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Oct. 24, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
52:45
Edition 673 - Borley Rectory - Sean O'Connor

A new take on the story of what was claimed to be Britain's "most haunted location" - Borley Rectory...Author and tv man Sean O'Connor has been back through the astonishing history of the building, its eccentric occupants and the truly bizarre happenings there that occurred over many decades.

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Nice to have you there.
It is another autumnal day here, but much warmer than you would expect for this time of year.
They're talking 18, 19 degrees, which I know I've said this before, but when I was a kid, we never got temperatures like that at this time of year.
I'm not going to knock it.
Much better and much cheaper when you bear in mind the cost of electricity than keeping the heating on, which I can't afford to do anyway.
And that goes for most of us here in the UK, I think, at the moment.
The ongoing drama of who is going to be our next Prime Minister here in the UK continues.
It might have been settled by the time you hear this.
But it is looking like we're going to get yet another Prime Minister here, and we'll be finding out who that is.
It's more unexplained than the unexplained, but we don't talk politics here.
A few shout-outs before we get into the topic this time.
Andrew in Australia, thanks for your kind words and your guest suggestion, a really good one.
John and Catherine in Tombstone, Arizona, nice of you to get in touch, and thank you for a great email.
And Jen, thank you very much for your offer of some support, some administrative assistance.
I'm going to get in touch with you about that, but thank you very much indeed for thinking of me.
That is the one thing that I'm having the most problem with at the moment.
So, you know, any potential help in that would be useful.
But let's talk about that.
And thank you again.
If you want to get in touch, go to the website designed and created by Adam.
It's theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link, and you can send me an email from there.
And I'd be very grateful if you do.
And please know, if I wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning, what's the first thing I do?
I check my emails, then I go back to sleep.
I see all the emails as they come in.
And if your email requires a response, then please let me know.
What else is there to say?
I think that's about it.
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That's where you'll find out the most up-to-date information about everything that I do.
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No other Facebook page of The Unexplained with Howard Hughes.
The topic on this edition of The Unexplained is something from my TV show recently, and it's something that you asked for and have been asking for for years.
The subject of highly haunted Bali Rectory in Essex.
Deeply haunted for decades.
And its story reads something like something from a Victorian novel, to be frank with you.
It is an astonishing story, and sometimes you believe, can this really be so?
But these are the events as they happen.
The guest is Sean O'Connor.
His new book was out about 10 days ago.
It was called The Haunting of Bali Rectory, appropriately enough.
Had some very good reviews.
One of them said, I believe Sean O'Connor's is the book on Bali that I've been waiting for.
He's got the perfect ear for drama.
Bali Rectory is perhaps the definition of an old haunt, says another reviewer, still exerting an extraordinary grip on the popular imagination.
In Sean O'Connor's meticulous and revelatory book, it comes up as fresh as paint, balanced, surprising, and strangely moving.
This is the definitive account.
So some very good reviews there from people, including Mark Gatis, actor, comedian, scriptwriter, novelist, and a man who wrote The Natural History of Ghosts, Roger Clarke, and others.
You will see.
If you check it out online, you'll see the reviews for it.
So a good book.
Something to say about this conversation that comes from my recent TV show.
There were some audio issues with it, which meant, and we tried everything that we could to try and clarify it, that very occasionally the digital audio connection breaks up a bit.
His picture was 4K perfect, and I think that was part of the problem because it was swallowing the bandwidth.
But the audio occasionally breaks up very slightly.
I could understand where he was going from his context.
But if that is going to be a problem for you, and if you don't like to hear anything other than absolutely 100% sound, please, of course, turn off now.
But it is an interesting conversation.
It is one that a number of people asked for.
So here it comes from my TV show, The Haunting of Bali Rectory.
Thank you for your support.
Thank you for being with me all the way.
Don't think I've got anything else to say.
Thanks to Adam, my webmaster, of course.
And, you know, keep those emails coming.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show.
Let's get to Sean O'Connor now from my recent TV show and The Haunting of Bali Rectory.
Bali Rectory is associated with extreme weirdness and a pattern and longevity of haunting that probably nowhere else in this country has experienced.
Maybe, as I say, there are various locations in Edinburgh that might be able to compete with it.
But certainly not the backstory around Borley Rectory.
The Haunting of Borley Rectory is a book that was released a couple of days ago.
And I'm going to just read you a little bit of the publisher's right up.
The author is Sean O'Connor.
I'll tell you about him in a second.
The publishers say when the Reverend Lionel Foyster moved in, he experienced a further explosion of poltergeist activity with an increasing violence directed at his attractive young wife, Marianne, a passionate and sensuous woman, isolated in a village haunted by ancient superstition and deep-rooted prejudice.
All of this at Borley in Essex, which the book actually calls more of a hamlet than a village.
But a very intense place and a very intense case.
The man who's written this book is Sean O'Connor, born in Birkenhead, so he's a Merseysider, rather like my good self, writer, director, and producer working in theatre, radio, TV, and film.
