Poltergeist: A Classic Study in Destructive Haunting (43 page)

After the Reverend Henry Bull’s death, his son, the Reverend Harry Bull, took over the rectory.
He was interested in psychical research, and claimed that he saw many ghosts.
His daughter told Price that he had seen a legendary phantom coach (in which the lovers were supposed to have fled) and that, one day in the garden, the retriever had howled with terror, looking toward some legs visible under a fruit tree.
Bull, thinking this was a poacher, followed the legs as they walked toward a postern gate; at which point he realized that the “poacher” was somehow incomplete.
The legs disappeared through the gate without opening it.

Harry Bull died in 1927, and the rectory was empty until 1928, when the Reverend Guy Smith and his wife moved in.

One stormy night, there was a furious ringing of the doorbell; when Smith arrived there, he found no one.
It happened again later—a peal so prolonged that Smith was able to get to the door before it stopped; again, there was no one.
After that, all the keys of all the rooms fell out of the locks overnight; later, they vanished.
Then they began hearing slippered footsteps.
Stones were thrown—small pebbles.
Lights were switched on.
One day, Mrs.
Smith thought she saw a horse-drawn coach in the drive.
Mr.
Smith thought he heard someone whisper, “Don’t, Carlos, don’t,” as he was walking into the chapel.
The Smiths decided to contact the
Daily Mirror
, who asked Harry Price if he would be willing to go along with an investigator.
They told Price their story, and gave him every facility to investigate.
But within nine months, they had had enough of the place—perhaps because its plumbing left much to be desired—and moved to Norfolk.
According to the SPR report, the Smiths only called the
Daily Mirror
because they were concerned about all the stories that the house was haunted, and wanted to reassure their parishioners by getting the place a clean bill of health.
This story sounds, on the face of it, absurd.
Moreover, there exists a letter from Mr.
Smith to Harry Price stating: “Borley is undoubtedly haunted.” (It is true that Mrs.
Smith wrote a letter to the
Church Times
in 1929, saying she did not believe the house to be haunted, but this seems to have been a belated attempt to stem the flood of sensational publicity that followed the
Daily Mirror
story.)

In October 1930, the rectory was taken over by the Reverend L.
A.
Foyster, and his much younger wife Marianne.
Foyster, oddly enough, had lived near Amherst at the time of the Esther Cox case, and the SPR survey makes much of this coincidence; however, it seems doubtful that the vicar would attempt to fake disturbances on the model of his earlier experience.
Certainly, the Foyster incumbency saw the most spectacular exhibitions of the Borley poltergeist.
Foyster kept a diary of the disturbances.
Bells were rung, bricks thrown, footsteps heard and water out of a jug poured over the couple when in bed.
Foyster was even awakened by a violent blow on the head from his own hairbrush.
They saw a number of apparitions, including the nun and a clergyman who was identified as the Reverend Henry Bull, the builder of the rectory.
Writing appeared on the walls, asking for a mass to be said, and asking for “Light.”

There is much independent confirmation of all these events.
A Justice of the Peace named Guy L’Estrange visited Borley at the invitation of the Foysters, and wrote a lengthy account of it.
As soon as he arrived, he saw a dim figure near the porch, which vanished as soon as he approached.
Mrs.
Foyster had a bruise on her forehead—something “like a man’s fist” had struck her the previous evening.
The Foysters were telling L’Estrange about mysterious fires that kept breaking out in locked rooms when there was a loud crash in the hall; they found it littered with broken crockery.
Then bottles began flying about.
L’Estrange notes that they seemed to appear suddenly in mid-air.
The bottles were coming from a locked storage shed outside.
All the bells began to ring, making a deafening clamor—but all the bell wires had been cut.
L’Estrange shouted: “If some invisible person is present, please stop ringing for a moment.” Instantly, the bells stopped—stopped dead, as if each clapper had been grabbed by an unseen hand.
Later, sitting alone in front of the fire, L’Estrange heard footsteps behind him; he turned, but the room was empty.
The footsteps had come from a part of the wall where there had once been a door.
In bed, L’Estrange felt the room become icy cold, and saw a kind of shape materializing from a patch of luminosity; he walked toward it, and had a feeling of something trying to push him back.
He spoke to it, and it slowly vanished.
He was luckier than another visitor who thought that the ghostly figure was someone playing a joke, and tried to grab it; he was given a hard blow in the eye.

The rector and others tried praying in the chapel, taking with them a relic of the Curé of Ars, and then went around the house making signs of the cross.
Finally, they all spent the night in the Blue Room, where Henry Bull (and others) had died; they asked that the entity should stop troubling the inmates of the house; a black shadow began to form against the wall, then dissolved.
But after this, temporary peace descended on Borley Rectory.

In 1935, the Foysters decided they had had enough, and moved.
Price rented the rectory in 1937, and arranged for a team of investigators to go in.
But the major phenomena were over.
Even so, the chief investigator, Sidney Glanville, a retired engineer, became completely convinced of the reality of the haunting.

In March 1938, the team were experimenting with a planchette, which wrote the message that Borley would be destroyed by fire.
This happened in February 1939, when the house mysteriously burned down.
Yet the phenomena continued; a Cambridge team investigating the ruins heard footsteps, saw patches of light, and recorded sudden sharp drops in temperature.

