By Jane Talbott-Stone

Often remembered as the most haunted house ever, Borley Rectory celebrated the 68th anniversary of its own death this year. In 1939, this beautiful, but thoroughly frightening red brick home burned to the ground after a ghost identified as "Sunex Amures" claimed he would set fire to the building on the night of March 27, 1938. He apparently waited until February before starting the fire, when it was claimed that an oil lamp inexplicably fell over and torched the place. As it was burning, someone watching the spectacle claimed to see the figure of a nun in one of the upper windows of the fire-engulfed rectory. An investigation by the insurance company, however, concluded that the fire was intentionally set. Unfortunately, it didn't elaborate on just who set the fire.

Borley seems to have been haunted from the beginning. Built in 1863, stories immediately surfaced of people hearing unexplainable footsteps coming from upstairs. Presumably, something about the ground itself was causing the hauntings. After the fire, excavations under the rectory did turn up a few human bones, and a female skull was also supposedly found in the rectory hidden in a paper bag. Unfortunately, Borley Rectory is also tainted with claims that the investigations done there were questionable, particularly in the case of that done by the somewhat discredited paranormalist Harry Price. Further, legends about the ghostly nun's history appear to have been completely fabricated by the daughters of one of the early residents.

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Nevertheless, some accounts from the rectory appear to be more valid. Given its position as a residence for clerics, the rectory's residents were not particular prone to lying. Four episcopal clerics lived in the building, and all seemingly reported profound paranormal events. The last to live there was the Reverend Lionel Foyster, who reported ghostly ringing bells, windows shattering, wall writing, and attacks on their young daughter. This culminated in Foyster performing two exorcisms on the building, but to no avail.

Borley Rectory is an unfortunate haunting. Given the massive publicity it recieved at the time, and indeed continues to see, the conditions were right for exaggeration. The involvement of Price did nothing for the credibility of the haunting, and more or less anything he wrote about the subject must be taken with extreme suspicion. But even without Price's work, multiple firsthand accounts exist that show that the building probably was intensely haunted, but none of that can now be investigated as the rectory no longer exists. Little evidence now remains of Borley, the site lies in a vacant field surrounded by modern homes, though one building that was linked to the rectory still stands in a somewhat altered form. The church itself is nearby, and is said by some to have taken over as the focus of the haunting after the rectory burned.

Borley Rectory remains shrouded in mystery, obscured by questionable accounts and discredited paranormalists. Regardless of your conclusions on the haunting, it remains one of the greatest of all haunted houses, and to this day, reading about it makes for one hell of a good ghost story.

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