He's worked as a showrunner on several major TV series, including EastEnders, Hollyoaks, Footballers, Wives, and Minder.
Fab.
In 2011, he produced Terence Davis' film version of Terence Radigan's The Deep Blue Sea, which starred Rachel Weiss and Tom Hiddleston.
And from 2012 to 2016, he was editor of The Archers for Radio 4.
If that's not variety, I don't know what is.
He's online to us now.
Sean, thank you for doing this.
Evening.
I understand that you are one of the many people suffering with a cold at this moment.
A little bit, yeah.
I'm on the paralyzed more as well.
Well, listen, if you need any spares, I've got them here, all right?
I can always send them to you.
Okay, I mean, you've got a fantastic track record of things that you've done.
None of the previous stuff working on Minder.
Which version of Minder, by the way, was that the later one or the earlier one?
It's a little remembered version with Shane Ritchie for channel five, actually.
Yeah.
Okay.
But East Anderson and various other things.
None of that suggests an interest in paranormality.
How does that come in?
I think it grabs you quite early.
And I met a friend of mine the other day, Mark Gators, and he also read these Daniel Farson books in the 70s, the Hamlin Book of Horror or the Beaver Book of Horror.
And those interesting stories about ghosts or vampires I found really intriguing as a kid.
And then, weirdly, I met Daniel Farson.
He was a TV interviewer in the 50s and a great bon viveur.
And I met him in the 90s in a pub in Plymouth when I was a young director down there.
And he just wanted to talk about it all night.
I mean, as you probably know, he was Bran Stoker's great-nephew.
So he's absolutely.
He didn't know that.
I mean, a lot of people did know that.
A lot of people won't have heard of Daniel Farson, but he was a sort of forerunner of almost people like Alan Wicker and those sorts of people, wasn't he, on TV?
Yeah, and he had a very sort of broad range of interests.
And one of them was writing about ghosts and witches for children.
And he wrote these series of kids' books, many of which I read in the 70s.
And one of them was The Hamlet Book of Horror, in which there's an extraordinarily beautiful painted cover of it.
And that intrigued me.
And inside, he tells the story about Harry Price and the rectory and Marianne Foyster.
And I found it very gripping.
I find the characters that's gripping as the ghosts, actually.
And then I'd always wanted to tell the story.
And interestingly, 10 years ago, when I first pitched it to the publisher that's now publishing it, they said that nobody's interested in ghosts.
They are.
And we're now in an era when people are completely fascinated by them.
During the research for this book, I went to, there's a pub by Guy's Hospital and the London 14 Society meets there.
And I was quite surprised to find that the people that were going in the audience who are very well informed and very interested and very articulate about the paranormal and ghosts and such like, were all quite young.
And they're all people, I guess, who aren't interested in organised religion, but they're interested in something bigger than themselves.
And I think that the whole notion of investigating ghosts is about looking beyond ourselves and looking for something that's bigger than us.
And I think that might feel like a very contemporary thing.
And that can lead you down all kinds of paths, can't it?
That can lead you into believing things that were the best will in the world really couldn't be so.
That kind of thought can lead you to being misled, but it can also lead you to uncovering and discovering amazing things that are beyond the realms of science and rationality.
Yeah, I mean, in many ways, the Baldy story, the reason we're still talking about it today is it feels like a sort of parable, a 20th century parable about faith more than anything.
It's not just about ghosts.
I mean, in 1914, there were 50 spiritualist societies in the UK, and by 1919, there were 500.
And people rejected organised religion after the massacre in the trenches and were looking for something bigger than themselves, looking for some sort of communication and looking to prove that all of these guys hadn't just died for nothing.
And that question keeps being asked in the 1920s and 30s when this tavloid story in Borley and this isolated village in Essex all kicks off.
So there's something about the time that the story takes place in, as well as the fact that Borley Rectory looks like a haunted house and it looks like it's been invented by Central Casting, in fact.
It's on a windy ridge.
It's in a sort of an area where there's supernatural stories.
There are stories of old ghosts.
It's a strange sectarian area where they don't like Catholics and they don't like Anglo-Catholics.
It's quite a area which doesn't like strangers.
They've been invaded by the Danes.
They've been invaded by the Romans and they're suspicious of outsiders.
So there is an air about that place.
I mean, look, Burley Rectory is a building, and I think we have a photograph of it as it appeared in the 1890s.
So there it is.
That's the basic building.
I mean, it's not a very prepossessing looking building, is it?
There are many people who say that it kind of looks spooky.
It looks challenging.
Yeah, I mean, it's a big old building and it's made of red brick and it's in the countryside.
It looks like an alien imposter.
It looks like it shouldn't be built there.
And I think that maybe the local people, as soon as it was built, were thinking maybe it shouldn't have been built then.
It was built with a lot of money by some very wealthy, a rector and his very wealthy family.
And when the Bull family moved in there, there were 13 children.
So it was full of people and a huge number of servants as well.
There was a farm next door.
The church was across the road, but it's still a very small hamlet.
