Borley Rectory

The ghostly nun appeared to four of Henry Bull's daughters simultaneously.

This is the thing about the Borley nun. She was not a once-in-a-decade rumor. She was seen repeatedly, by multiple members of the same household, over decades.

She walked the garden path that had come to be called the Nun's Walk. She walked it in daylight. She walked it in the evening. She walked it at the same time in the same direction with the same deliberate, unhurried gait of someone who is not going anywhere particular but has committed to the route.

She did not interact with people who saw her. She did not respond to being called. She did not turn her head. She walked.

The daughters got used to her.

This sentence I want you to sit with for a moment. The four daughters of the family who lived in this house got used to the ghostly nun in the garden. It became a feature. It became the kind of thing you mention and then continue with your conversation.

The Bull family lived in that house for decades. They had a nun. They carried on.

Henry Bull's son, Harry Bull, eventually inherited the rectory. He continued to see the nun. He died in 1927 in the Blue Room of the house. After his death, the nun was seen standing at his bedroom window, looking out.

This is either grief, or it is something else.

The Smiths, who moved in after, lasted eight months.

Harry Price was a ghost hunter.

This was not a job title that existed in the formal sense in 1929, but Price had made it one. He was a member of the Society for Psychical Research. He had investigated mediums. He had exposed frauds. He had also, on several occasions, documented phenomena he could not explain, and he was careful to distinguish between the two outcomes.

He arrived at Borley Rectory in June 1929 after receiving a letter from the Smiths, the current residents, who were having a difficult time.

What he found over his first visit was substantial. Objects moved. Bells rang with nothing near them. Something knocked on walls in response to questions. His notes from this period are specific, documented with times and witness names and weather conditions.

Price declared Borley Rectory the most haunted house in England.

This is a very large claim to make. England has a lot of houses and a lot of history and no shortage of candidates. But Price was not a man who made claims lightly. He had spent years exposing fraudsters and he knew what fraud looked like.

He became closely associated with the house. He investigated it on and off for nearly a decade. He brought in other investigators. He kept records.

The records are, even now, uncomfortable reading. Not because they are dramatic. Because they are methodical. Price had the handwriting of a man who was trying very hard to write down exactly what he saw.

The writing appeared after 1937.

Not graffiti. Not scratched. Writing that appeared on the plaster walls, in pencil or in what appeared to be pencil, in a shaky handwriting that looked like someone trying to write while their hands were very cold, or very afraid.

The messages asked for help. They asked for prayers. One said, 'Marianne, please help get.'

Marianne was Mrs. Marianne Foyster, the wife of the rector at the time. She appears throughout the later Borley history as a figure people cannot quite get a consistent picture of. She claimed to have seen the nun. She claimed objects were thrown at her. She may have been a victim. She may have been a participant. She may have been both.

The wall writings are still discussed by historians because they are one of the few physical artifacts of the haunting that multiple witnesses saw independently. Price photographed them. Others photographed them. They were on the walls.

A séance at Borley in 1937 contacted, or claimed to contact, the spirit of the walled-up nun. Her name was given as Marie Lairre. She had died, she said, in 1667. She had been brought from France and walled up in the foundations.

She asked for prayers.

She also predicted the house would burn.

She gave a date: 1938.

The fire came in 1939. One year off.

Close enough, if you are being charitable. And it is hard not to be.

The fire started in February 1939.

The new owner, Captain W.H. Gregson, had moved in the previous year. He did not have Price's experience with strange houses, but he was coping.

He was in the hall one night when a pile of books toppled and knocked over a lamp. The oil spread. The curtains caught.

The house burned for a long time. Neighbors reported seeing figures in the upstairs windows during the fire. Not fire silhouettes. Not tricks of light. Figures.

One neighbor was specific enough to describe a young woman in old-fashioned clothes standing in the flames at an upper window.

The fire gutted the interior. The walls stood.

And then, afterward, workers doing cleanup found bones in the cellar.

Human bones. Buried under the foundations.

The bones were from a young woman.

Price arranged for them to be given a proper burial in Liston churchyard in 1943. A burial, and prayers, which is what the wall writings had asked for.

After the burial, the sightings largely stopped.

This is either a coincidence or it is not. The record does not resolve this question. The record just states the sequence and lets you decide what to do with it.

Harry Price published his account of Borley Rectory in 1940. It was a bestseller.

He published a second book in 1946, two years before he died.

After his death, investigators from the Society for Psychical Research went back through his records. They found problems. Price had, in some instances, exaggerated. There were accounts from witnesses that contradicted his published version. Some physical evidence was less impressive on reexamination than it had appeared in print.

The critics concluded that Price had, at minimum, been credulous and, at maximum, had staged some of the phenomena himself.

This is a serious charge against a man who cannot defend himself.

What the investigators did not do was explain everything. The wall writings, seen by independent witnesses before Price arrived. The bones in the cellar. The original Bull family accounts from the 1880s and 1890s, decades before Price. The Smiths, who had no connection to Price when they wrote their original letter asking for help.

The rectory was demolished in 1944. The ruin stood until then, visited by curious people who reported, with some consistency, that standing in the ruins felt wrong in the specific way that places feel wrong when something bad happened there.

Now it is a field.

The nun's garden path is gone. The cellar is filled in. The wall writings were burned.

Some stories end like this. Not with an explanation. With a field.