When a Victorian ghost hunter investigated Britain’s most haunted house, this is what he found
Showman and psychic researcher Harry Price turned Borley Rectory into a national sensation, and its infamy as a haunted house hasn’t gone away
Borley Rectory was a large, red-brick house that stood in rural Essex. It was draughty and unkempt, and the subject of many local rumours.
Nearby villagers referred to strange, ghostly figures that stalked its grounds, and spectral messages scrawled on the walls. By the 1930s it had earned a reputation as one of the most haunted houses in England.
Harry Price, a self-styled ghost hunter with an eye for publicity, made it his mission to study the building, and uncover the source of its supposed mysteries. The ensuing investigation would make him a national celebrity, while adding a new dimension to the British obsession with the paranormal.
“There are ghosts in every culture, throughout history,” says author and Aberystwyth University academic Alice Vernon, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast. “They’re all differently defined and manifest in different ways. But my definition of a ghost is that it’s a lingering echo of something that was once alive.”
For Price, a man born in the tail end of the Victorian-era with plenty of wealth (and time to spare), those echoes presented themselves as opportunities for him to take the spotlight, and his inquiry into Borley Rectory became the defining ghost story of modern Britain.
The Victorian age of ghosts
Victorian Britain, for all its industrial progress, was also a place with a burgeoning interest in the supernatural. After the carnage of the First World War, the fascination intensified. Families who had lost sons and husbands in the trenches turned to spiritualism in grief, hoping for proof that death might not be the end. That was the context in which Harry Price plied his trade.
“Harry Price was a ghost hunter and psychical researcher,” explains Vernon. “He had a lot of money and wasn’t sure what to do with it, but he found that ghost-hunting could get him a lot of publicity – and he loved publicity. He was very active in the 1920s and 1930s and made a lot of enemies along the way.”
Enter Borley Rectory
The defining moment of Price’s career arrived in 1929, when he investigated Borley Rectory: a former clergy house in rural Essex that was supposedly haunted by the ghost of a nun.
The haunting, reported in the tabloids, caught Price’s attention. After contacting the owners, he took up residence inside the rectory and declared it to be a ‘psychic laboratory’.
“He started this quite militaristic operation to try and find evidence of ghosts,” explains Vernon. “He wrote to The Times and posted an advert asking for observers who would be willing to stay at the rectory and hold vigils. There was just one mangy camp bed; he didn’t want his observers to have any comfort or sleep.”
Volunteers soon arrived to serve their shifts and began recording every creak, knock and cold draft. And, just as Price had hoped, it didn’t take long for the building to start ‘performing’.
“All sorts of phenomena happened,” says Vernon. “There was a window that smashed as if somebody was standing in the room and knocked the glass outwards. Mysterious writing appeared on the walls. A gold ring turned up from nowhere. The case really gained Price notoriety.”
Price catalogued the incidents, published his findings and filled lecture halls with audiences eager for tales of a haunted England. His account of the ‘nun’s ghost’ (supposedly a murdered woman who had been bricked up alive for breaking her vow of chastity) became central to the story, despite no record of any convent being found at the site.
Still, the legend spread faster than the refutations, assisted by tabloids that gave Price’s stories the front-page treatment.
When science collided with scandal
However, many ghost hunters distrusted Price – not least members of the long-running Society for Psychical Research (SPR), which sought to submit supernatural claims to scientific scrutiny.
Price’s critics within the society accused him of sensationalism and sloppy methods, while others suggested that he might have staged the incidents to guarantee results. And, before long, the people closest to Price began turning against him, too.
“He had a secretary called Mollie Goldney,” explains Vernon. “She had a very real love-hate relationship with him. She would work for Price, but sometimes went behind his back. And she was best friends with another ghost hunter called Eric Dingwall, who hated Price.”
After Price’s death in 1948, Goldney and Dingwall published The Haunting of Borley Rectory: A Critical Survey of the Evidence.
The book was an “exposé of all the fraudulent evidence that Harry Price had created, and it generally revealed the terrible way he had conducted the investigation,” Vernon says. “Harry Price had gained a lot of notoriety from it, but eight years after his death, Mollie Goldney wanted her final say to discredit the investigation.”
Their book accused him of planting objects, manipulating witnesses and faking phenomena. But Price’s reputation withstood the attacks.
“It arguably wasn’t successful,” says Vernon. “When you think of Borley Rectory, you think of Harry Price and the investigation, not the way it was discredited.”
And Price’s name became shorthand for the professional ghost hunter: sceptical enough to sound credible, but theatrical enough to engross the popular imagination.
Meanwhile, Borley Rectory and the brand of paranormal investigation that Price deployed continue to have enormous influence.
Shirley Jackson, author of the 1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, was deeply inspired by Price’s tales, using many elements from his reports within her story’s plot.
Whatever foul play he might have deployed at Borley Rectory, Price remains one of the most famous ghost hunters in history – and it doesn’t seem like he’ll be forgotten any time soon.
Alice Vernon was speaking to Jon Bauckham on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
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Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra where he writes, researches, and edits articles, while also conducting the occasional interview