So it was very, very heavily peopled in the 1860s when it was first built.
But by the 1920s, when the war had happened, there's a rector and his wife and they've moved in with no children and two cats.
And they've got a 26-room house that they can't heat.
It's got no electricity, there's no gas, there's no running water.
And it's a windy, old, cold, depressing, dank, dark building.
And there's already rumours about it from the 1860s that there are phantom nuns and there's headless horsemen.
And then in the 1920s, a new rector arrives and arrives straight from India with his wife.
There are 12 other rectors who've been interviewed for the job and then reject it.
So 12 people didn't want it.
And the last person to accept the job is called Smith.
And he has just arrived from India and he's half Asian.
He's a mixed race guy and his wife.
And then as soon as they arrive, the haunting becomes a poltergeist haunting, which is a New thing for the rectory, and that continues for the next 10 to 15 years.
I think it's a I found, and you can tell me whether this is wrong, but I found because this is a complicated story involving a lot of people, I found a chronology of the house online, and I think it may be just worth me going through it.
1863, the Reverend Henry Bull moved into the house, as you said, that he just constructed.
The Reverend Bull had a large family, as you also said, and subsequently had the house extended.
1892, Henry Bull died.
His son, Harry Bull, who was also vicar, took over the role.
1927, so that was a good long reign of close on 30 years nearly.
Harry Bull died, and in 1928, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved in.
They moved out in 1929.
Eric Smith's sister was a medium.
I don't know whether that plays into all of this.
1930 to 35, the house was occupied by the Reverend Lionel.
This is where it gets really interesting.
The Reverend Lionel Foyster, a cousin of the Bulls, so it's sort of all in the family in a way.
And his wife Marianne, a fascinating character because we build into this infidelity and all sorts of other things.
They eventually left because of Lionel's increasing ill health.
There was an age gap between them.
1927 to 38, the house was rented by Harry Price, which, you know, he is the archetypal paranormal researcher, ghost hunter, very famous man, never out of the newspapers in his era.
He secured various observers to report on phenomena there.
1939, the house caught fire, badly damaged.
By then, the owner was W.H. Gregson.
1944, the whole thing is knocked down.
That's quite a chronology, isn't it?
You say in the book...
Most ghosts are only seen by one person at a time.
In 1900, there are apparently ghosts which are witnessed by four different people in the same family.
So I think it's the number of witnesses that make it a very distinct case and also the amount of time.
You're talking from 1863 right up to the 1940s.
So 80 odd years, really, of apparent or alleged haunting.
So am I right in, and I did one of the, you know what journalists are like, I did one of these journalist speed reads over this weekend.
So I can't say that I read every single word, but you know how you do that.
You get the main points into your head.
It seems to me that there was a bit, there was, what am I saying, an increasing intensity of phenomena experienced by the different people who occupied that place.
Now, Eric Smith was interesting because I think Eric Smith was the one who complained about the living conditions.
So Eric Smith was not in there for too long.
And then, you know, still in the family, somebody else came in.
But it seems to me that there was an escalation in activity over time.
Yes.
And the thing is that whether we believe the activity of the house to be a paranormal or not, a series of families who are not related all claim that something went on.
So in some way, it's almost like the story of the house or the house itself infects people, that there are weird things going on there.
And I think it's probably true that some of the characters invented or exaggerated the stories to their own ends.
I think that the Smiths probably were sick of the house.
They couldn't afford it.
It was too isolated.
It was too cold.
It was too drafty.
And it was haunted, they felt.
So all they wanted to do was get away from it.
And they exaggerated the haunting story in order for the bishop to give them another opportunity to go somewhere else.
But Eric Smith's sister was a medium.
Yes, she was.
I mean, there's only a little bit of evidence for that, not very much.
And certainly he was interested in psychical research, but many people were at this time.
Post the First World War, lots of people were interested in spiritualism.
And when you look at the newspapers of the time, all the time there are stories about seances or about visitations, and there's lots of discussion about paranormal societies in all the daily papers.
So it was very much the currency of the period.
So the fact that the Smiths were interested in it wouldn't be unusual for the time.
But when they leave, the foisters take over, a cousin of the people that own the rectory and his wife.
And she is a very young, attractive, quite a character indeed.
And they stay there for five years.
And that's the most intense period of haunting, which is, I guess, the classic haunting period.
Which I want to get into in the next segment of our conversation.
But did the, and again, these may be words that I skipped past in my speed reading of the book.
Forgive me if they are.
Did the diocese in Essex take any interest in all of this?
Because with so many accounts of paranormal happenings, rocks and stones being thrown around the place, sightings of strange figures in the garden, which happened a couple of times, did the diocese take any interest or did they keep it at arm's length?
They certainly took notice, but they were very, very dismissive of it.
And the local bishop was very dismissive of any idea that there might be activity there.
And he thought the Smiths should just put up and shut up, basically.
And the Bull family, who'd been there from the 1860s, hadn't complained about the activity there.
And they sort of took it in their stride.