In August 1943, Price decided to try digging in the cellars at Borley, which he had been advised to do by a planchette message which claimed to come from “Glanville”—the same Glanville who wrote the account of the Tedworth drummer.
They found a cream jug, which had also been referred to by the planchette, and some fragments of a human skull.
The jawbone showed signs of a deep-seated abscess—Peter Underwood speculates that this is why the phantom nun always looked miserable.

The SPR survey on Borley, which appeared eight years after Price’s death, had the effect of seriously undermining his credit.
Trevor Hall’s
Search for Harry Price
(1978) completed the work of destroying his reputation.
Yet although this leaves no doubt that Price lied about his origins—perhaps romanced would be a better word—and hungered for fame, it produces no evidence that Price was not exactly what he always claimed to be: an enthusiastic scientific investigator of paranormal phenomena.
To assume that, because Price wanted to be thought a “gentleman,” he was also dishonest as a paranormal researcher, is surely poor psychology.
Price was one of those ambitious men who crave an outlet for their energies.
He was forty years old before he found the opportunity he was looking for—a long time for a man of Price’s impatient temperament.
It came when Dingwall invited him to Munich to study the Schneider brothers.
From then on, Price had discovered his vocation; at last, he had found the outlet he needed for his explosive energy and romanticism.
And when a man as energetic and romantic as Harry Price finally finds what he is looking for, he does not risk spoiling everything with a little cheap skulduggery.
It only takes one scandal to destroy a scientist’s reputation.
But to put it this way is to imply that Price disciplined his natural dishonesty solely to maintain his reputation and this is to miss the real point; that once a man has found his vocation, he pours into it all that is best about himself.
Bernard Shaw has left an interesting description of the socialist Edward Aveling, who was Eleanor Marx’s common-law husband; he was an inveterate seducer, and a borrower who never paid his debts, yet where socialism was concerned, he was fiercely sincere.
Everything we know about Price reveals that, where psychical research was concerned, he was totally dedicated—although not above grabbing publicity wherever he could find it.

In short it would be of no advantage to him to pretend the Borley phenomena were genuine when they were not.
His reputation was based on his skepticism as much as on his support of the reality of psychic phenomena.
Possibly—like most of us—he was capable of stretching a fact when it appealed to his romanticism.
But in the case of Borley, there was no need to stretch facts.
The haunting of Borley does not rest on Price’s evidence alone; there are dozens of other witnesses, such as Guy L’Estrange—or Dom Richard Whitehouse, cited by Underwood, who witnessed just as many incredible occurrences: flying objects, ringing of bells, writing on walls, outbreaks of fire, materialization of bottles.

And is there evidence that Price
did
stretch the facts?
The SPR survey cites as an example of his dishonesty the episode of the pair of legs that Harry Bull saw walking through the postern gate.
Price says, admittedly, that when the man emerged from behind the fruit trees, he was headless.
But the report then goes on to cite Price’s original notes, which read: “Rev.
Harry Price saw coach, Juvenal, retriever, terrified and growled.
Saw man’s legs rest hid by fruit trees, thought poacher, followed with Juvenal, gate shut, but saw legs disappear through gate.” Clearly, what Bull saw disappearing through the gate was not a complete man, or Price would not refer only to the legs.
It sounds as if the upper half of his body was missing—in which case, headless is a fair description.

What seems clear from all accounts of the case is that the “ground” itself is haunted, and continues to be so.
Like Ardachie Lodge, Borley is a “place of power,” the kind of place that
would
be chosen for a monastery, and that probably held some pagan site of worship long before that.
In the Rectory’s early days, Harry Bull himself—son of the Reverend Henry Bull—was probably the unconscious focus or medium; Paul Tabori says that he was probably psychic.
This is borne out by the fact that young Bull saw so many of the “ghosts,” including the coach and the nun.
It is important to realize that not all people can see ghosts.
The “ghost hunter” Andrew Green describes, in
Our Haunted Kingdom
, a visit that he and other members of the Ealing Psychical Research Society paid to Borley in 1951.

One of the Society members grabbed my arm and, although obviously terrified, proceeded to describe a phantom that he could see some thirty feet in front of him, standing at the end of the “Nun’s Walk.” It was of a Woman in a long white gown, and moved slowly towards the end of the neglected garden .
.
.
the witness was perspiring profusely with fear and later with annoyance that I had failed to see the ghost.

Green had only heard the rustle of trees and bushes, as if something was walking through the undergrowth.
We may assume, then, that if Green had been a tenant of Borley before its destruction, he would probably have seen no ghosts.
Bull was, it seems, enough of a “medium” to see the ghosts.
And Marianne Foyster was a far more powerful medium who changed the character of the haunting into poltergeist activity.
(Most of the messages scrawled on walls were addressed to her.) The reason that the subsequent investigation of Borley (during Price’s tenancy) was so unsuccessful was that there was no medium present to provide the energy.

Asked about the “ley system” of the Borley area, the ley expert Stephen Jenkins replied as follows: “Norfolk and Suffolk are a spider-web of alignments, many of which are linked to curious manifestations.
Borley church stands at a node where four lines cross, one going from Asher church to Sproughton church .
.
.” After giving further details of the ley system, he goes on:

My wife photographed me as I was standing with my back to the south wall of Borley churchyard, at ten o’clock on the morning of Saturday the 1st of September, 1979.
Recently, this was borrowed for a magazine article, and the editor kindly sent me an enlargement.
No less than three people, not one of them known to the others, have on separate occasions noted in the enlargement some odd—and not very prepossessing—faces among the trees close to the church.
The same identifications have been made without possibility of collusion.