Borley Rectory
Borley Rectory (Borley rectory) was a late Victorian mansion in Borley, a town on the River Stour, on the border of Essex and Suffolk . It was considered "England's most haunted house" until it was destroyed by fire in 1939. The alleged decades-long haunted house was made famous in the 1930s by the controversial parapsychologist Harry Price , who was later suspected of having staged many of the poltergeist phenomena in the house himself. The area of the former rectory still has a local color for self-proclaimed ghost hunters , esotericists and para-scientists.
history
The dark, brick building in nested Pugin style with 23 rooms in 1863 on behalf of the pastor allegedly built Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull on the foundations of an old monk monastery. The area, surrounded by tall trees, has been considered an ominous place by the residents for centuries, where, according to legend, a monk had a forbidden love affair with a nun from the neighboring monastery in the 14th century. The tragic couple was then sentenced to death. According to various traditions, the monk was either beheaded or hanged and the nun was walled up alive in the cellar vault of the monastery. The nun's ghost is said to have appeared near her grave in order to wander back and forth between the two monasteries on the so-called "nun's path". There were also frequent sightings of a ghost carriage and the unsettling appearance of a headless man in the Borley area.
When the parish was established on the Nuns Path, these apparitions are said to have increased. The Reverend Bull and his family of 15 soon reported a wide variety of mysterious incidents. In the evening, the residents are said to have been observed through a window by a "sad-looking ghost nun", whereupon the exasperated Reverend had the window walled up. After that, the mysterious processes in the house worsened dramatically: objects are said to have been thrown through the rooms by invisible hands, knocking and scraping noises of unknown origin were reported, and bells were sometimes inexplicably rung. Two of the Reverend's daughters told of a shadowy figure they believed they had seen in the garden of the rectory on the nuns path. A daughter is said to have been awakened roughly by a slap in the face; Another claimed to have made out the figure of a dark man with a large hat next to her bed at night.
When Henry Bull died in 1892, his son Harry succeeded his father. The strange activity in the house continued, however, so that the servants soon refused to enter the property. In addition, the horror story, enriched with superstition , has been embellished with ever greater detail over time. After all, the rectory had such a bad reputation that after Reverend Harry Bull's death in 1927, twelve clergymen refused to take over the pastor's office.
In 1928 the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife moved into the house. Although the couple were skeptical of the ghost, they too soon encountered strange things. Just one day after moving in, Mrs. Smith discovered a woman's skull wrapped in brown wrapping paper in a cupboard. The Smiths also reported of a dark horse-drawn carriage that drove around the house at night, of light in the windows, inexplicable footsteps in empty rooms and the ringing of the servants' bell, although it was broken. The troubled couple eventually turned to the Daily Mirror with the strange story . The newspaper sent a reporter to Borley in June 1929, who then published a series of articles about the mysterious rectory.
A case for Harry Price
Eventually the self-proclaimed ghost hunter Harry Price became aware of the case that would make him famous. Price visited the haunted house for the first time on June 12, 1929. As soon as it arrived, the ghost took on the quality of a loud poltergeist : There was knocking noises, keys fell out of the keyholes, stones and other objects, such as a vase, were thrown across the room and a window pane broke. As Price left the property, the haunted end came abruptly. In the weeks that followed, Price made several visits to Borley Rectory, and each time similar phenomena occurred. Finally the Smiths moved out, exasperated. Mrs. Smith later suspected Harry Price of staging the supposed poltergeist. He was succeeded by the pastor Lionel Algernon Foyster, a relative of the original owner. Foyster moved into the rectory in October 1930 with his wife Marianne and adopted daughter Adelaide. As soon as the Foysters moved in, the ghost began again, the doorbell started again, bottles were thrown, objects moved or mysteriously disappeared only to reappear elsewhere, and the daughter Adelaide is said to have been threatened by "something terrible". Reverend Foyster then carried out two exorcisms that were unsuccessful. When trying to drive out the spirits, he was hit by a stone. Finally the Foysters turned to Harry Price with the new incidents, who immediately paid their respects. The ghost was now evidently focused on Marianne Foyster. She described that she had been hit in the face by an invisible force and thrown out of her bed at night. Price was particularly interested in the messages to Marianne, scrawled on a wall, in which the alleged ghost pleaded with her for help. The correspondence was documented with photographs.