And so when the Smiths begin to start complaining about it, the Bishop just isn't interested.
And so they abandon the house effectively until they can finally find somebody sort of 12 interviews later that could take over the house.
Enter the Reverend Lionel Foyster and his younger wife, Marianne.
Yes.
And that's a very strange relationship.
She's much younger than him.
And weirdly, they'd come from Canada where they were sort of working with missionaries, but they had met in England.
And he actually baptised her when she was a small girl.
So there's a very strange relationship between them.
And it's much more of a sort of father and daughter than a marriage, really.
And I think it's a sort of marriage of convenience.
And then, when they get there, she finds the environment around the rectory very dull, very boring.
There's no electricity, there's no cars, there's no phones.
And she does start having an affair with the lodger, which I think adds a bit of a frisson to the whole story.
Well, indeed, at one point in the book, not to put too fine a point on it, you say that some of the knockings and bangings attributed to paranormality were perhaps more human.
Yeah, I mean, things certainly did go bump in the night.
I mean, that's what happened in the rectory.
And I think that they use the stories of the activity to disguise what they're doing.
But interestingly, she, in her later years, she said, she only died in 1992, but in her later years, she said, you know, some things at the rectory were made up, but there were things that happened in that house that I still can't explain.
And I don't see any reason for her to lie when she was nearing the end of her life and there was no point in making it up anymore.
So though I'm a very intrigued sceptic about the activity there, I still find it interesting that many of the people who are actually there still claim that there was something weird about the house.
And you say that Marianne died in 1992, which is comparatively recently.
How did she describe the phenomena that presented itself, what she considered to be the genuine phenomena that presented itself there?
Well, interestingly, though she's the sort of the heroine at the center of the story in the 1930s, she never really writes about it, but her husband wrote a diary.
And the reason that I think one of the reasons we're talking about it now is that you've got a rector who's writing a contemporary diary saying exactly what happened in the house.
Almost, it's so detailed.
And Lionel clearly believed that all of these things were real.
And so he was writing them all down.
And so she never claims that there was activity there, but she comments on what he wrote.
But, you know, for instance, one of the things that's very distinctive about the case is this wall writing that took place there where her name was written scratched into the wall in a really sinister way.
And yes, these messages get more complex, don't they, as time goes by, and they seem to be exhorting her to do things.
Yes, and they sound like they're sort of desperate appeals from a soul in torment.
And it's apparently the ghost of a nun who had been in an affair with a local monk in the sort of 16th century.
And then the monk was executed and she was walled up in the walls in a convent.
So she was buried alive.
And that these appeals, these very Catholic appeals, are to Marianne to save her or save her soul, if you like.
This appeal from one dead woman to this charismatic woman at the centre of the story in the 1930s.
And it seems to be a very unusual way of ghosts attracting attention by scratching into the wall.
But what we do know is that Marianne came from Canada, that she'd been living in Amherst at some point.
And there is a famous case in the 1870s, the Great Amherst Mystery, which some of your viewers might know about, where there's also writing on the wall.
And, you know, one can only imagine that Marianne knew about that and repeats the activity in Borley 60 years later.
Sean O'Connor, we're talking about Borley Rectory.
I want to bring in the character of Harry Price.
Sean O'Connor, we're talking Borley Rectory, the most haunted building in the United Kingdom, they say.
Sean, I didn't ask you about that claim.
I mean, do you think that that stacks up?
So many people say the most haunted place in the United Kingdom, Borley Rectory.
Is that so, do you think?
Well, I think it's a really great advertising ploy.
And I think that Harry Price nicked it from Banachin House, which is the most haunted house in Scotland, which is established first.
And then I just thought he thought that was an amazing jingle, effectively, an amazing brand.
And then he claimed it and he nailed it.
And the reason that, you know, there's a long-running TV series called Most Haunted is because they nicked it from his title.
So it's clearly worked.
So whether it's the Most Haunted House in England or not, I'm not quite sure.
But certainly it is the longest haunting story.
As we said earlier, it takes place over about 80, 90 years.
So there's certainly evidence that it at least must be one of the most haunted houses in England, maybe.
You mentioned the nun and the story of the nun and the messages on the wall.
What else, as far as you're aware, happened on that site that might have imprinted itself on the building?
Well, there was supposed to be a story about Henry Dorsenball having had an affair with one of the servants and that one of the servants was pregnant by him and that this child was born dead and then buried somewhere on the rectory site.
And this is sort of like the inciting incident in the story.
And so somewhere on the site, there's believed to be this dead child.
And then Harry Price and his associates start to do seances where this child's whereabouts is identified and it might be in a well, under the rectory, under the rectory for all, in the cellar.
And once he's had a great success in 1940 with The Most Haunted House in England, he writes The End of Bolly Rectory, his follow-up, his Most Haunted House in England 2.
And in that, he's looking for a story.
And what he does is he creates a story about the death of this child and this nun.
And indeed, he finds some bones under the cellar and goes so far as to have those bones buried in a churchyard in the local area and conveniently has a photographer to record it for posterity as well.
