The Rectory That Should Never Have Been Built
Borley, Essex. A lonely lane, a church, and a big ugly red-brick rectory built in 1863 right on top of the ruins of a 13th-century monastery. The locals always said the ground was bad. They told stories of a Benedictine monk and a beautiful novice nun who tried to elope in 1362. The monk was beheaded, the nun was bricked up alive in the cellar of the monastery.
After that, a headless monk and a weeping nun in a grey habit were seen walking the lane that would one day be called “the Nun’s Walk.” Sixty-six years later, in 1929, the Reverend Guy Eric Smith and his wife Mabel moved in with their three little girls. They only lasted eleven months before fleeing the house.
The Bells That Rang Themselves
The first night they heard footsteps overhead. Then the servant bells in the kitchen, old Victorian pull-bells long disconnected, began to ring violently at 3 a.m. Every night. Footsteps paced the corridor. Doors slammed. Lights turned on and off. A woman’s voice whispered “Don’t, Carlo, don’t…” in empty rooms.
Then the objects started moving. Keys vanished from locks and turned up weeks later in the coal scullery. A child’s toy brick flew across the landing and struck Mabel Smith on the forehead. One morning she found a pile of her own jewellery laid out on the dining table like an offering.
Harry Price Arrives
June 1929. The Daily Mirror ran the story. Paranormal investigator Harry Price drove down from London with a car full of thermometers, cameras, and sealing wax. He stayed for ten years, off and on, and logged over two thousand separate incidents with forty independent witnesses who never met each other.
Price’s first night: every bell in the house rang at once for five solid minutes. A candle levitated off a table and floated down the corridor. A woman’s voice sobbed “Help me” from inside a wall.
The Writing on the Walls
In 1931 the Smiths fled. The new rector, Lionel Foyster, moved in with his young wife Marianne and adopted daughter Adelaide. Within weeks fresh pencil scrawls began appearing on the walls, always in the same frantic child-like hand:
“Marianne… please help get… light mass prayers… Marianne help me…”
The writing would appear in front of witnesses, letters forming as if an invisible hand held the pencil. Once, Adelaide watched the words “I was murdered here” scratch themselves across fresh plaster.
The Nun, the Monk, and the Burning
The grey nun was seen by dozens: gliding along the garden path at dusk, head bowed, hands pressed together. A headless monk walked the landing. A phantom coach and horses thundered up the drive and dissolved at the front door.
In 1937 Price rented the rectory himself for a year and brought in forty-eight official observers. Phenomena exploded: objects thrown, glass smashed, fires started spontaneously. One investigator was struck by a heavy iron candlestick that left a bruise shaped like a cross.
February 27, 1939. New owner Captain Gregson dropped an oil lamp in the hall. The fire spread with impossible speed. Neighbours gathered on the lawn and watched faces appear in the flames, a young woman screaming, a monk with no head. The rectory burned to the ground.
The Excavation
1939-1943. Price returned with a team of archaeologists. Beneath the cellar floor they found the bones of a young woman, early twenties, and a medieval prayer medal. The skull had been bricked up separately in a cupboard, exactly where the wall-writing had begged for “light mass prayers.”
Final Verdict
Over two thousand incidents, forty independent witnesses over the years and a nun’s bones found bricked up exactly where her ghost said they would be. Borley Rectory is gone, but on quiet nights people still see the grey figure walking the lane that used to be called the Nun’s Walk… still waiting for the prayers that finally came too late.