The week before my visit in 1997, vandals broke into the church through a stained-glass
window, stole the chalice, and used the cross as a pry bar. The week after I left, they broke
another stained-glass window.
Over the decades, drunks, vandals, and rude people have made a mockery of civility.
Black masses have been said on the church grounds. As a consequence of years of abuse, the
residents are very anti-tourism. I can't blame them.
When my mother lived there, the tours had already begun. This has to be most
disconcerting to residents who are trying to live a normal life. While no formal tours currently
drive to Borley, tourists are still seen every day - as if it were an amusement park. It is no wonder
that local constables are constantly on call to rebuke visitors.
In September of 2001, the parish priest sent me the following appeal:
I don't want there to be any misunderstanding about the Churchyard. The individual graves in the Churchyard are what Americans call "real estate." They belong to the family of the deceased and are paid for. Their family put up the gravestones and they are supposed to keep their plot tidy. Unfortunately they also die in their turn and in the hundreds of years that they have been burying people there are no longer those families to keep the grave nice. This leaves us to look after the grass around the graves but we are not allowed to move the gravestones when they fall, break, or just tilt over, because they do not belong to us. The Parish keeps the Graveyard mowed and the bushes trimmed, but we can do nothing to tidy the graves themselves. I realise that to those who don't know about graveyards, it can look very untidy but that is the way it has to be. To get permission to move stones is a very long and expensive legal business because the British believe that property (real estate) is inviolable. We don't go down that road unless it is absolutely essential - we can't even bury people in the unused spaces.
What does add to the problem is, of course, hundreds of people over the years walking all over them in the dark, knocking down the stones, moving the stones, and getting them broken. The same applies to the Church fences; there is only the front one left. People lighting fires, holding seances and things, do not always look to see whose grave they are abusing. And because most of the people in Borley were poor peasants, labourers and agricultural workers, their families could not afford gravestones. They are buried there just the same, even though there is no sign of an actual grave and, over the last 1000 years, the whole churchyard has been buried over many times. You can see why we take a very strong line in discouraging people from visiting and using the churchyard in this way. THEY ARE SHOWING NO RESPECT TO THE VILLAGERS BURIED THERE. These villagers' bodies have been entrusted to the Church to be cared for. It doesn't matter if people say, "O they are not really there, they will have decayed." I always ask them if they would like people partying on their grave; they recoil in horror at such a suggestion. Why should those buried in 1501 not be shown the same respect as those buried in 2001? We try to care for our Churchyard and we wish others to do so too.
With best wishes to everyone
Go with God,
The Revd. Captain Brian A. Sampson, C.A.
On 5 July 2000, a local resident sent me the following: There has been an upsurge of problems in Borley churchyard recently. We've been getting carloads of couples charging round the churchyard at night 'grunting, screaming and yelling obscenities'. They've been causing quite a bit of damage both in the churchyard and across the road in the Coach House. This is very distressing to people who have their family, friends, relatives and ancestors buried in the church. You can imagine their feelings. The police are increasingly unwilling to respond to requests from the villagers to evict the revellers from the churchyard. These upsurges in nuicance, trespass, and vandalism always correspond to some new uncritical publication about the haunting of Borley Church. As there has never been any such haunting, every local resident, and those who have family associations with Borley Church would wish they would stop. The subject of the Borley Rectory Haunting is an interesting and amusing one, but it is interesting only as an object lesson in gullibility and credulity, and its exploitation by cynical journalists (including Harry Price). The church should be left out of it since, if it really were haunted by anyone other than trippers larking around, we would certainly know about it!
It is my intention to do all that is in my power to dissuade such unfortunate behaviour.
James Turner lived at Borley after the fire and wrote in his book My Life With Borley
Rectory: "Say a
bloke gets hold of a house with a so-called ghost in it. Easy enough to fake, I says. And what
does he do? Gets hold of some damn fool paper to write it up and there you are, all the world
and his wife come flocking out to see the place and before you know where you are, everybody in
the kingdom is seeing ghosts in and out of the doors and the gardens." As he is flooded with
visitors, Turner points out how they act as if it were public property and people in general had a
right to demand whatever they wanted. They expected to have their desires met while destroying
gardens and eating fruit off the trees as if it belonged to them. "Now everyone who came to the
place took a little bit of brick with them."
Turner goes on to say, "One of the things I dislike most about the crowds of people who
have come here, the fact that they claim to know more about my home than I do."
Turner adds, "What was left were the people who got the idea
that ghosts still roamed about the old ruins. Such people became a great nuisance." Later he
wrote, "What we did suffer from. . . all the time we were there at Borley. . . . were the ghost
hunters who came without being asked and trampled the garden to bits, stealing the apples and
pears and other fruit. Naturally most of them arrived at night. . . ."
Another time, Turner continued this line in his book Rivers of East Anglia: "In
the few years I and my wife lived there we had little or no trouble, from anything paranormal.
What eventually drove us out were the crowds of sightseers who came at all times of the night
and day asking to be shown what was left of the haunted Rectory. Sometimes we would come
upon them eating their lunch in the garden. A party of several parsons and their wives just walked
in because the gate was open and prepared a picnic in the garden without attempting to discover
to whom the place belonged.
Parsons, indeed, were the worst offenders. Perhaps because it was called the Rectory they
imagined they had some exclusive right of entry. They did not hesitate, even at midnight, to push
themselves into the house. Sometimes, at night, torches would flash from the direction of the
glebe meadow and 'psychic investigators,' as they called themselves, were obviously about. In
the end, when it became almost impossible to go into the garden without a stranger approaching
you with the inevitable question, 'Have you seen anything?' we left and moved further along the
ridge of high ground of which the hamlet of Borley forms one end."
The Turners were forced out even after the Suffolk and Essex Free Press asked visitors in 1947,
"Please don't intrude on the privacy of Mr. and Mrs. Turner. 'Stand and stare,' by all means, but
not at the residence of Mr. and Mrs Turner. And please remember that their land is private
property and don't trespass." The appeal has not worked.
In his book Some Unseen Power, Philip Paul describes the installation of a new rector - Edward Mathias - upon the death of Reverend Henning in 1955. The East Anglian Daily Times had noted the installation was to be on the anniversary of the nun's appearance - July 28. "This time, the spectating visitors came in droves, a few of them proving a great nuisance in their inconsiderate invasion of private property. There were many sightseers from overseas."
As recently as 1988, an eloquent plea for civility was featured in The Guardian. An entire page was dedicated to "The Chance of a Ghost" bringing out the worst in visitors. As the churchwarden told the reporter, "The people of this village are absolutely fed up of the story. In all the time we've lived here, the only disturbances have been human ones."
Visitors in April, 2000 were met by one of the disturbed residents.
As fascinating as the site may be to ghost-hunters, I make a public plea for civility and for
understanding. With all the noise, vandalism, and rude behavior, it is very doubtful even ghosts
would remain in such a place. None presented themselves during my visits.
I plead with all who are determined to visit Borley, "Please consider the residents of this quiet country village as regular folk, and treat them as you would wish to be treated." Thank you.
c. 25 January 2011, Vincent O'Neil