Okay, let's set the scene for the entrance of Harry Price into this story.
And as we said, the most active period was Lionel Foyster and Marianne, much younger than him, and we got her background there.
This was an active period, the most active period.
Can you summarize the sorts of things that happened?
You know, the stories of things being thrown against the wall, you know, All sorts of stuff happened within that period.
Yeah, I mean, one of the most distinctive things and the most sort of atmospheric things, I think, is that the house bells in the house, there were 26 house bells, 26 rooms in the house, and 18 house bells, which they'd have a house board by the kitchen passage where the servants in the 1860s could see who was calling them.
And these would apparently ring at any time of day and night with no apparent human activity.
And so the Smiths had them all cut.
So there are no house bells left apart from the back door and the front door, but still the house bells rung.
So either this is ghosts calling, ringing them, or it's something much more mundane like rats gnawing the bell wires.
But it's one of the most distinctive bits of the haunting, which is the strange sort of ringing of the bells in strange times of night.
There'll also be the nun was seen on what's called the nun's walk outside the rectory, and she'd been seen there since the 1860s.
Didn't the maid observe the nun?
It wasn't one of the principals.
No, no, it was the maid who observed the nun.
And several people saw a ghostly coach with headless sourcemen.
And as you can see, these are all generic English spooky stories.
And every village in the country would have these strange stories about nuns and headless sourcemen in that period.
But didn't Marianne herself report something strange with lights on it, a carriage of some kind, spooky carriage pulling into the drive?
Mrs. Smith saw the coaches in the driveway.
And this seemed to relate to this story about this walled-up nun and the phantom coach in the 1860s.
So, but several people cited these strange things.
And in fact, next door to the rectory is the rectory cottage, which is the old stable building.
And the people that lived there, the coachman and his wife, they heard crockery crashing.
They thought there was a dog they heard in the room with them when they were sleeping at night.
They thought there was a sort of hound upstairs in the attic.
And so lots of people noted the same sorts of things over many years.
There's a lady called Mrs. Byford, who was a maid in the 1880s.
And when the story became a sensation in the 1920s, she wrote to the Daily Mirror and said, actually, it happened to me.
And I was waiting in my bed one night.
And I could hear this muffled sort of sound of footsteps in slippers, she remembers particularly well, which was outside her door.
And when she opened the door, of course, there's nothing there.
Enter Harry Price.
I think we have to bring him into this story.
We've kind of talked around who this man was.
I don't think there's anybody in the current era who would equate with him.
He was very much a product of that era, of the embryonic tabloid press.
As you said, that post-war and during the First World War interest in spiritualism, as they called it, and all things to do with spirits and ghosts and that sort of thing.
Harry Price, product of that era.
Talk to me about the man.
He's a really fascinating character, I think.
And I live in Southeast London, and he was born just up the road.
So he's a local lad for me.
And he's a very curious character.
He's very interested in lots of things.
He's interested in coins.
He's interested in book collecting.
He's interested in spirits.
He's interested in radio.
He's interested in cinema.
And he's got his finger in lots and lots of pies.
He's a very, very interesting guy.
But what he wasn't is he wasn't very, he was an ordinary working class lad.
And he was, at the time, the Society of Psychology Research, which was set up in 1882, was very much a patrician organisation, which was run by academics.
They weren't interested in engaging with the public through the press, and they were only interested in academic publications.
It was quite a sort of snooty organisation.
And this guy comes along after the First World War, really curious, really excited, really interested in this new science.
And it's as fascinating as electricity or as film is.
And it's all very new to him.
And of course, he engages with the tabloid press and he finds a very, very easy way of communicating with the public.
And I think he's fascinating because what he does, I mean, is he democratises psychical research at the time in a way that the Society for Psychical Research were not interested in.
So he is the sort of person that would want to tell the story, to get ordinary people to engage in it, to read his books, to read about psychical research in newspapers.
And maybe what happens is that his enthusiasm to make it a subject for the common mud to talk about in ordinary daily newspapers is more important to him than being absolutely accurate in the way that he reported it.
He had this thing called the National Laboratory for Psychical Research, which sounds very grand.
Yes.
It sounds very grand.
And he wanted it to sound grand.
And he was very keen to engage with it and to make, and he wanted to engage with the University of London and make it sound academic and patrician.
But actually, it was a very amateur organisation.
I mean, he was never paid for it in his daily life.
He was a paper salesman.
He sold paper for wrapping vegetables and for tea bags and that sort of thing.
That was how he made his money.
His role as a psychical researcher was an amateur job.
He was a sort of amateur guy going around on his weekends in his little car, going to haunted houses, writing stories about them, talking to the newspapers about them.
He was just a huge enthusiast.
He wasn't an academic.
He wasn't really a professional.
And I find that fascinating because he's driven by his own interest and his own enthusiasm.
And in that sense, I find him quite an endearing character.
Yeah, I mean, he was controversial.
