Borley Rectory

An English rectory that Harry Price promoted as the most haunted house in England, whose case three SPR members attacked in a 1956 report and Robert Hastings re-examined in 1969.

Harry Price set out the case in his 1940 book The Most Haunted House in England, which he presented as ten years of investigation. He tells how three young women, Ethel, Freda and Mabel, came home through the far gate of their garden after a garden party on 28 July 1900, in daylight, and all saw a bowed female figure on the lawn at the same moment.

Skeptoid's Brian Dunning disputes the early history. He says nothing unusual at Borley was written down before a 1929 Daily Mirror article, the point at which Price was first brought in, and that Price's published versions often contradict what the families living there reported. Dunning's 1929 starting point and the 1900 sighting as Price tells it cannot both stand.

In 1956 three members of the Society for Psychical Research, Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, published a critical survey of the evidence in the SPR's Proceedings and as a book. The three authors wrote that they meant to show how evidence of this kind should be weighed, and how easily people are misled when the investigators themselves take part in deceiving the public. Wikipedia describes the study as dismissing most of the sightings as imagined or invented and as putting Price's credibility in question. In 1969 Robert Hastings published an examination of their report in the same Proceedings. He summarised it as claiming that the phenomena were faked or exaggerated and that Price himself had cheated.

Wikipedia says ghost historians now largely reject Price's claims. It also notes that neither the report nor a more recent biography of Price has ended public interest, and fresh books and television documentaries about the rectory keep appearing.