by Harry Ludlum
Apart from the episode of the screaming girl, which is impossible to substantiate, the final element of the Bull family's role in the Rectory disturbances is connected with the life of Harry Bull.
I strongly suspect that Harry Bull was a disillusioned and troubled man, and that the final years of his life, from the time of his marriage to Ivy Brackenbury, was overshadowed by domestic conflict, and that this left a brooding atmosphere in the Rectory, which only added to the essence of what had gone before.
The next element revolves around the Smiths and the Foysters and their part in the overall picture. From comments in the Hastings' report it is quite clear that both Guy and Mabel Smith believed the Rectory to be haunted, and that they both held this view for a long time after moving away.
Guy Smith remained convinced that the place was haunted from 1929 until his death in 1940, but not so Mabel Smith. After the war, she turned completely against the belief that Borley Rectory was haunted, and the critics have presented a case that with Price dead, Mabel Smith could now tell the truth about the Rectory.
The Hastings' report, coupled with the effect on Mabel Smith of her husband's death, reveals the real reason for her sudden about-face. Far from having to do with telling the truth, it had to do with Mabel Smith trying to obliterate from her mind the whole Borley period of her life, because for her their stay there had been very unpleasant.
Taken in that context, Mabel Smith's feelings towards the reputation of the Rectory cannot be taken at face value, and it is by failing to allow for this that some of the main critics of the case have rendered their submissions invalid, especially in attempting to attack Harry Price's role in the Smith era.
It is over the tenancy of the Foysters that some of the most heated rows have blown up in connection with Borley. Many have suggested that Lionel Foyster invented much of what went into his diary of incidents in the Rectory; and that during the early stages of his involvement with the Foysters, before he wrote his first Borley book, Price thought that Marianne Foyster was to blame for some of the phenomena.
He formed a different view after seeing the results of Sidney Glanville's investigations and the evidence of the Whitehouse family. The claim that Lionel Foyster invented many of his diary entries cannot be made with any surety, while Marianne's evidence since the war has been so contradictory that it cannot be accepted as proof one way or the other.
Probably the fairest assessment one can give the Foyster period, and Price's coverage of it, is that the foundation of the reports are probably true and that Price presented what he believed to be the facts in good faith.
The writer feels that even if one disregards the Foysters' own evidence, one cannot easily dismiss the evidence of other people who witnessed phenomena there during that same period, if for no other reason than for the number of witnesses and the fact that not all of them knew the Foysters or Harry Price.
We now come to Harry Price himself, Borley's pioneer investigator, an extraordinary man, either lauded as presenter of one of the greatest cases of haunting in modern times or despised as the biggest fraud the psychic world has ever known!
Price began his investigations into the hauntings at Borley Rectory in June 1929, and was still busy with correspondence on the case a few days before his death in 1948. To the public who read his two classic books on the story of Borley Rectory, there must have seemed little doubt that the hefty Victorian monstrosity built for the Rev. Bull was indeed the most haunted house in England.
It is quite obvious, from both the books and, perhaps more importantly, from his files, that Price believed the Rectory to be haunted and presented it as such in good faith.
Guy Lyon Playfair has commented that there is a body of opinion that thinks Borley Rectory was haunted, but that Price's role in reporting it was questionable. That is fair enough, but the general public since 1956 has been led to believe that both the story of Borley Rectory and Harry Price's role in it amounted to nothing more than a giant concoction and fraud.
In the report of 1956, by Dingwall, Goldney and Hall, evidence was presented that purported to prove beyond doubt that Price, in his work on the Borley case, was guilty of fraud, duplicity, manufacturing evidence and misrepresentation on a grand scale. It now seems quite likely that Dingwall and Goldney started out with some genuine doubts and misgivings about Borley. It also seems they took at face value the findings of Mr Trevor Hall, having no idea at that time of how Hall had conducted his share of the investigation.
I believe that Hastings proved that the claim that the Borley story and Harry Price's role in it was a proven fraud can no longer be sustained, and that the allegations against Price over Borley are completely discredited.
All those attacks on Price over the haunting of Borley Rectory, if not disproved by the late Mr Hastings, must surely founder on the rocks of a defence of Price's work by a man who could not stand Price as a person, namely Nandor Fodor. Here was a man who was prepared to defend Price's integrity over Borley in spite of disliking him.
I contend that in the end it will be those such as Fodor, Hastings and Underwood, with their work on Price's role at Borley that will carry the banner for Borley Rectory, and not the attacks of his critics, though doubtless there will be those who will violently disagree with that opinion and go on arguing about Borley for many years to come.
Where Price did fail at Borley was in not carrying out enough scientific quantification of the phenomena and in failing to investigate in sufficient depth the possible historical background to the hauntings.
Now it is time to deal finally with the last drama and this concerns the fire itself!
For many years, the suggestion that the fire that gutted Borley Rectory happened under mysterious circumstances was almost taken for granted by the enthusiasts of the story.
Certainly the 'Amures' threat of 1938, to burn the Rectory, proved to be prophetic, but in the memoirs of Sir William Crocker there appeared the first hints in print that the fire of February 1939 occurred through other than paranormal causes.
