Enigma of Borley Rectory

by Harry Ludlum

  An interesting sequel to this, some years later, was that in 1929 Guy Smith's maid, Mary Pearson, claimed to have chased a headless figure down the lawn until it vanished among the greenery, and in 1938/39, Captain Gregson lost two dogs, which yelped in terror at something that the Captain couldn't see in the rear courtyard, and tore off, never to be recovered. Of these events, more later.

  Harry Bull also saw a little old man standing on the Rectory lawn, pointing up at the sky with one hand and down at the ground with the other. It is said that Harry Bull recognised this strange little man from stories passed down through generations of the Bull family, as an old family gardener called Amos.

  One of the many theories about what might have happened on or near the site of Borley Rectory, years before, even suggests that old Amos had been employed at the supposed old Borley Rectory, a building that may have pre-dated even the Herringham rectory, not to be confused with Borley Place, which the late Rev. Herringham used in his later years and until his death.

  Going back over the numerous reports about a little old man seen several times near the place, one wonders whether he had any connection with the figure seen by Ethel Bull, or the man in her bedroom who so abruptly caused her to wake.

  The old-fashioned coach, with its pair of brown horses, was another phenomenon that Harry Bull reportedly saw or heard on more than one occasion. He is said to have seen it once being driven by a headless driver. On another occasion, as he was returning to the Rectory, he heard the clatter of a horse-drawn vehicle approaching at some speed after dark. He stood into the side of the road; doubtless expecting to see a vehicle rattle past, but instead only the noise of it passed him. Of the vehicle and its horses or driver, there was nothing whatever to be seen!

  One night, as is related in The Ghosts of Borley, the servant bells all started ringing of their own accord and, puzzled by the sudden commotion, Harry Bull came downstairs, candle in hand and wrapped in a plum-red dressing gown. The bells worried him greatly and he is said to have feared that they were an omen of some misfortune about to befall himself or his family.

  Oddly enough, it seems that almost anyone who stayed long at the Rectory suffered either from ill health or from a relatively short life. Henry Bull died in the Rectory at the age of 59, and Harry Bull died at 64 from cancer, both men passing away in the Blue Room. Guy Smith, Harry's successor at Borley, seemed to have escaped ill health but his wife Mabel was ill for a time, just one factor that helped drive the Smiths out of the Rectory.

  Lionel Foyster, the next Rector, spent much of his tenure crippled with arthritis and his wife appeared to have suffered periodic bouts of collapsing, though these episodes had some curious aspects, not least being the fact that in spite of everything Mrs Foyster outlasted them all, eventually dying in 1992, aged 93. A little baby she cared for at Borley died when only a few weeks old, and of course, Harry Price, who spent 18 years working on the Borley case, eventually died from a heart attack in 1948 though not at Borley Rectory, but there is some evidence that he was taken ill once when actually in the Rectory one night in 1929.

  CHAPTER 4

  The Nun Makes her Appearance

  I have reserved for this special section the most spectacular of all the strange spectral figures of Borley Rectory, the curious Catholic Sister of Mercy, a title that presents some problems in the tracing of her identity.

  Not long after the Rectory was completed, the Bull family began to be puzzled and to some extent pestered by the figure of a holy sister who took to staring in at the family through the side window of the dining room, with her face pressed close to the glass, when they were at their meals. In time, Henry Bull is said to have grown tired of this novelty and to have given instructions for the side window to be taken out and the opening bricked up.

  This window overlooked the outside driveway and it has been suggested that it was blocked up due to lack of privacy owing to people looking or trying to look through the window from the road. That sounds reasonable enough until one notices that not only was that window well back from the road but it was also partly obscured by shrubs and would, except in bright sunlight from the direction of the lawn, show only a rather fuzzed reflection to a casual passer-by.

