The rectory was built in 1862 for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, on a site local tradition already associated with a ruined monastery and an unhappy nun. The Bull family reported disturbances from the outset: footsteps, a phantom coach, and, most persistently, the figure of a nun seen walking a path along the garden that became known as "the Nun's Walk." None of this reached a national audience until 1929, when a new incumbent's wife wrote to the Daily Mirror describing fresh phenomena. The paper sent a reporter, accompanied by Harry Price, a psychical researcher with a genuine talent for self-publicity.
Price's tenancy of the case over the following decade produced the bulk of what is now called evidence: thrown stones, bell-ringing, and, after the Bull family's departure, a long campaign of automatic writing and message-tapping conducted with tenant Marianne Foyster, whose own domestic circumstances were at least as strange as anything attributed to the rectory. Price rented the empty building himself in 1937 and ran a year-long observation using a team of amateur volunteers recruited by newspaper advertisement, publishing the results as The Most Haunted House in England (1940). The rectory burned down the following year and was demolished in 1944. Price's second book, The End of Borley Rectory (1946), covered the fire and a supposed final excavation of human remains in the cellars.
The case did not survive scrutiny. Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall's 1956 report for the Society for Psychical Research, The Haunting of Borley Rectory: A Critical Survey of the Evidence, went through Price's records in detail and concluded that a significant share of the phenomena had been fabricated, very likely by Price himself, and that much of the rest could be explained by the ordinary strangeness of the Bull and Foyster households. The reassessment ended Borley's claim to serious study, though not its fame. It remains the most written-about single haunting in England, still cited today as a case study in credulity and confirmation bias as often as it is offered as evidence of anything supernatural.
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