It's 160 years since a new home built for a vicar became the UK’s most haunted house.
The churchman and his family suffered a series of terrifying and unexplained events after moving into Borley Rectory in 1862.
Now as David Tennant plays a vicar with a secret in BBC drama Inside Man, James Moore reveals the place’s mysterious history.
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By the time Borley Rectory was being built in 1862 the place already had a mysterious past.
Constructed for the Essex village’s new vicar Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, the gothic house replaced another rectory that had been destroyed by fire in 1841.
The site was associated with the legend of an old monastery and a monk who had a relationship with a nun.
It’s said she ended up bricked inside her convent’s walls after it was exposed.
Once Bull and his family moved into their home things started getting more sinister.
Strange rapping sounds and rushing water were heard in the house and a maid left after enduring regular unexplained footsteps outside her door at night.
Bull’s daughter Ethel was slapped in the face by an unseen hand as she lay in bed, while she and his other children reported seeing the nun in the grounds.
Chillingly, both a gardener and handyman swore they’d seen a similar figure on different occasions.
When Bull died in 1892 his son Harry took over.
On one occasion he reported his dog had found a pair of legs sticking out of bushes near the house. When he approached, they moved. Then, he saw they belonged to a body with no head.
He watched, astonished as it got up and vanished through a locked gate.
In 1927 Harry died and Reverend Guy Smith moved in.
Soon his wife Mabel made an alarming discovery after cleaning out a cupboard – the skull of a young woman wrapped in a brown paper package. They buried it in the garden.
But, over the coming months, the couple were plagued by servants’ bells ringing – despite being disconnected – as well as whispering sounds. Both Mabel and a servant reported seeing the phantom coach too.
When investigating journalist Vernon Wall and a photographer kept vigil in woods near the house in 1929 they saw a light going on in an upstairs window, though they knew no-one was there.
Soon he visited again, this time with psychic investigator Harry Price who reported seeing a shadowy figure, possibly the nun, in the garden.
They experienced other weird phenomena – bricks crashing through windows, pebbles inexplicably rolling down the stairs and a glass candlestick flying past their heads.
It was all too much for the Smiths who moved out, to be replaced by the Reverend Lionel Foyster with his wife Marianne and their three-year-old daughter Adelaide.
As well as objects moving on their own, Marianne was reportedly left with a cut and black eye after being struck by an unseen force, which also threw her out of bed.
Weird writing began to appear on the rectory’s walls and she even reported seeing the ghost of the original Henry Bull in a dressing gown.
The Foysters moved out in 1935 and, unsurprisingly, a buyer for the rectory couldn’t be found.
So Price rented the house and, with the help of volunteers, monitored ongoing poltergeist activity there.
At midnight on February 27, 1939, shortly after the house was finally bought by a Captain WH Gregson, a huge blaze broke out, leaving it as a ghostly empty shell.
After his death, Price was accused of faking some of the strange events at the rectory. But terrifying testimony and eerie events continued at the site.
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