© 2002 Harry C. Brown, Jr.
What strange chain of events could have led a small boy in the dusty hills of rural Mississippi to form a lifelong attachment to a place he would never visit -- indeed had ceased to exist -- and which was impossibly far away in time, in culture and geography? I have not been asked that question a great deal; my friends have long accepted my eccentricities and it’s not the sort of interest one mentions to strangers. But Vincent asked it when we first corresponded, so I’ll answer.
The short Answer would naturally be, “It’s the power of Borley.” But I have long wanted to commit the matter to the record, if for no other reason than as a biographical sketch captured in a distant and simpler time.
In the interest of full disclosure, and to prevent the perpetuation of false impressions of the American South still held by some, I must say that considerable poetic license has been taken in the title of this essay. As a boy and ever after I have despised going barefoot and never have; I simply couldn’t pass up such an alliterative methaphor.
My Mother was widowed toward the end of the War, shortly after I was born, and we went to live with her parents in an old and rambling, but not haunted, house in a small town in Mississippi, with extended family under the roof including a teenage uncle and Mother’s slightly younger sister. As I have remarked to Vincent, my mother and my maiden Aunt both were probably very similar to Marianne --"artistically" inclined and given to romanticism. Aunt Nan was a painter, Mother a dance teacher (book-keeping at the electric company’s small “downtown” office being her day job), and, I think in many ways prototypes of the "liberated" woman in a time when women "weren't supposed to act like that." Mother had even owned and could fly an airplane, and she had spent the War operating a bullet-making machine at the Anniston, Alabama arsenal.
Our family had lived in the Newton County area of east Mississippi for many generations, and my grandparent’s house had once been a doctor’s residence and office along an important stage road. The house sat at some distance from the road and was surrounded by a large grove of trees, among which my uncle delighted in frightening me at night, sending me out on some pretext and then secreting himself stealthily by another approach behind a tree and at the right moment moaning, popping out unexpectedly, and so on. It was all much less pathological than it probably sounds.
Night at the outskirts of small towns was much darker then than now, and the electricity was far from dependable. In this setting, and particularly with my Uncle enjoying my skittishness in the dark, conversations during soft evenings spent rocking on the ample front porch often turned to spooky things.
In spite of our seeming cultural isolation, there was a constant stream of magazines and newspapers into the house. My great-grandfather had established the town’s newspaper -- at the time in the charge of Grandmother’s brothers -- and a slightly more distant ancestor, the Rev. Nathan Lytle Clarke, had been a pioneering religious journalist in the state. So, considering the circumstances of the time, we were a fairly bookish family and, insofar as we could afford it, enormously given to magazine subscriptions.
One evening when I was alone for a bit in the living room I wandered over to my Aunt’s corner and saw on her marble-topped side table a small magazine whose cover depicted a floating head above a group of people seated around a table. The yellow lamplight accentuated the lurid colors of the cover, characteristic of the “pulps” of the time. It was the January, 1950 issue of Fate Magazine, and inside was J. P. Bessor’s story, “The Ghosts of Borley Rectory.” I was about to be hooked.
Fortunately, the family were all busy elsewhere at the time, and I had an opportunity to examine the magazine. I was fairly nervous about it, because although it was the same size as the Reader’s Digest, which I was encouraged to read, it was also suspiciously similar to another magazine, Pageant, a little publication sometimes imported into the house which invariably featured “pinup” photographs and which I was forbidden to peruse. It had the look of something Mother would not be too happy to find me reading, as she took a dark view of some of her younger sister’s more Bohemian interests and tendencies.
Here, though, was a story about ghosts, demonstrable ghosts, researched ghosts, in print, in a real magazine, not a scary comic book. I was fascinated. I read the story, and made certain that I kept my eye on the location of the magazine among my Aunt’s stack of current literature for future reference.
Although I can’t remember the exact occasion, it was not long until another Borley article appeared, this time a short piece in one of the “Popular Science” type publications to which my Uncle subscribed. I recall yet another article in a similar publication, this one concentrating on Harry Price, Ghost Hunter, and then, again in “Fate,” appeared the S. H. Glanville article “The Amazing Story of Borley Rectory” (October, 1951) which gave a much more detailed picture of the events at Borley than I had known before.
Naturally, during this time I thought it would be wonderful to be a ghost hunter, and asked all available relatives if they knew of any local ghosts. I felt certain that the field offered opportunity for the diligent boy, and no doubt success in running down a spook or two would lead to an invitation to London to discuss things.
Finally there was a report that there was a strange light in the attic of a house a mile or two away, just outside of town. Although the house was practically new, being built in the ranch style and situated at the top of a hill, there had been a suicide there, or some other ill-defined tragedy, as a result of which the house was unoccupied, except possibly by a revenant of the Tragedee. After a couple of nights of pestering, Mother agreed to drive me out there at night in her new 1950 Plymouth car, which she liked to drive around, anyway.
