The truth about ‘the most haunted house in England’

Place and story are little remembered now. The rectory in Essex was severely damaged by fire in 1939. But any old house with an unpleasant atmosphere, especially isolated, damp, dark and unmodernised, was once described as ‘like Borley Rectory’.

Judging by this long ‘story of a ghost story’, the place showed its true nature from the beginning. Many of the incumbent rectors, their families, servants and guests heard and felt ghosts, always malevolent. Crockery flew about and hit people; candlesticks tumbled down stairs; there were whisperings, cries, thumps and bumps. The usual.

Well, odd things do happen in old houses. I have entered rooms which I was immediately desperate to leave. When rumours abound, especially in remote rural places, visitors are primed to expect a haunting; but I have even felt uncomfortable when viewing an anonymous house for sale.

There are still plenty of people who believe in ghosts – cloudy, bodiless phantoms, glimpsed, usually by just one person, before they vanish. Borley Rectory produced headless coachmen and nuns, darkly dressed. Nobody much sees such apparitions now. Ghosts change with the times.

One of Borley’s least explicable disturbances was the ringing of the house bells which summoned servants to various rooms, not only when nobody would admit having pulled them but when the wires operating the old-fashioned intercom system had been disabled. And what about objects taking off across rooms in plain sight, or pictures hung on strong cord suddenly crashing down?

Poltergeist activity has long been linked to hysteria – inevitably, as the word implies, of female origin. And teenagers with raging hormones and confused psyches have been blamed for somehow acquiring the ability to propel objects, lift carpets and even make beds fly.