Arguably, thre is a curious irony in the fire, almost as though it was a means to an end initiated by the spirits of those dead and gone, utilising the human weakness of a living occupier for whom the fire was also a means to an end!
But for the tracing of the two Gregson sons, it is very likely that the full story of the fire would yet be untold, but armed with the evidence of the two seemingly conflicting versions of the fire by the two sons, I would suggest that we now have the most likely facts behind the fire that destroyed the most haunted house in England.
While the Gregson sons give conflicting accounts of how the fire occurred, the observant reader will no doubt realise that the two men have unwittingly revealed the likely truth by their very contradictions.
The evidence in favour of Captain Gregson having set fire to the Rectory for the insurance money is quite strong, and I submit that Gregson did just that, sending both of his sons to call the fire brigade, probably believing that with both of them safely off the premises for some 20 minutes or so, while they went to the public telephone at Borley Green, he could make sure that the Rectory was burning like a torch before the brigade got there.
And yet, at the same time, there is the possibility, as previously suggested, that the Captain was being used as an instrument of exposure of the truth of events long past!
There will be those readers who will consider such an idea to be nonsense, and let us just remember another thing. Whoever the entity really was who produced the 'Amures' threat to destroy the Rectory stated in that contact that the fire would signify the end of the hauntings at Borley Rectory and reveal the story of a murder that happened there, but the fire did not stop the disturbances!
Could it be that the entity or entities that seemed to have preordained the fire intended that, after it, someone should publicly reveal the evidence that the fire was supposed to reveal? If so, then could it be that perhaps the disturbances continued because this final part o
f the strange pageant of Borley Rectory was not enacted, and that the entities are still waiting for their task to be completed?
Select Bibliography
The volume of material that has been produced on the Borley Rectory case since 1929 is so enormous that it would take a work of this size to list it. However, the following selection constitutes some of the key sources of information about this extraordinary episode. There are a great many essays of varying length in editions of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, also in the Proceedings thereof. Most of this material can be examined by the bona-fide researcher at the Harry Price Library of the London University and of course in the SPR's own library, by serious students.
Arthur C. Clarke's World of Strange Powers, Ed. Simon Welfare and John Fairley, Putnam, 1984.
An Examination of the Borley Report, Robert J. Hastings, Proceedings SPR, Vol. 55, Mar 1969.
Christmas Ghosts, Harry Price, St. Hugh's Press (nd 1948?).
Confessions of a Ghost Hunter, Harry Price, Longman Green, 1936.
Daily Mirror; article by V. C. Wall, June 10th, 1929.
East Anglian Magazine, article by Capt. W. H. Gregson, RE retd., Autumn 1939.
English Mediaeval Monasteries 1066-1540, Roy Midmer, Heinemann, 1979.
Far from Humdrum: A Lawyer's Life, Sir William Crocker, Hutchinson, 1967.
Ghosts in the South West, James Turner, David & Charles, 1973.
Ghosts and Hauntings, Dennis Bardens, Zeus Press, 1965.
Hauntings, Peter Underwood, Dent, 1977.
Haunted Borley, A. C. Henning, Privately published, 1949.
Haunted East Anglia, Joan Forman, Robert Hale, 1974.
History of Essex 1768, Joan Morant, E.P. Publishing edn., 1978.
Harry Price, The Biography of a Ghost Hunter, Paul Tabori, Athenaeum Press, 1950.
Most Haunted House in England, Harry Price, Longman Green, 1940.
My Life with Borley Rectory, James Turner, The Bodley Head, 1950.
New Lights on Old Ghosts, Trevor H. Hall, Duckworth, 1959.
Poltergeists, Hauntings and the Haunted, David C. Knight, Dent, 1977.
Readers' Digest Strange Stories, Amazing Facts, p140, Readers' Digest Assoc. Incorp., 1989.
Search for Truth, Harry Price, Longman Green, 1940.
Some Unseen Power, Philip Paul, Robert Hale, 1985.
Sometimes Into England, James Turner, Cassell, 1970.
The End of Borley Rectory, Harry Price, Longman Green, 1946.
The Haunting of Borley Rectory (A Critical Survey of the Evidence), Dingwall, Goldney and Hall, Duckworth, 1956.
The Ghosts of Borley, Peter Underwood and Paul Tabori, David & Charles, 1973.
The Search for Harry Price, Trevor H. Hall, Duckworth, 1978.
In addition to the above, there is also an enormous amount of often rather fragmented material dealing with Borley among the archives of such places as the Public Record Office, British Museum, Cathedral of Canterbury and elsewhere. Particularly interesting items are the following:
Calendars of State Papers Domestic, 1547 to 1580, Vol 16 and Vol 17.
Canterbury Charter, mss, Register. B. f176 and f178; Register K f253, Canterbury Cathedral Library.
Patent Rolls, 38, ed. 111.
Lambeth Court Rolls, 71A and 74.
Feudal Aids, Vol. 2, pp 144 and 168.
Morant's History of Essex, Vol. 2, p 317.
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