And we'll get in a little while the story of how I think there was an attempt to expose him, an expose after his death, which I don't think saw the light of day, but there were people who spoke disparagingly of him later.
But, you know, let's not take away, as you say, the fact that he popularized all of this stuff in a way that other organizations didn't and couldn't.
I find the story of how the Daily Mirror picked up on Harry Price and contacted him interesting.
Apparently, somebody from the Daily Mirror was told by Harry Price's secretary that he was lunching at a friend's house, gave him the phone number, and that's how the mirror got involved in this story.
Yes, but actually, he was at work in his paper office is where he was.
And then he scurried on down the next day to Baldi.
But it's interesting that the guy who ran the Daily Mirror had the opportunity at the time to contact the Society for Psychical Research, which is the senior organisation at the time, but he didn't because he knew that they wouldn't be offering him a good story.
So what he did is he engaged with Price, who was offering a good story.
And he's a really journalist-friendly guy.
And what they wanted in the Denny Mirror at the time was a good story.
They weren't interested in a sort of scientific investigation.
And I think maybe the story's celebrity is bound in that moment, that the guy from the Deny Mirror decides to engage with a sort of commercially friendly ghost hunter rather than the patrician organization, which perhaps he would have done if it was going to be a proper investigation.
What was the coverage, the newspaper coverage, like?
I researched the Enfield Poltergeist case, and the Daily Mail was heavily involved in that.
A lot of photographs of people in mid-air and all sorts of things to do with that.
But how did the Daily Mirror handle this?
Well, the mirror had been down there on the Sunday before Price arrived, and then it was in every day for a week.
Not on the front page, on about page three.
And they covered it quite fully with photographs, for instance.
And then local newspapers and the national newspapers picked it up, and then they continued to talk about it.
And then because Price talked about it, it became a bigger story.
And then when the Smiths moved out and then the Voices moved in, again, it became a big media story.
And then Price would lecture about it.
And then he started writing pamphlets about it.
He wrote an article for an American Psychical Organization magazine as well.
So it became an international story.
And then I think he recognised that he had an amazing story in his hands.
He's got this extraordinary looking house, which is cold and grafty and strange and in an isolated area.
He's got a rector who's been haunted.
He's got a rector who's written his own ghost book.
So it sort of turns itself into this sort of absolutely unput-downable story, which has got everything.
It's got a sexy hero in it.
It's got this strange house.
And then he turns it into this extraordinary book, which becomes a huge bestseller in 1940, which is called The Most Haunted House in England.
It's a gift that keeps on giving, isn't it?
Really?
But one of the, as we see today, but it's interesting to see it in that era.
Publicity is a double-edged sword, because with publicity comes notoriety.
And at one point, and this was the point, people were reading the Daily Mirror and getting on down there to go and see this place.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's fascinating that as soon as the articles in the mirror arrived, then hundreds of people went down there.
They went down there on foot, on bicycles, in sharabans.
They took children.
They put musical instruments down there, lots to drink.
And then overnight, they absolutely trashed the place.
They trashed the lawn.
They threw bottles at the house.
They had to get the police outside.
And of course, the local people just wanted to see the ghosts.
And so the story just got bigger and bigger and bigger and absolutely uncontrollable.
So however the story started, whether there's the essence of truth in it or whether it's been exaggerated by some of the people involved in it, it becomes a story that they can't control anymore.
And in fact, the story of the house rather than the truth of the house becomes a thing that drives it and drives it and drives it.
And those people who went there, who got intimately involved with the house, they had their parties, they had a few drinks there on the lawn, they trashed the place.
Did any of them have experiences?
As far as you know?
No, I don't think they did.
I think most of them were local people, so they'd heard stories about it and they were scared apparently about going past the house, even though they used it for mothers' meetings and such like and local meetings.
But I think they were curious.
They were curious about it.
They didn't actually experience anything.
And in fact, I think they became quite frustrated that they didn't see anything.
And they went there to see the ghost and have a party, the ghost to drive.
And it's interesting, there's another case in the 30s that Price takes part in called, it's not the podcast of the Battersea Poltergeist, but it also takes place in Battersea.
And exactly the same thing happens where a local family say that they're being haunted.
And then the local people go there from Battersea and start throwing things.
They're very, very intemperate.
They want there to be a ghost.
They want there to be a spook.
It doesn't arrive.
So of course, what they do is they start trashing the place and smashing the windows and getting very frustrated and drinking more.
Oh dear.
And of course, in situations like that, we're not necessarily saying this one, but in situations like that, Sean, sometimes people involved with investigating it or publicising it will want to put things there in order to satisfy those people who are going down to satisfy their curiosity.
I think there's a lot of truth in that.
And I think that Price, for instance, wanted to popularize psychical research as a popular science and an entertainment.
He was very keen for it to be adopted as a proper area of study for the University of London, but he also wanted to write books about it and he wanted ordinary people to get involved in it.
And so he wanted there to be things for people to see, things for people to witness.
And so he's not averse to giving them a hand.
