The physical destruction of Borley Rectory - famously known across the world as the ‘most haunted house in England’ - on a winter’s night only months before the outbreak of World War II was the culmination of many strange and dramatic happenings in this isolated corner of East Anglia over the proceeding seven decades. Today only photographs and a handful of disparate relics survive, with the result that the Revd Henry Bull’s gloomy and rambling red-brick house is now fast disappearing from living memory: even Peter Underwood, one of this country’s most experienced and respected paranormal researchers whose long and unprecedented association with the Borley case began in the mid-1940s, was unable to see the rectory in its entirety before it was finally demolished and the site levelled in the early months of 1944.
In the years since the death of psychical researcher extraordinaire Harry Price, the greatest champion of genuine supernatural phenomena at Borley, the rectory case has divided the paranormal community as to its merits, not only a haunted house per se, but as one worthy of the ultimate ‘most haunted’ crown. Perhaps in the shadowy lamp-lit interior of Borley Rectory anything was possible, but despite much of the hysteria that tales of the haunting have and continue to generate, a thread of the unexplained runs through the many and varied chapters in its long and compelling history that cannot be completely dismissed or ignored.
Set against accounts of phantom figures, ghostly wall writing, mysterious lights and midnight vigils, is a human drama of particular richness and extravagance which is the key to the longevity and enduring appeal of the Borley story. After much original research into the Borley ghosts during the 1970s, the late Bedfordshire ghost hunter Tony Broughall came to the perceptive conclusion that the rectory was probably never haunted – only perhaps by a succession of very strange occupants – both the haunters and the haunted - that fate had brought together. As to its grounds, the roadway alongside and the twelfth century church in whose shadow it stood between 1863 and 1944, he was not so sure. Undimmed by the passage of time, the ghosts of Borley continue to hold a fascination for all those who fall under their sway.
Paul Adams is one of the authors of The Borley Rectory Companion
For the full story of the most haunted house in Britain, please see The Borley Rectory Companion.
For the complete range of The History Press's Haunted Books, please see the Haunted section of our website.