  It is sometimes suggested that there were times when bright light in the right quarter would shine on the strange marble fireplace in the dining room and there are those who have theorised that the nun was staring at that because of the monks' heads carved on its side columns and not at the family. Whatever the truth of the matter, the side window was indeed bricked up and remained so for the rest of the Rectory's existence. One might initially think of the Window Tax, a long-forgotten source of revenue to the Exchequer but, as Harry Price pointed out in The Most Haunted House in England, the window tax went the way of most redundant statutes in 1851, 12 years before the Bull Rectory was built. The tax would have been in force during Herringham's time, so was that why he wouldn't use the old Rectory? It is conceivable that the old Herringham rectory (not to be confused with Borley Place) had more windows than Herringham was willing to pay for, moving him to abandon it as derelict.

  There is some circumstantial evidence, admittedly based on a second-hand account, of a nun being seen at Borley before the building of the Bull Rectory in 1863. Of this, however, there is but the most scanty detail, but as to the coming of the nun upon the scene after 1863, that is a very different matter and indeed from the time of Henry Bull onwards she has become the central character of the whole drama. Following upon the incidents of the figure at the window, the strange nun began to appear frequently upon the far side of the garden, the track that she seemed most often to follow, which ultimately acquired the name of 'The Nun's Walk'.

  She usually seemed to appear in the top far corner of the garden and then would drift along that side of the garden before disappearing from view among the tangle of the copse below the lawn. In due course, there appeared at the top of the garden near the road the now famous octagonal summerhouse and it is popularly supposed that Henry Bull had this built so that he and his son Harry could sit and watch for the nun to appear.

  Every so often, it would seem, she obliged and sometimes remained in view for several seconds. One might be inclined to smile indulgently now at the story of the summerhouse, since such structures were common in Victorian gardens, but the fact that both men saw the nun, as did others at the Rectory, now seems to be widely accepted. In addition to her usual path by the far side of the lawn, she was sometimes seen in the road outside the Rectory and, as Edward Cooper of the stable cottage discovered during the First World War, she also drifted across the rear yard and out through the upper gate on to the road. As far as can be ascertained, however, she was never seen inside the Rectory or the stable cottage.

  The elements steadily claimed the ruined Rectory

  About 1900, Harry Bull claimed to have been followed by the nun from the church to the Rectory entrance. Having initially dithered as to whether to leave the porch door open, supposedly for her to enter, he decided against it. However, possibly the most spectacular happening of all, concerning the nun, came in the summer of 1900. On July 28 of that year, two of the Bull sisters were returning to the Rectory from a summer party. Reports as to which of the girls were involved vary, Price stating Freda and Mabel Bull in his second book.

  They entered the copse by one of the bottom gateways and proceeded up through the greenery towards the Rectory. They had barely cleared the trees at the foot of the lawn when, there in front of them, over on the far side of the garden, stood the grey figure of a holy sister, sometimes stated to have been fumbling at a string of beads with her head bent down. The sight stopped the two girls in their tracks. There was something most odd about the look of the figure. Exactly what happened next has been argued over since, but the version of events usually told is that one of the girls gathered up her skirts and scuttled into the Rectory to fetch another sister. It is thought to have been Elizabeth, usually known in the family as '
Dodie', part of whose private diary is still in existence. She came out with her incredulous sister and snorted 'A ghost - nonsense!' and promptly walked towards the figure.

  Harry Price tells us that the figure, which had been gliding slowly along the side of the lawn, stopped, turned to face the girls and then vanished. Price's reporting of the incident, which he based upon an interview with the sisters at Chilton Lodge, Cornard, in 1929, tells us that the figure displayed a facial expression of intense grief, but later the sisters are said to have recalled that only two of them saw the figure and not in perfect light, and also not closely enough to see its face, but they always maintained that the nun was there and that, after stopping where it was for a moment or two, it turned to face the Rectory before vanishing from view. It is just worth mentioning that others since have made remarks about the figure's apparently miserable facial expression, some claiming to have noticed traces of tears upon the spectre's face.