That's what I think.
Ultimately, he helps the ghosts along.
I mean, if the ghosts don't turn up on time to order, then he'll find a way of making it happen.
Sean O'Connor has written a book about it that was published this week with a lot of detail about the case, including the involvement of Harry Price.
And can we just be clear about this, Sean?
Harry Price started to be involved in this, didn't he, when the Foysters were there, Lionel and his younger wife, Mary Ann?
That was when he came in.
No, he started with the Smiths, actually.
So he was right there from the beginning in 1929, and he carried on being Involved with the case until the rectory burned down in 1940 and then he continued to write about it until he died in 1948.
One story that I think we should tell here, the morning of the 25th of February, Mary Ann Foyster was in the kitchen making breakfast and had put the kettle on the range to boil water for tea.
She prepared the cups and saucers as usual.
As the kettle was boiling, she couldn't find the teapot.
It wasn't where she usually left it.
She looked everywhere in the cupboards, in the scullery.
It was nowhere to be found.
There was a period where kitchen requisites, if that's the word, disappeared and then were put back.
Yes, and they'd lose domestic articles all the time and things would turn up.
And also bricks would be thrown in the house or they would be trying to sit down and there'd be pins underneath the seating that they sat on.
So it looked like that the house itself was trying to damage them, to trip them up, to attack them, to throw stones at them, to throw pins at them.
At one point there's pepper thrown in her face and she also begins to see visions of this, of a former rector.
So it seems that when they move in, that the activity in the house gets worse and worse and worse.
And for a while, it seems to be just Marianne and then her husband that are being attacked.
And then gradually it becomes the children as well because they have an adopted child.
So it seems to become more and more and more dangerous.
And that's when Lionel Foyster decides that they should have an exorcism of the house, which is what they try.
And Harry Price was involved in that?
He wasn't involved in the exorcism, but he comes along later on because actually he was invited by the Foysters to come and look at the house.
And when he got there, he decided that Marianne was responsible for the haunting and he was very, very clear it must be her.
And then Lionel Foyster is so appalled by that, he banishes Price from the house for a few years and Price is off the scene.
And then later on, Price is invited back to the rectory to investigate again.
And again, he believes that Marianne is responsible for the haunting.
Gee.
And you say that at the point they discussed exorcism, Harry Price not being involved, at that point, just from the very discussion of doing this potentially, things got worse.
Yeah, it's curious that they, because they're Anglican rectors and they're not supposed to be doing exorcisms.
It's not part of the Anglican religion and has been banned since the Reformation.
But Lionel's so desperate to do something that he gets an Anglo-Catholic to come and help him exercise the property.
And they do so.
But it doesn't seem to have any effect at all.
It just makes it worse.
And the noise and the banging of the stone throw it's just worse.
And in the end, I think they are so desperate that they take any help that they can get.
And they're offered some help by some local mediums.
And then finally, they're offered help by Price himself.
They were offered help by, and this is extraordinary, a man called George Warren, 79 years of age, the local postmaster and would-be exorcist, you describe him as.
Yeah, they're a curious couple, the Warrens, and they come and they claim that they've exorcised lots of local ghosts from the area.
And they send a letter to Lionel Foyster and say, we can help you.
Marianne's not very keen because she feels that people don't believe what she's saying.
And she's been very anxious and very irritated by people's interest in what's going on there because they think it's her.
And then finally, Lionel allows them to come to investigate and to hold a sourance there.
And that's the first of a couple of seances that take place at the rectory.
That one is not so successful.
But the second seance that takes place seems to clear the rectory of the ghosts.
And the foisters remain at the rectory for another four years with no apparent activity.
So it seems that this second seance does actually clean the house of the ghosts.
Was this the séance with the wonderfully named Guy Lestrange?
Yes, it was.
He's an extraordinary character.
And they actually, he actually speaks in the nun's voice.
The nun actually comes and is summoned to the séance and he speaks in her words.
And he talks to her about her being locked up in anured in the walls as she sort of starves to death.
And having communicated with her, it seems that they've resurrected her in order for her to depart properly.
And then the rector is very, very quiet from that point onwards.
So it seems to have worked.
But it was all singing, all dancing.
I mean, he was promising, this is the first mention of it, I think, ectoplasm, which is, for those who do not know, this kind of cotton wool, smoky stuff that appears to exude from the medium.
Yeah, I mean, actually, when he talks in the nun's voice, it's very touching because she talks about being walled up in this, in this, and you're in a wall and starving to death and not having anything to drink.
And it is quite touching when you read what the transcripts for this seance were.
And at the very least, he had a very, very vivid and fertile and quite touching imagination, I think.
Re-enter Harry Price.
He took out an advertisement at one point of all things in the personal columns.
His intention was to invite dozens of independent observers to stay at the rectory and document their experiences.
He didn't want professional psychics.
When and how did that happen?
Well, that takes place in 1937.
And as you will know, the personal columns of the Times used to be on the front page.
So it's very, very obvious where it was.
