Enigma of Borley Rectory Read online

  It should just be mentioned that when the Rectory was first built, the grounds also included the land that butted onto the far side of the garden, but this was all eventually turned over to farmland and orchard, and indeed it remains agricultural land to this day. A great pity has been the removal of many of the trees that used to surround both the Rectory itself and the lawn. These trees, the Cedars of Lebanon, under which Margaret Wilson was later to be buzzed by a curious flying insect as she sat painting a picture of the Rectory, gave the building its secluded atmosphere.

  The writer has, it is hoped, sufficiently described the house and garden to enable the reader to relate the strange catalogue of events to the appropriate locations and draw as much atmosphere from these descriptions and the accompanying illustrations as can be portrayed in an account written long after the events occurred.

  To make a complete description, it now remains to picture the stable cottage that stood behind the Rectory, and which had its share of rather strange happenings. It is this cottage that still stands today. This cottage does appear to be Victorian, and several folk over the years have assumed that it was built at the same time as the Rectory itself but, belying exterior appearances, the stable cottage is rather older. The 1841 tithe map and the 1839 tithe list tell us that the building was on that site before the big Rectory was built and some photographs of it show signs of its having been altered to blend into the new Bull rectory. One illustration of it in The Ghosts of Borley shows the garden side of the cottage, with its little porch, and immediately above this there is visible evidence of a bricked-up gateway. In its earlier form, the coach bay was in the bottom, with the living accommodation over the top. The Bull sisters are said to have related that the family carriage was stored in the ground floor, the stables being at the end of the cottage nearest the farm, and at right angles to the cottage itself. These buildings have also largely disappeared, leaving the cottage as the only solid surviving relic of the former Rectory establishment.

  The stable cottage now boasts a large outward extension upon the garden side, which although a modern addition blends well with the rest of the property. The same cannot be said, however, for the ugly blockhouse-type dormer extension on the upper storey. At the time of writing, the building had double glazing and was owned by a Colonel Dorey, so once again the Rectory site housed a military gentleman.

  The evidence in the Essex County Archives clearly indicates that the cottage is older than popularly supposed, or as described by estate agents. It certainly seems to be contemporary with the old Herringham rectory, which was demolished to make way for Henry Bull's massive pile.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Hauntings ... 1863 to 1927

  If Borley Rectory itself was in many ways a curious great barn of a place, in architectural terms, then what is alleged to have happened in and around the building can be described as little short of extraordinary.

  The long sequence of strange happenings is said to have culminated in the Rectory becoming, at the height of the disturbances, almost uninhabitable. It would seem that little time elapsed after Henry Bull and his family moved into the Rectory before people who stayed there realised that something about the house 'wasn't quite right'. That the Bull family lived there, apparently unconcerned, from 1863 to 1927 can perhaps be partly explained by the family's attitude to the strange events and by the fact that the Bull children came to accept them as just part of life in the house, though the various sisters were not above being caught by surprise on some occasions.

  In particular, two features about the Rectory that persisted throughout its existence were the stillness of the house, far more so than would normally be the case in such a large building filled with so many people, and its rather uncanny habit of appearing cold whatever the outside temperature might be. It should be mentioned in connection with this that admittedly the Rectory was a pest of a house to heat properly in the winter months, partly because of its clumsy interior layout, but its chillness was often apparent in warm weather too.

  The stillness of the house was the more noticeable feature. In a place of such size one would expect, especially at night, to hear all sorts of creaks and groans, chiefly from contracting or expanding joists or floorboards and rafters, or from doors unwittingly left ajar so that they squeaked. At Borley Rectory, however, the place seemed always to be dead still. However, many noises were heard in the house that seemed to have no physical cause.

  Some items did produce regular noises of course, in particular the water pump, which by all accounts was a very noisy contraption. There are those who suggest that the pump was responsible for many of the sounds reported as being paranormal, but wouldn't a person normally search for the source of such a noise if they did not know where it was coming from?

  We turn now to the specific incidents at the Rectory, beginning with some that occurred during the heyday of the house.

  To begin with, a curious incident involving two of the Bull sisters is reported to have happened when they were young children. They were standing by one of the Rectory gates with a family maid in attendance, and as they stood looking out over the countryside, they saw a couple of their local friends walking across one of the fields. There would have been nothing unusual about this, except that walking a little way in front of them was a young girl whom neither of the girls recognised as being local. We are told that later the two sisters met their two friends and asked who it was that had been out walking with them earlier. The response was that there had been nobody else in the field with them, nor had they met up with anyone else on the way. The stranger in the field appeared to be dressed all in white.

  Mention of this odd incident brings the author to another less certain occurrence, thought by some to be connected with the girl in the field. This episode, not in itself a psychic occurrence but rather the theoretical cause of one that happened very much later, came to light when it was told to Harry Price by a Sudbury man, early on in his investigation.

