Borley Rectory, and the problem with anecdote

There's a reason skeptics have a problem with anecdotal evidence and eyewitness testimony.

It's not that that it's impossible that you saw a ghost, or Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial spacecraft.  What we're saying is that we need more than your assurance that you did.  Not only do we have the potential for outright lies and hoaxes -- some of them very subtle and clever -- we have the fact that the human sensory apparatus more or less sucks.

To put not too fine a point on it.

I mean, it works well enough.  It keeps us sufficiently aware of our surroundings to stay alive.  But we're easily tricked, we miss things, we misinterpret what we see and hear.  As astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "The human perceptual system is rife with all sorts of ways of getting it wrong."

As an illustration, let's consider one of the most famous "haunted house" stories in the world -- the infamous Borley Rectory, of Borley, Essex, England.

Borley Rectory always shows up on those websites with names like, "Ten Most Terrifying Real Ghost Stories!", usually somewhere near the top of the list.  So here are the bare bones of the story, just in case you don't know it.

Borley Rectory was built in 1862 by Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, Rector of Borley Parish.  He designed the building to replace an earlier rectory that had burned down in 1841, and also to accommodate his wife and family of fourteen children, which indicates that Reverend Bull put a lot of stock in the "be fruitful and multiply" thing from the Book of Genesis.

Be that as it may, the parish was certainly steeped in history.  The parish church is thought to date to the twelfth century, and the town was the site of Borley Hall, the ancestral seat of the Waldegrave family.  But here's where truth starts twisting in with fabrication; because the additional claim that the rectory had been built on the site of an old Benedictine monastery appears to have no basis in reality.

Which means that the tale that is the basis of the haunting also is of dubious provenance.  Because the story goes that a monk in the (almost certainly non-existent) monastery was having an affair with a nun from a nearby convent.  They made plans to elope, and had in fact arranged a coach driven by a friend of the monk's in order to get away, but the plan was discovered.

Sexual indiscretion by the clergy was a major no-no back then.  The coachman was beheaded, the monk hanged, and the nun bricked up in a wall inside the convent.

Except... none of them existed, remember?  Because there's no evidence there ever was a monastery on the rectory grounds.

But that didn't stop the tale from growing. Here's one account of what Reverend Bull et al. saw:

On July 28th, 1900, three Bull daughters reportedly saw a figure on a path, which later became known as the "Nuns Walk", to the rear of the rectory.  They were joined by a fourth sister to help greet the stranger, but the apparition disappeared.  Harry also told of seeing the nun, together with the phantom coach in which she had eloped.

 
She was also seen wandering the grounds around the Rectory, in and out of the bushes, dressed in grey.  There are reports of the Monk and Nun passing across the grounds.  Several people said they observed "A lady in grey cloak" and "A gentleman with a sort of bald head, dressed in a long black gown."

Once the story of the haunting began to spread, others reported seeing spectral nuns and monks.  But then events accelerated.  A later rector of the parish, one Lionel Foyster, moved in in 1930 with his wife Marianne, and they began to experience poltergeist activity in addition to the continuing presence of ghostly figures loping about.  Marianne began to receive messages written on walls and scraps of paper, such as the following:

Both of the Foysters reported having peculiar experiences:

During the first year of their tenancy, Lionel described many unexplained happenings including; bell ringing, the appearance of Harry Bull [son of the first rector of Borley], glass objects appearing out of nowhere and being dashed to the floor, books appearing, and many items being thrown, including pebbles and an iron.  After an attempt at exorcism, Marianne was thrown out of bed several times.

The Foysters eventually moved out, apparently because of Lionel Foyster's declining health, and afterwards no one could be found who was willing to live in the rectory, almost certainly because of its reputation.

And then Harry Price got involved.

Price was a psychic investigator of significant fame, who had founded the National Laboratory of Psychic Research as a rival to the far more reputable Society for Psychical Research.  Price himself was a strange mixture of skeptic and sketchy.  He was instrumental in unmasking outright hoaxers such as Helen Duncan, who used cheesecloth and paper soaked in egg white to simulate "ectoplasm."  But his investigation of Borley Rectory, leading to the publication of a book in 1940, was unequivocally in support of its having been haunted -- despite a stinging critique by researchers for the SPR who said that Price himself was a trained conjuror (which was true), and had "salted the mine" by faking some of the evidence from Borley, in collusion with Marianne Foyster, who "was actively engaged in fraudulently creating [haunted] phenomena."