And he wanted to take over the house for a year, move all of his colleagues in there to record what might happen for a whole year.
And he gives them a list of things they might expect to see.
And they have to write down what's happened to them.
And it seems to be a very scientific investigation.
But actually, there's no logbook.
Nobody keeps any notes.
It's all a bit vague.
People don't take, you know, they take photographs, but then they take the wrong photographs and they paper the notes, but the wrong notes.
There's a cat in there.
The doors are left open.
The place isn't secured at all for this whole year.
And Price effectively collects lots of stories of people feeling scared or hearing funny noises or having funny feelings.
And then they record all of this stuff.
And then he uses that in his book.
So it's almost like he was looking to get other people to verify that the house was haunted so that he could use their testimony in his book, which then makes his book looks like it's a proper investigative, serious academic publication, when in fact it's a sort of entertainment, which has the appearance of being truthful, whereas in fact, it's a sort of fantasy.
And how was all of this going down with the Society for Psychical Research?
They absolutely despised him because it was making him famous and it wasn't making him rich, but certainly this ordinary working class lad from Southeast London with a funny accent and funny staring eyes had cornered the market in ghost stories.
And the Society for Psychical Research, I think, were a bit put out about this, that he basically he made their area of study his area of commercial interest.
And they slightly despised his behavior, his attitude, his methods, and I think his celebrity.
You know, he's a sort of Derek Akora of his day.
And he was getting all of the adulation and the funding as well, actually.
So they didn't like this upstart who had, you know, he created his own organization.
He was a force of record with.
He was talking internationally, to international magazines about this story.
And it was all very personal.
Harry Price was famous.
He was the most famous ghost hunter of his day in the world.
You know, this is a guy with no academic qualifications, no experience, no money, a self-made man who makes this area of study his particular thing.
Whenever there was a ghost story mentioned in the newspapers, they'd ring Harry Price.
They wouldn't ring the Society of Psychical Research at all, and they didn't like it.
What was the most evidential thing that he came up with in all of his years of research?
Oh, that's a question.
There's a...
There's a controversial haunting called the Rosalie Haunting in London, which he absolutely believed was true.
And he certainly believed it was true, and he put a lot of thought and effort into trying to prove that it was.
But I think that many people think that he wanted it to be more true than it actually was.
So with the Borley Rectory case then, how would you summarize Harry Price's conclusions on that case?
Clearly, he was a man who was not a pushover at the beginning, didn't think that for a while Marianne's experiences were legitimate or what they appeared to be.
So he was a guy who was not, it seems, a starry-eyed convert believer.
But how did he summarize it?
Did he say, here is a place where paranormal activity definitely happened and we think it's haunted?
Well, his attitude to whether it was haunted or not changes over time.
And he sometimes changes his mind and sometimes tells half-truths.
I think what happens for him personally is that he decides that it's his legacy and that ultimately he wants to be remembered on the planet for one thing and that Bawley is the thing he wants to be remembered for.
And he is.
So he sort of got what he wanted.
And I think that he was so enthusiastic about his area of study, his area of interest.
He wanted other people to be interested in it too.
He wanted to share it.
And I think he didn't mind whether he told half-truths to get there.
So there's a very interesting bit in his, I mean, what's interesting, if you go to the University of London, all of his materials are available for study and always has been.
He didn't hide anything.
And when Cindy Glanville says, you know, you can't put this incident in your book because it's not really true.
And Price says, it doesn't matter.
It makes a great chapter.
And for him, it's a classical journalist for you.
But for him, he was more interested in the story than the truth of the story.
So it's one of those let not the facts stand in the way of a good story.
Oh, absolutely.
You know, we're in an era, we're in a post-truth era where stories are retweeted or whatever, and we don't know what the truth is anymore or who to believe.
And Harry Price sort of anticipates this world that we're living in, which ultimately the story has more power, more commercial fire than the truth.
And that, interestingly, like with anything as well and lots of hauntings, the story becomes so big that that's more attractive than the truth, the journal of truth that might have inspired the story in the first place.
The rectory burned down, didn't it, in 1939, wasn't it?
Yeah, yeah.
And there's nothing on that site at the moment, is there?
People still report from what I hear that it's a strange place, that people get weird feelings there.
There are some bungalows, some smart bungalows built in the 60s and 70s there, so there's nothing to see at the site anymore.
And it's an isolated place.
It's quite lonely and it's windy.
There's a church there and a churchyard.
And I think if you go up there expecting to see ghosts and wanting to see ghosts, you'll see what you expect to see and have funny feelings, I think.
Because people don't want to come away disappointed.
But I don't think there are ghosts there.
I think that maybe strange things might have happened in the past, but the rectory isn't there anymore, so there's no haunted house in the village anymore.
As ever, your thoughts welcome on any of my podcasts and anything that I do.
Go to the website theunexplained.tv.
You can follow the link and send me an email from there.
Tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show, all of that stuff.
Thank you very much.
More guests.
Great ones in the pipeline coming up here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This is me and the Unexplained online.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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