In the meantime, other para-scientists had become aware of the Borley ghost and they all came to the conclusion that the ghost was consciously or unconsciously created by Marianne Foyster. Marianne Foyster said she had temporarily suspected her own husband of creating the ghost in collaboration with one of the para-scientists. She later admitted to creating some phenomena herself to distract from her love affair with a lodger. With Lionel Foyster's death, Marianne moved out and the Borley house stood empty.
In May 1937 Harry Price rented the rectory. With an advertisement in the Times he went in search of "responsible people with leisure and intelligence, fearless, critical and impartial" to spend time as observers in the Borley rectory and record supernatural occurrences. Price put together a team of 40 people, mostly students, from over two hundred applicants. An Oxford student wanted to see objects move around the house. A BBC employee was hit in the head by a bar of soap in a locked room, and another observer saw the room temperature drop several degrees for no plausible reason. All people unanimously reported inexplicable noises in the house.
In March 1938, Helen Glanville, the daughter of one of Harry Price's employees, held a séance with a planchette , at which two ghosts are said to have reported. The first ghost was that of a young French nun who called herself "Marie Lairre". Marie Lairre came from a convent near Le Havre and was to be married to a forest count in Borley. He strangled her in 1667 on the site of what would later become the parsonage and buried her corpse in what would later be the cellar of the house. Some messages from the séance also agreed with the earlier statements of the Bull daughters. Price eventually identified Marie Lairre as the ghost who has wandered the Borley property for centuries and who is believed to have scrawled the ominous cries for help on the wall.
The second ghost is said to have identified himself as "Sunex Amures" and announced that he would set the Borley rectory on fire at 9 o'clock that evening and that the bones of a murdered person would be exposed. However, the Sunex Amures prophecy did not come true that evening, March 27, 1938, but only a year later, on March 27, 1939. That evening the new tenant of the parsonage, a Captain WH Gregson, was busy putting books on a shelf, a kerosene lamp tipping over and setting the entire building on fire. The house burned to the ground that night. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen ghostly figures in the flames. Captain Gregson was later charged with arson. In 1943 Harry Price undertook some excavations in the basement of the house during which he found the suspected bones of a young woman, as well as a medal depicting Saint Ignatius. Further excavations did not reveal anything further. In the hope that the spirit would finally find rest, the bones were buried in a Christian ceremony in the neighboring village of Liston after the pastor in Borley refused - and to follow local opinion - that the find was only about Pork bones.
Haunted or deceived, aftermath
Harry Price died in 1948. After his death, his reputation was seriously damaged when three members of the London Society for Psychical Research (SPR), former loyal assistants to Price, reopened the Borley case. In their so-called Borley Report , they noticed inconsistencies in Price's records and concluded that most of the “ paranormal happenings” in Borley were either faked or caused by natural things such as rats, and that the strange noises were specific Acoustics of the house. Price's credibility in particular was questioned by the researchers, quoting the Daily Mail reporter Charles Sutton, who accused Price of fraud after his death: “A lot happened that night I was with Harry Price and one of his colleagues on the famous Borley Rectory. So a large pebble hit me on the head. After a number of noisy 'phenomena' I packed Harry and found his bag full of blocks and pebbles [...] after a conversation with a lawyer my article was deleted. "
The Life -Reporterin Cynthia Ledsham told of a photo shoot in Borley in 1944 when it became the rectory just demolished. The photographer took a picture of a brick that appeared to be flying through the air. Price announced that this was "the first photo of a Poltergeist bullet ever taken". It later emerged that the flying brick was merely thrown by a construction worker who was busy with the demolition. After closer research, the parish was not at all on the remains of a former monastery, even the ghosting nun was played by one of the maids. It was also found that the Foysters had previously lived in Amherst , Nova Scotia , a place made famous in the 19th century for a well-documented poltergeist phenomenon that has striking parallels to the Borley case. Even the ghost doodles on the walls were probably made by three-year-old daughter Adelaide. In his 1948 book Search for Harry Price , the author Trevor Hall described the ghost hunter as a "publication-addicted charlatan and unscrupulous liar".