  What is alleged to have happened is this. Not long after the Rectory was built, a girl was supposedly seen dangling perilously from the outside sill of the Blue Room window, screaming her head off. She is said to have then lost her hold, crashed through the glass roof of the verandah to the stone steps below and been killed. It was this incident that Harry Price himself seemed less than satisfied with, for no evidence to explain it had come to light by that time, 1929, and Harry Price himself recorded in his first book that he could find no evidence to substantiate this peculiar tale, and on that incomplete note he left the incident.

  The idea behind this incident was that the girl, whoever she was, had been in some way assaulted by somebody in the Blue Room and, in trying to evade her tormentor, fell out of the window, vainly trying to grab hold of the sill to save herself. Though the incident may appear rather far-fetched, we will take some time at a later stage to examine the possibilities and investigate the actual historical feasibility of the kind of incident described.

  The supposed connections between this incident and the strange girl in the field, seen by the young Bull sisters, are twofold. The girl in the field is said to have been dressed in white, though some versions of the incident have it as being blue, and curiously enough, many long years later, after the fire at the Rectory, a girl dressed seemingly in either pale buff or pale blue was reported being seen standing at what had been the Blue Room window, but under the most bizarre circumstances.

  Now other incidents. One of the most frequent and doubtless most annoying of the Rectory's odd phenomena was the persistent and seemingly pointless ringing of the servant bells when no member of the family had rung for a servant. It has been suggested, in the highly critical book called The Haunting of Borley Rectory, by E. J. Dingwall, K. M. Goldney and T. H. Hall, that mice were responsible for the incidents, getting among the rafters and bouncing on and off the bell wires, though this seems to have been fairly well disproved by the point that bells which had had their pull wires cut to stop the nuisance
continued to function from time to time.

  One of the earliest of these incidents was when one of the Bull sisters, thought to have been Ethel, was alone in the house. For no apparent reason, every bell in the house starting ringing at once. Following upon this, the sound of rushing water was heard inside the Rectory, again without any explanation. This was even more weird than the bell-ringing, because the Rectory not only had no mains water supply, but no interior piping either, until after the end of the Bull family's days in the place, when a later Rector, the Rev. Guy Smith, spent a considerable sum of money having the archaic facilities improved. We must now turn to other curious happenings.

  Cases of actual physical assault in poltergeist incidents or allegedly by ghosts are extremely rare, though not entirely unknown, but one of the Bull sisters, whilst asleep in bed was woken up by having her face slapped. Nobody was in the room with her at that time, and again no one could make any sense of the occurrence.

  Other phenomena involved the same sister for some time. Each night as she was about to retire to bed, there would come a series of loud rapping noises on her bedroom door. After that, loud bangs and crashes would be heard in the house but, as with much else at Borley Rectory, nobody could ever make any sense of these incidents.

  The most persistent feature of all was that of strange heavy footsteps which always seemed to occur at times when there was nobody in those parts of the house from which the sounds appeared to come. This phenomenon lasted from the time the Rectory was built until demolition men pulled down the remains of its gutted shell during the closing months of the Second World War.

  During the Bull sisters' childhood years, perhaps about the time of the 'girl in white' incident, each night around half past ten the girls would hear the sound of footsteps passing their bedroom door, walking along the landing and stopping outside the night nursery. When the footsteps stopped, three taps would be heard and then all would be quiet, save for those nights when the loud crashing sounds could be heard.

  Then there was the visit by a relative. He was put up in one of the bedrooms but afterwards he flatly refused to sleep there again. As to why, regrettably he did not elaborate.

  An often-reported mystery was that of lights being seen in rooms that were locked or otherwise out of use. This was reported time and again by numerous people, over many years. It should be remembered that throughout its existence, even up to 1939, the Rectory was illuminated entirely by oil lamps. It was never wired for electricity, nor was there gas.

  The Rectory as seen from the tower of Borley Church

  These, then, were some of the early occurrences at the Rectory. We pass now to several strange happenings more precisely dated. The experiences of a one-time headmaster of the well-known Colchester Grammar School illustrate the curiosities of Borley Rectory at that time.

  During his time as a student at Wadham College, Oxford, young Harry Bull made the acquaintance of P. Shaw Jeffrey, who was later to become headmaster of Colchester Grammar School. As a result of their friendship, Shaw Jeffrey spent at least one summer vacation, possibly two, at Borley Rectory as a guest. When he recounted his experiences many years after, as an old man of venerable years, although he was unable to recall the year or years of his visit, his memory of some curious incidents at the Rectory were fresh enough.

  Among other oddities, he recalled stones falling about inside the house. He also heard a horse-drawn carriage more than once, and records a nun having been spotted by other members of the Bull family while he was at the Rectory. There had been about 17 in the family at that time, though it seems that perhaps some of these might have been cousins from the Pentlow arm of the family, because there were reportedly only about 14 Borley members as such.

  On one occasion, Shaw Jeffrey had removed his boots before retiring to bed, and left them near his bed, on the floor. The following morning he found them on top of a wardrobe. Also while he was at Borley Rectory, a French dictionary in his possession went missing. He was later disturbed in his sleep by a loud 'clump' and there on the floor was his dictionary.

