Borley Rectory

Borley Rectory was built in 1862 by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, rector of Borley Church, as a home large enough for himself and a family of fourteen children. It was a plain red-brick house of many rooms and dark corridors, and stories attached to it almost from the start. Local legend spoke of a monastery once standing on the site and of a monk and a nun who tried to elope, were caught, and were killed – the nun supposedly walled up alive. Historians have found no evidence for the monastery, but the tale gave the house its signature ghost.

Henry Bull died in 1892 and his son, the Reverend Henry "Harry" Foyster Bull, succeeded him. On the evening of 28 July 1900 four of the rector's daughters, returning from a garden party, reported seeing a young woman in the habit of a nun in the grounds; three of the sisters, Ethel, Freda and Mabel, were said to have been petrified with fear. The nun sighting became the cornerstone of everything that followed.

By 1929 the rectory had new occupants and the newspapers had taken an interest; Harry Price, already a well-known investigator, paid his first visits that summer. In October 1930 the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster, his wife Marianne and their daughter Adelaide moved in, and the five years of the Foyster tenancy produced the most intense reports of all, including the famous writings on the walls. The house was badly damaged by fire on the night of 27 February 1939, shortly after a retired army officer, Captain W. H. Gregson, had bought it. The ruin was finally pulled down in 1944.

Harry Price is the reason the world knows Borley. He first visited in 1929, and in May 1937 he leased the by-then-empty rectory for twelve months, advertising in The Times on 25 May for helpers. Around 48 unpaid "official observers", mostly students, spent weekends there under instruction to log anything unusual. Their reports, the wall writings and the planchette sessions fed his 1940 bestseller The Most Haunted House in England, and the affair filled newspapers for years afterwards. At a séance on 27 March 1938 a spirit calling itself "Sunex Amures" declared the rectory would burn that night at nine o'clock. It did not – but when it did burn eleven months later, in February 1939, after Captain Gregson reportedly knocked over an oil lamp while unpacking, the prophecy was remembered.

The sceptical case is strong and worth knowing. Charles Sutton, a Daily Mail reporter who accompanied Price in 1929, later said that after a pebble struck him on the head he grabbed Price and found the investigator's coat pockets full of stones. After Price's death in 1948 the Society for Psychical Research commissioned Eric Dingwall, Mollie Goldney and Trevor Hall to re-examine the case; their 1956 report, The Haunting of Borley Rectory, concluded that Price had fraudulently produced some phenomena and that the rest could have natural explanations – rodents, illusions, outside noises. "The question as to whether Price presented a deliberately distorted account of the Borley affair in his books," they wrote, "is not, we think, now in doubt."

Yet the reports did not stop when the house came down. Borley Church, which was largely ignored while the rectory drew the crowds, is now the focus. Visitors and investigators have reported organ music from a locked and empty church, footsteps walking towards the door followed by the sound of a key turning, thumps and bell-ringing after hours, a monk-like figure squatting in a corner as if hiding, and the sad nun in the churchyard. One paranormal group's recorder is claimed to have picked up a deep, mournful sigh and a groan. Believe what you will: Borley remains the case that every later British ghost investigation is measured against.

Be clear about what is and is not there. Borley Rectory no longer exists: the fire of 1939 gutted it, the ruin was cleared in 1944, and its site is private land with modern homes on and around it. There is nothing of the house to see and no public access to the plot, so please do not wander onto private drives or gardens, peer into windows or arrive at night with torches. Borley is a working hamlet where a handful of people live, and they have put up with generations of ghost-hunters.

What you can visit is Borley Church, a twelfth-century parish church across the lane from the old rectory site, which is open to the public and worth the trip in its own right, with a peaceful, atmospheric interior and a churchyard that has become the focus of most modern reports. Nearby you can also see the former Rectory Cottage, Borley Place and the Tithe Barn from the road. Park considerately in the village or walk in from Long Melford, and combine your visit with Sudbury, the Stour Valley and the timber-framed villages of the Essex–Suffolk border. There are no organised ghost tours at Borley, and no one can stay in the rectory; base yourself in Sudbury, Long Melford or Lavenham instead.