It was not midnight, but definitely after 9:00 pm when we left. The haunted house was on the same road as my great-uncle Irving’s house, the streetlight in front of which marked the terminus of the Town Limits. A mile further on around a curve, at the top of a small hill and considerably back from the road, was the house we sought, low and stretching. No lights were on, in the house or anywhere around. Mother drove by slowly; we had gone some distance past the house when there was a sudden flash of light from it. Mother, on the nearer side, gave a little gasp. She stopped, we looked back...but nothing.
She turned the car around, so I was on the nearer side, and approached the house again. This time, sure enough, there was an apparition of light for a fleeting instant as we drove by. Mother stopped the car and we both got out to look, slowly changing our vantage points. At last we found a spot where the “apparition” was continuous...and it was also evident that among the architectural features of this fine home was a large plate-glass window -- a novelty in the town at that time -- which, on its hill, served up an admirable reflection of Uncle Irving’s streetlight, also situated at the crest of a hill, and as the crow flies, not too distant. Mother was a good sport, and I think for both of us the sudden thrill on the first glimpse of the unexplained light was worth the disappointment of not having found a mystery.
All of this exposure, then, had occured before my eighth birthday. But in the following year, the great UFO controversy dominated paranormal journalism in the popular magazines, and I lost touch with Borley. In 1954 Mother re-married and we moved to Jackson, the state capital, and life brought new challenges and opportunities for a small-town boy.
My interest re-emerged in the later 1950's, when Shirley Jackson published her novel, “The Haunting of Hill House.” The novel, of course, uses as its engine the interaction of psychic/psychological forces among sitters of various backgounds engaged in a scientific investigation of a haunted house exceedingly similar to Borley Rectory. In fact, I think pointing this out to my high school sophomore English teacher was my first excursion into scholarship, as she had never heard of Borley and asked for a complete redaction of the similarities between the two situations. “Hill House” later became a movie as “The Haunting,” I believe, and was also loosely used in a cheap horror flick called “The House on Haunted Hill,” which starred Vincent Price and included a cardboard skeleton that moved out on a wire over the audience at a crucial moment, evincing squeals of delight and a barrage of popcorn and Jujy Fruits directed toward the pasteboard phantom. I also remember a couple of television programs, including an episode of “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour,” which had noticeable Borlean antecedents.
After college, during the course of some research on another literary character with connexions to the supernatural -- The Reverend Montague Summers -- I came across Trevor Hall's "New Light on Old Ghosts" and my interest was aroused again, although it later became evident that Hall himself was a character worthy of investigation. More on that in a later essay or two, I hope.
Through the following years, I accumulated most of the published Borley canon, including Price’s works relating to the Rectory as well as almost all the works of Trevor Hall, excepting a couple of his rarer books which are, except for the “Sherlock Holmes and Borley” work, irrelevant to his part in the Borley panoply.
If you have followed me this far, I will conclude with a sidelight on one of the two copies of “New Light on Old Ghosts” in my collection.
As I said, I had first read the book about 1966, and in fact I had checked it out of the public library and taken it to read on a short vacation spent at a lakeside cabin. There, I remember, it had been stained on a couple of pages by a small drop of my favorite condiment, Worchestershire sauce, as a result of my penchant for reading while eating in order not to waste the time.
About twenty years later, I noticed that the public library was having a sale of their surplus books, which they did every few months at the time. I decided to run over and see what was left, even though by the time I had learned of it the sale had been going on for several hours. Among row after row of books haphazardly laid out on folding tables, it took only minutes before my hand fell on -- “New Light on Old Ghosts,” somewhat battered and shopworn, but still bearing on pages 6, 7 and 8 the indelible imprint of Worchestershire from that summer meal long ago.
I bought the book for fifty cents and went home. The Power of Borley had grabbed me yet again.
Although most of my education was in the sciences, particularly microbiology, I have spent my working life in pursuits related to the media, including political consulting and partnership in an advertising and public relations firm. I am currently a media consultant and a founding partner of AIR2LAN, a broadband wireless Internet service provider based in Jackson, Mississippi, with ofiices in Houston, New Orleans and Montgomery, Alabama as well as operations serving the Mississippi Delta in partnership with economic development groups seeking to overcome the “digital divide” which has placed rural and poorer areas at a disadvantage in attracting industry and jobs.
My ongoing literary interests, in addition to the Borley saga and its personalities, are the Victorian/Edwardian so-called “Literary Converts” of whom Montague Summers was the most flamboyant, and the influence of developing technological models upon societal spiritual beliefs, which, of course, is very tangent to Borley. A further example of the latter would be the fact that in Victorian times, science was discovering and mastering then-mysterious forces in the natural world, paving the way for easy belief in mysterious spiritual forces as simply expressions of further Laws of Nature. A more recent example would be the effect Quantum Theory -- or more accurately misunderstandings and superficial knowledge thereof -- has had on numerous “New Age” spiritual ideas.
Needless to say, the cultural milieu of late Victorian England and the scientific community thereof, including many pioneers in microscopy, are of great interest to me.