  It was in the autumn of 1927 that the nun made another rather curious and spectacular appearance, this time unfortunately only witnessed by one person. At that time the Rectory was empty, for Harry Bull had died in June, and presumably Mrs Bull had given up the place, because there seems to be no mention of her after Harry's death. His sisters had been gone since 1920, having moved to Cornard, and Harry Bull's successor, Guy Smith, had yet to come.

  During this time, there came upon the scene a journeyman carpenter named Fred Cartwright, who at the time was lodging in Sudbury whilst engaged on repairing some farm buildings between Borley and Clare, which had, and still has, an order of monks. To reach his place of work, Fred had to come through Borley early each morning and would normally pass the Rectory just as it was getting light. On his second day of walking to work by this route, Fred had walked up the hill from the direction of the railway as he had on his first morning.

  This time, as he approached the lower drive gate of the Rectory, he noticed standing at the gate, a holy sister dressed in what has often been stated to have been the habit of a Sister of Mercy, though there is a query attached to this description. Apart from wondering what she was doing there at such an early hour, Fred saw nothing particularly unusual about the figure, and walked on.

  For the next three mornings, he saw no sign of the figure but on the fourth day there stood the nun, this time seemingly asleep where she stood, with her eyes tightly shut. Again, momentarily curious as to why she was standing there, Cartwright shrugged his shoulders and went on his way. A week went by and then there she was again, only this time as the carpenter passed, she appeared to be not only exhausted but also looked ill.

  Fred Cartwright was by now somewhat puzzled and, thinking that something was wrong with the nun, he made to turn back but the nun had disappeared. Thinking that she had gone inside the Rectory, he walked on. On the following Friday morning he saw the nun again, for the last time. As he came up the lane towards the Rectory, there she was by the same gate and this time Fred decided to speak to her but before he reached the spot, she had vanished without a trace. One moment she was there, the next instant ... nothing! Thoroughly bemused, Fred pushed open the gate and walked up the whole length of the Rectory driveway looking for the nun, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  CHAPTER 5

  Edward Cooper and the Stable Cottage

  For a time during the First World War, and on various subsequent occasions, the strange occurrences at the Rectory also affected the stable cottage, which survives today as virtually the last remnant of the Rectory establishment.

  In April 1916, the Bull family enlisted the services of Edward Cooper and his wife and provided them with living accommodation in the stable cottage. For some time, the couple were pestered at night by the noise of what sounded like a large animal pattering about in a room adjoining their bedroom. This went on for quite a time, until one night the Coopers were woken up by a terrific crash, sounding as though every piece of crockery in the place had been smashed in the same instant.

  Edward Cooper got up and went downstairs with a candle, expecting to come upon a scene of disaster, only to find that not so much as a single teacup had been disturbed, but after that the noise of the supposed padding animal was not heard again.

  On more than one occasion, Cooper and his wife saw the nun figure and on one summer's evening they saw the nun walk across the courtyard at the back of the Rectory and go through the gate and on to the road outside, crossing en-route an iron inspection cover which should have rattled if it was stepped on by any mortal being, but it didn't! None of these happenings could quite compare, however, with the sight that Edward Cooper saw on one very clear and brightly moonlit night.

  As he was getting ready for bed, he looked out of the window and saw the most extraordinary spectacle. Crossing the road and clearly visible in the moonlight was an old-fashioned coach and horses, with its side-lamps lit. One, possibly two, men were seated up on the driver's box, and everything including the horses' leathers and buckles were clearly visible.

  The coach tore across the road at a peculiar angle and went clean through everything in its path without making a sound. It followed a path completely at variance with the road itself, though over the years, the direction in which it was going has varied from one telling to the next. In the report by Harry Price, it was stated to have appeared in the field just alongside the church, crossed the road, passing clean through a hedge on the way, and to have vanished round the back of the farmyard behind the cottage.

