Borley Rectory - sick of journalists treating it like a joke, the history is genuinely serious

A piece came out in the Telegraph last week - I won't link to it, frankly it doesn't deserve the traffic - which referred to Borley Rectory as "Britain's most ludicrously haunted house" and spent most of its word count making fun of Harry Price. I'm not here to canonise Price, he had obvious issues with evidence handling and some of his methods were questionable at best. But the dismissive tone of contemporary journalism about Borley ignores the fact that the case file, stripped of Price's more theatrical contributions, still contains some genuinely unexplained material.

The rectory itself burned down in 1939 and was demolished in 1944, which means we're working entirely from historical record - but what a record. Independent witness testimonies from people with no connection to Price, reports going back to the 1860s before he was even born, and the post-demolition excavations in 1943 that found human remains under the cellar floor. A young woman's skull. The church records showing a French convent attached to the site centuries earlier. None of that was invented by Harry Price.

My frustration is that every time Borley gets media coverage it's either breathless believers treating every Price anecdote as gospel or smug columnists treating the entire thing as an opportunity to feel clever. The actual interesting questions - who was the woman in the cellar, why were bones there, what do the independent witnesses from the 1880s describe and why are those descriptions consistent - never get asked. It's like journalism about Borley exists specifically to avoid the parts of Borley that would require actual research.

Has anyone done serious archival work on the pre-Price accounts? I've been trying to get access to the Essex Records Office files on the site and hitting a lot of bureaucratic walls, which is either standard public records tedium or mildly suspicious depending on your disposition.

The Telegraph has been doing this for years, it's essentially their house style for anything paranormal - a light mocking tone that lets them cover the subject while making it clear they're above it. The frustrating thing is it does genuinely set the public conversation. Someone who reads that piece and then encounters Borley research will come in with a sneer already loaded. The Harry Price rehabilitation/demolition cycle has been going on for seventy years and the actual historical substance keeps getting lost in the argument about whether he was a fraud.

The bones in the cellar are the thing I keep coming back to. The excavation was done in 1943, so well after Price's main involvement, by different people, and they found partial skeletal remains consistent with a young adult female. That's a fact that appears in official records. The church did eventually conduct a service and reinterment. Now you can explain that a hundred different ways and most of them don't require the supernatural - buildings have histories, people die, things get buried - but the specific detail of the French nun legends predating the discovery of female remains is at minimum an interesting coincidence that deserves more than a raised eyebrow from a Telegraph columnist.

I've had some luck with the Essex Records Office, not specifically on Borley but on another Essex location. The trick is to be very specific in your FOI request rather than asking generally for "all records relating to" a site. Ask for specific document types - parish records between specific dates, planning documents, correspondence files from a specific period - and you'll get further than a broad request which they can legitimately say is too wide to process. Happy to give more specific advice if useful.

Slightly off topic but the thing about Borley that most people don't know, or don't mention, is that the phenomena continued after the building was demolished. People living near the site and walking past the ruins reported things well into the 1950s and the reports have never entirely stopped. There's no building there anymore, there's nothing to knock or creak or play tricks with the light, and yet the accounts persist. That doesn't fit neatly into any of the standard sceptical frameworks - the "it's an old building settling" explanation doesn't work when there's no building. I don't know what to do with that but it seems relevant.

The journalistic approach you're describing is basically identical to how they covered the Rendlesham Forest fiftieth anniversary pieces last year. A slightly amused tone, lots of "of course no extraterrestrials were actually involved," and zero engagement with the actual documented evidence. It's a defensive crouch masquerading as critical thinking. I've started to think that the mocking tone is specifically load-bearing - if you take any of these cases seriously even for the purposes of investigation, you might end up somewhere uncomfortable, and it's much easier professionally to stay in the smirking zone.

why were bones there, what do the independent witnesses from the 1880s describe and why are those descriptions consistent

These are the right questions and I'd add: why is the existing literature so reliant on Price as the primary source when there were clearly other investigators and witnesses? Peter Underwood wrote about Borley extensively and his accounts draw on people Price never interviewed. Guy L'Estrange's report from 1931, which predates Price's major publication, contains descriptions that align with what was reported decades earlier. The case has a much deeper evidentiary base than the "Harry Price made it all up" crowd want to acknowledge.

Went to the village about two years ago, just as a curious visitor rather than an investigator. The church is still there and it's a beautiful, very quiet place. The locals are... not particularly enthusiastic about ghost tourism, which I completely understand, and I wouldn't recommend turning up there with a load of equipment and an attitude. But standing in the churchyard in November with no one else around there was a quality to the quiet that I can't fully describe. Not frightening. Just weighted, somehow. Make of that what you will, I'm not claiming it's evidence of anything.

For what it's worth I sent a fairly polite letter to the journalist who wrote the Telegraph piece, not angry, just pointing out the specific historical errors in it (he got the date of the fire wrong and misidentified Price's initial visit by several years). Never got a reply. Sent the same corrections to the letters editor. Not published. This is what fighting the culture war on paranormal credibility looks like I suppose - shouting into the void one politely worded letter at a time.