S01-E02 - Borley Rectory
Haunted UK Podcast: History, Hauntings and the Unexplained
Steven Holloway
4.5 • 652 Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2021
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A Gothic rectory in rural Essex.
A ghostly nun seen beneath the trees.
A house that burned, vanished, and still somehow remains one of the most debated hauntings in British paranormal history.
In this early Haunted UK Podcast episode, Steve explores the strange and controversial story of Borley Rectory — once known as “the most haunted house in England”. Built in 1862 on the site of an earlier rectory, the house quickly became associated with footsteps, bell-ringing, poltergeist activity, phantom carriages, disembodied voices, mysterious lights, and the recurring apparition of a nun.
The episode follows the families and witnesses linked to Borley across the decades, from the Bull family and their reports of ghostly figures, violent disturbances, and unexplained sounds, to the Smiths, who discovered a human skull hidden in the house, and the Foysters, whose time at the rectory brought some of the most dramatic and contested claims of all.
At the centre of the story stands Harry Price, the famous ghost hunter, investigator, magician, sceptic, and showman whose work at Borley made the case legendary. Through séances, alleged spirit messages, strange predictions, fire, excavation, and later accusations of fraud, Borley became more than a haunted house. It became a battleground between belief and scepticism.
Atmospheric, historic, and full of unanswered questions, this episode revisits a building that no longer exists, yet continues to draw ghost hunters, researchers, sceptics, and believers to the same enduring mystery: was Borley Rectory truly haunted, or did legend, invention, grief, and ambition create one of the greatest ghost stories ever told?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Haunted UK podcast is not only on Patreon, but is also now on coffee, so you have even more choices to get more content from the show. |
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| 0:17.2 | One of the advantages of Patreon is its sleek user interface. |
| 0:26.6 | But if you want to avoid those pesky additional app store charges from both Apple and Google, |
| 0:28.7 | then why not give coffee a try? |
| 0:35.4 | Simply open a browser window and type coffee forward slash haunted UK podcast. |
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| 0:48.3 | Whichever platform you choose, we're sure you'll enjoy the bonus content. |
| 0:59.0 | Thanks for listening and enjoy the episode. Welcome to Pink Flamingo's Haunted UK podcast. |
| 1:51.9 | Welcome to Pink Flamingo's Haunted UK podcast. The This is episode two of Pink Flamingo's Haunted UK podcast, and today we'll be taking a journey through the haunted history of Boreley Rectory. |
| 2:05.1 | As with the previous episode, let's take a brief dive into the history of the house and its surrounding area. |
| 2:11.5 | The rectory was a large Gothic-style house built in 1862 in the village of Borley. |
| 2:19.3 | The village is located in rural Essex, not far from the border of Suffolk, and is near the River Stour. The house was built by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull, on the same site as the previous rectory, |
| 2:25.3 | which was completely destroyed by fire in 1841. |
| 2:29.3 | The new house was built to a larger scale to accommodate the bull family's 14 children. |
| 2:35.0 | The immediate area of the rectory also housed the church, which was thought to date as far back as the 12th century. |
| 2:43.0 | The foundation remains of Bawley Hall, as well as a few farm buildings. |
| 2:48.0 | The story of a Benedictine monastery built in 1362 was home to a legend regarding a monk and a nun |
| 2:54.8 | from a nearby convent who had begun an affair. This was quickly discovered and the monk was |
| 3:00.7 | executed but the nun's fate was far worse. She was bricked up alive inside the walls of the convent. This story turned out to be |
| 3:10.7 | allegedly false, apparently made up by the rector's children. But it's these fabrications that |
| 3:17.4 | have made the legend of ball erectory and its paranormal happenings a topic of intense debate. |
... |
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