Price, of course, denied any such thing, but further inquiries by the SPR left his role in the alleged haunting in serious question.  And the matter came to an unexpected close when the rectory burned in 1939 because of an accident with an oil lamp.

The remnants of the building were demolished in 1944.  But people still visit the site and the adjacent cemetery, and still report ghostly appearances, lo unto this very day.

See what I mean about anecdote?  We have a story that started out with a most-likely-false claim of three executions on the rectory grounds, followed by what many believe was an outright hoax perpetrated by Harry Price and Marianne Foyster.  Blend that together with overactive imaginations, and the rather dubious quality of the human perceptual systems, and you have a mishmash out of which any kernel of truth -- if there is one there -- becomes impossible to discern.

So is Borley haunted?  The most honest answer is "there's no way to know for sure," with a strong corollary of "... but probably not."  There's nothing here that any unbiased individual would consider hard evidence, just tall tale piled upon unsubstantiated claim, mixed with "I heard that people saw ghosts there."

If this is "one of the best-authenticated haunted sites in Britain," as one website claimed, we've got some serious problems.

To return to my initial point, it's not that I'm saying that any of the claims of the paranormal are impossible.  What I'm saying is that thus far, no evidence I've seen has been convincing, at least not to someone who wasn't already convinced.  But despite all that, I'm hoping to visit Borley next time I'm in the UK, and if I do, I'll definitely report back with anything I happen to see.

Not that it should make a difference.  Because eyewitness testimony is still subject to all of the caveats I've mentioned -- even if it comes from yours truly.

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The Brown Lady of Raynham Hall

One of the more curious ghost stories I've ever heard is the tale of the "Brown Lady," named after her drab clothing, who has been allegedly seen many times in Raynham Hall Manor in Norfolk, England.

I first ran across the story in a collection called 50 Great Ghost Stories by John Canning, which from the inscription inside the front cover -- "October 29, 1977 -- Mon cher ami -- mieux vaut tard que jamais -- Amélie" -- I received three days after my seventeenth birthday from a family friend.

It's a pretty cool book, although (like many of this ilk) it mixes myth and folklore with stories that actually have some historical veracity.  The tale of the Brown Lady is one of the second type, because the people involved are actual historical figures, although the evidence for the haunting itself is still a little on the sketchy side.

The facts of the case are pretty well documented.  Lady Dorothy Walpole (18 September 1686 - 29 March 1726), who was the sister of Robert Walpole, the first prime minister of England, was married to Charles Townshend, 2nd Viscount Townshend.  Townshend had been married before, to one Elizabeth Pelham, by whom he had five children; he and Dorothy Walpole had seven more, the youngest of which was the mother of Charles Cornwallis, who signed the surrender at the Siege of Yorktown and ended the American Revolutionary War.

Dorothy Walpole wasn't happy, however, partly because Charles Townshend was more interested in growing turnips (I kid you not) than in devoting himself to his wife and family, and also because supposedly he had a nasty temper, which I would too if I had to eat turnips.  Be that as it may, Dorothy Walpole Townshend sought solace elsewhere, but unfortunately for her, she chose Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton, as a lover.

Well, the story goes that either Townshend or Wharton's wife (the legend varies) caught Dorothy and Thomas in flagrante delicto, and Townshend decided the only proper response was to lock his wife up in Raynham Hall to prevent her from cheating on him again.  She stayed there for the rest of her life, dying in 1726 at the young age of 40, possibly of smallpox -- although if she was never allowed outside her room, you have to wonder who she caught it from.

Be that as it may, once Dorothy Walpole Townshend's sad and short life had ended, people started to report the presence of a specter haunting Raynham Hall.