In summary, SPR members found no clear evidence of any paranormal activity in Borley. They published their research results in 1956 in the book The Haunting of Borley Rectory , whereupon Robert Hastings, another member of the SPR, again doubted the report, but without arriving at a satisfactory result himself. The dispute over the authenticity of the Borley case occupied the SPR until the 1980s. Ultimately, the Society concluded that probably not a word Harry Price had ever written about the Borley Parsonage was true.
"The Widow of Borley"
The life of Marianne Foyster, born Mary Anne Shaw in 1899, was accompanied by numerous dubious circumstances. In 1933 she gave birth to a boy named John, who died just four and a half months after he was born. The child probably came from the lodger with whom she had an affair. She passed the boy off as the son of the elderly Reverend. She later adopted other children. Presumably from financial hardship, she saved herself over the years in several marriages with much older, sometimes mentally unstable men, to whom she faked pregnancies in order to attain marriage vows. She led suspected double marriages , which were not clearly proven to her, forged her own papers and "rejuvenated" herself by 10 years. In the course of time, she received the dubious reputation of the relevant press as the "widow of Borley". With the appearance of Harry Price's first book on the Borley case, in which Marianne Foyster is described as a "talented medium ", she moved away from England, presumably for fear of being exposed as a fraud. In 1945 she married the US Air Force pilot Robert O'Neil, with whom she moved to Minnesota in 1946 . There she worked as a teacher for some time. The couple adopted another child. In 1958 she divorced O'Neil and went back to England. There, the parapsychologist Trevor Hall, who was still involved in the Borley case, became aware of Marianne Foyster (O'Neil) and her dubious résumé. With the help of a private detective, he tried to put Marianne under pressure and to blame her for the Borley phenomena and the death of the Reverend Foyster. However, she managed to refute all allegations. Soon afterwards she left England for good and spent the following years in Fargo, America . In 1963 she moved to La Crosse , Wisconsin , where she was a highly regarded social worker until the 1980s. Marianne Shaw Foyster (or d'Arles, Fisher, von Kiergraff, Monk or O'Neil - depending on the husband) died in December 1992 without ever having given a plausible explanation about her role in the Borley case. The author Robert Wood, who interviewed her, dedicated her biography The Widow of Borley , published in 1992 , in which he endeavored to "portray her person as objectively as possible".
literature
- Harry Price: The End of Borley Rectory . Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1946; Reprinted by Read Press, 2006, ISBN 1-4067-2212-X
- Harry Price: The Most Haunted House in England ; Reprinted in Time Life Books, 2003, ISBN 0-8094-8058-1
- Richard Morris: Harry Price - The Psychic Detective . Sutton Publishing, 2007, ISBN 0-7509-4271-1
- Paul Adams, Peter Underwood, Eddie Brazil: The Borley Rectory Companion - The Complete Guide to 'The Most Haunted House in England' . The History Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0-7509-5067-1
- Robert Wood: The Widow of Borley . Gerald Duckworth & Co, London 1992, ISBN 0-7156-2419-9
Web links
- Borley Rectory Gallery (English)
- HarryPrice.co.uk - website dedicated to ghost hunter Harry Price
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Carol Alway et al .: Incredible but true . Das Beste, Stuttgart 1976, ISBN 3-87070-097-1 , pp. 426-427
- ↑ a b c The world of the inexplicable - of ghosts and ghosts . Moewig, Rastatt 1995, ISBN 3-8118-7321-0 ; Pp. 36-37
- ^ Robert Wood: The Widow of Borley , 1992; see. Marianne Foyster - The Dark Lady of Borley Rectory ( Memento from July 12, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
Illustrations
- ↑ Mysterious ghost figure in the garden of the parish in the English language Wikipedia; Photography from the 1930s
- ^ Alleged ghost messages to Marianne Foyster. Connecticut Paranormal Research Society, accessed October 31, 2009 .
- ↑ Borley Rectory shortly after the fire, 1938. (No longer available online.) In: Borley Rectory Pictures. The Foxearth and District Local History Society, archived from the original on September 26, 2010 ; accessed on October 31, 2009 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The ominous "flying brick". In: Borley Rectory Pictures. The Foxearth and District Local History Society, accessed October 31, 2009 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 3 '17.3 " N , 0 ° 41' 38.1" E