  Some versions of events tell us that Cooper saw the coach appear from the farmyard and hurtle across the road in the opposite direction. Harry Price told his readers that he had interviewed the Coopers twice, in 1929 and again ten years after in their later home near Sudbury, and that their story did not alter in the slightest.

  The Coopers were a hard-headed, no-nonsense couple and after leaving Borley in March 1920 - having also seen a queer little man running round their bedroom early one morning, only to vanish before their eyes - they experienced nothing else.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Story Continues ... 1928 to 1935

  After the end of the Bulls' years at Borley Rectory, and following on the experiences of Edward Cooper and his wife and Fred Cartwright's story, the strange story entered a new phase, probably the most argued-over period of its whole history.

  The remaining members of the Borley branch of the Bull family now had some considerable difficulty in finding a new Rector to take up the living. Some 10 or 12 hopefuls came to look and said 'No!'. The isolated location of the old Victorian rabbit warren that was Borley Rectory and its total lack of common domestic amenities put off one prospective tenant after another, until finally a cultured and pleasant Eurasian gentleman, The Rev. Guy Eric Smith, accepted the living and in the autumn of 1928 he moved into the Rectory with his wife Mabel. The couple had no children.

  Their curious experiences began even before they had settled in, although it was not so much the phenomena that drove them out some nine months later, but rather the appalling state of the place, which they found depressing and very hard work to manage, in addition to which Mabel Smith was quite unwell for some time. They did, however, seem to suffer more than their fair share of the Rectory's odd and often unwelcome curiosities, which only served to further their general dislike of the property.

  This point was made quite clear by Price in his book, The Most Haunted House in England, and it is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that it has been other writers, and not Harry Price, who have recounted this aspect of the Smiths' tenure the wrong way round, by stating that the ghosts drove them out. If Price can be criticised at all over the Smiths' period at Borley, then it is in unwittingly causing the extraordinary interest that arose when he did agree to investigate the place, which he would not have done, had not Guy Smith contacted a national newspaper, which passed details to Price, thereby resulting in the Rector having unwittingly destroyed his own privacy.

  The bringing to the public notice of the Borley
story did, of course, bring to the hapless village the inevitable sightseers and would-be ghost-hunting brigade, but it seems a mistake, on reflection, to blame Harry Price for that. Indeed, Price had little time for these folks, whom he referred to as 'rubbernecks', and when a party of youngsters later caused some trouble at the Rectory he made some caustic remarks about them in his book.

  But to continue. Before they had properly moved all their belongings into the Rectory, Mabel Smith was cleaning the house, which must have been in a pretty scruffy state, having been empty since the summer of 1927. In cleaning out a cupboard in the Rectory, she came upon a brown paper parcel which, when untied, was found to contain a somewhat unpleasant souvenir in the shape of a small human skull, thought upon closer inspection to be that of a young woman.

  Enquiries failed to reveal how it came to be in the Rectory, though a local belief was that any attempt to remove it from the Rectory resulted in an increase in the disturbances therein. True or not, it could be said to have lived up to its supposed reputation in the light of the subsequent happenings in the house.

  Guy Smith, doubtless somewhat puzzled by the rather gruesome relic, reburied it in the churchyard and thought no more about it. One wonders what he would have thought about the skull had he had any inkling at the time of what lay in store.

  Not long after they had moved in, Guy Smith was on his own in the house and on crossing the landing outside the Blue Room he heard a gradually rising whispering, culminating in a pleading voice crying 'Don't Carlos, Don't', before the sound faded away. It was not the first time Smith had heard strange mutterings on the landing but only on this occasion did he hear some definite words. One suggestion made since is that the Rectory had a habit of trapping sounds originating from people in the stable cottage behind the Rectory, which seems reasonable until one looks at the plans of the Rectory and realises that the Blue Room landing was at the front of the house, several feet from the stable cottage, with numerous solid brick walls in between. The writer, having studied the Glanville plans, cannot accept that such sounds from the cottage would have carried that far within the solid and hefty structure of the Rectory.