The most famous of the encounters was with novelist Frederick Maryatt, who was a friend of Charles Dickens.  Maryatt's daughter, Florence, wrote in 1891 about her father's meeting with the Brown Lady :

…he took possession of the room in which the portrait of the apparition hung, and in which she had been often seen, and slept each night with a loaded revolver under his pillow.  For two days, however, he saw nothing, and the third was to be the limit of his stay.  On the third night, however, two young men (nephews of the baronet), knocked at his door as he was undressing to go to bed, and asked him to step over to their room (which was at the other end of the corridor), and give them his opinion on a new gun just arrived from London.  My father was in his shirt and trousers, but as the hour was late, and everybody had retired to rest except themselves, he prepared to accompany them as he was.  As they were leaving the room, he caught up his revolver, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," he said, laughing.  When the inspection of the gun was over, the young men in the same spirit declared they would accompany my father back again, "in case you meet the Brown Lady," they repeated, laughing also.  The three gentlemen therefore returned in company. 

The corridor was long and dark, for the lights had been extinguished, but as they reached the middle of it, they saw the glimmer of a lamp coming towards them from the other end.  "One of the ladies going to visit the nurseries," whispered the young Townshends to my father.  Now the bedroom doors in that corridor faced each other, and each room had a double door with a space between, as is the case in many old-fashioned houses.  My father, as I have said, was in shirt and trousers only, and his native modesty made him feel uncomfortable, so he slipped within one of the outer doors (his friends following his example), in order to conceal himself until the lady should have passed by. 

I have heard him describe how he watched her approaching nearer and nearer, through the chink of the door, until, as she was close enough for him to distinguish the colors and style of her costume, he recognised the figure as the facsimile of the portrait of "The Brown Lady."  He had his finger on the trigger of his revolver, and was about to demand it to stop and give the reason for its presence there, when the figure halted of its own accord before the door behind which he stood, and holding the lighted lamp she carried to her features, grinned in a malicious and diabolical manner at him.  This act so infuriated my father, who was anything but lamb-like in disposition, that he sprang into the corridor with a bound, and discharged the revolver right in her face.  The figure instantly disappeared - the figure at which for several minutes three men had been looking together – and the bullet passed through the outer door of the room on the opposite side of the corridor, and lodged in the panel of the inner one.  My father never attempted again to interfere with "The Brown Lady of Raynham."

Now, to be fair, Florence Maryatt isn't exactly what you might call an impartial witness.  She was heavily into spiritualism, and was the author of books with titles like There is No Death and The Spirit World.  So I'm inclined to take anything she says with a grain or two of salt.

Which, of course, I would have anyhow.

Maryatt, however, wasn't the only one to claim seeing the Brown Lady in person.  In 1936, a photographer named Hubert Provand, who worked for Country Life magazine, was taking photos of Raynham Hall for a feature article.  They were setting up for a shoot of the wide interior staircase when Provand's assistant, Indre Shira, pointed at "a vapoury form gradually assuming the appearance of a woman moving down the stairs towards us."  Provand took a photo of the apparition, which has since become one of the most famous ghost photographs ever:

The incident was investigated by Harry Price, a noted paranormal researcher whose reputation for accepting questionable evidence led to his leaving the skeptical and science-based Society for Psychical Research, and founding his own rival organization, the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, because the obvious answer to skepticism is to start a group that will see things your way.  (One of the more famous examples of Price's dubious approach to investigation was the debacle of Borley Rectory, the "most haunted house in England," the evidence for which subsequent inquiries found was almost entirely fabrication.)

For what it's worth, which is probably not much, Price declared the Brown Lady photograph authentic, saying "the negative is entirely innocent of any kind of faking."  But like Florence Maryatt, he's not exactly the most reliable source of information.  Further analysis showed that the image is most likely a double exposure (note the pale lines above the stair treads, and the double reflections on the bannisters).  The ghost figure itself shows a lot of similarity to a traditional Madonna statue, down to a foggy impression below the face that appears to be hands folded in prayer.

Even if the photograph is a fake, of course, it doesn't mean that the other accounts aren't true.  But at the moment, the story doesn't have much to recommend it -- other than a second-hand and probably biased account, and a famous photograph that is almost certainly a fake, the Brown Lady doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.

It's still kind of a cool story, however, and I'd love to visit Raynham Hall myself.  If I ever get to go, however, allow me to reassure Dorothy Walpole Townshend that I plan on being entirely unarmed, and even if I were to bring a gun for some reason, I'd never think of shooting her in the face with it.  I mean, it's all very well to get scared in those kinds of situations, but that kind of breaches the rules of etiquette even so.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]