  Another of the many people to recall strange events at Borley Rectory before 1900 was Elizabeth Byford, whose family served at the Bulls' for a very long time. One of them had been the Bulls' coachman at one time.

  As a young girl, she was a maid at Borley Rectory for one brief month in 1886, and 43 years later in 1929 she related her experiences in a letter to Harry Price. During the year in question, Elizabeth was employed as an under nursemaid and was duly allotted a room in the Rectory, a room which, she was informed, was haunted. Knowing that a couple of the ladies of the house had been sleeping in that room only a little while before, she ignored the comments and went about her business. About a fortnight after starting work, she was woken in the middle of the night, hearing what sounded distinctly like some person walking along the corridor towards her room, and making a noise as if wearing carpet slippers. It was the routine for Elizabeth to be called by the head nursemaid at 6 am and, no doubt still half-asleep; she thought that was who it was. But nobody knocked or entered her room and in spite of the other servants making light of her experience when she mentioned it the next morning, she began to feel most unsettled and, not very long after, she gave up her post and left.

  As Harry Price commented in The Most Haunted House in England, were it not for the fact that the footsteps phenomenon was experienced and reported by countless numbers of people, Elizabeth Byford's experience could have been dismissed as the result of her own imagination arising from stories she had heard about the hauntings.

  Her report actually served to confirm and strengthen the evidence for the mystery of the strange footsteps. Among those who heard them over a period of very many years, one could mention several of the Bull sisters, Guy Smith and his wife, members of the Cambridge Commission who investigated Borley during the Second World War, and various other people including James Turner's wife, when they lived in Borley Cottage after the Second World War.

  Another fairly commonplace occurrence was that of footsteps heard in the road outside the Rectory when there was nobody in sight. One of Harry Bull's brothers, Walter, was for much of his life away at sea, but on at least 50 occasions during visits to Borley he had heard the sound of somebody following him along the road outside the Rectory, but there was never anyone in the area to account for the noise.

  Ethel, one of the sisters, was also the victim of a number of rather disconcerting experiences. During one of these occasions, she was alone in an upstairs passageway when she became aware of somebody standing by her side. She turned, somewhat surprised, to see a tall dark-complexioned man, but before Ethel could collect her thoughts, the figure vanished completely. In another incident, something caused her sleep to be disturbed. She awoke to find standing by her bed a strange-looking man with a tall hat and dressed in very old-fashioned costume. It seems likely that Ethel was not the only person to see this curious figure.

  Some reports tell us that he was seen again later, sitting on the edge of the bed, whilst sometimes it is related that she felt the presence of somebody or something sitting on her bed. But it was Freda who is thought to have been one of the sisters involved in a most extraordinary incident in July 1900, when she was with her sister, Mabel. Details will be found in the special section relating to the appearances of the most famous of all Borley's ghosts.

  We turn now to the numerous strange experiences of the Rev. Henry Bull's son, Harry, or Henry Foyster Bull to give him his proper name. It is the strange things that Harry Bull experienced and talked openly about that received a lot of the often rather one-sided and rather pointless criticism in more recent years. There are those who have tried with great effort to dismiss Harry Bull as a teller of tall stories, a morbid dreamer and much else besides, yet his experiences were shared by so many others who visited or stayed at the Rectory. The writer has digressed as to Harry Bull's genuineness at this point because it is felt that he deserves at the very least the benefit of the dou
bt, a balanced view of him, as has, we hope, been properly applied to Price in the opening passages of this book. However, to proceed with Harry Bull's experiences:

  He succeeded his father as Rector in 1892, and occupied that post until his own death in 1927. Although he did not live in the Rectory for the whole of his life, for he spent some time in Borley Place where he was born, during his years as Rector of Borley he reported a number of strange events, perhaps the most visually unpleasant being that of a headless figure in the Rectory garden. This odd incident has been related many times in the various chronicles of Borley. In Price's first book, The Most Haunted House in England, we are told that Harry Bull had ventured out into the garden with a pet dog called Juvenal.

  Something is alleged to have disturbed the dog to the point that it began howling and cringing at something in the gloom ahead of them. Harry is said to have followed the dog's frightened stare and noticed the legs and feet of somebody standing among some shrubbery. The legs then moved into full view and, to Harry's consternation, the figure appeared headless!

  The figure then moved towards one of the garden gates, through which it passed even though the gate was closed and locked, and then disappeared from view in the vegetable garden. There have been arguments over the extent of this incident and Price's reporting of it, but the text of the notes from which Harry Price took his writings was revealed more recently by Robert J. Hastings in his own investigation of the story. The notes read as follows:

  'Harry Bull in garden one day with the retriever, Juvenal, who howled and cowered when Bull saw the legs of a man otherwise hidden by fruit trees, pass towards a small postern gate, which was kept locked, and pass through it. Someone chased the headless man through the garden who eventually disappeared in the vegetable garden.'