Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Most Haunted House in England

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

In the 1930s paranormal investigator declared Borley Rectory the “most haunted house in England” – and with good cause! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, and welcome to this short stuff, the very special Halloween edition of short stuff, Chuck.

About the Borley Rectory. And I have to say, this one's good, but I think it still doesn't hold the candle to the, the one you put together that kicked off our Halloween content, which is the most sterile way of putting it. The two-parter of Jack O'Lantern's and Sleepy Hollow. Really? I like this one more. It was wonderful. We even got a message from Dave, the producer, saying like, this is the greatest thing I've ever heard in my life. I'm paraphrasing, but that was basically it. Well, thank you, Dave. Yeah. So this is, I like this one too, though, because this is about the most haunted house in England. Yeah, which a lot of people automatically know what we're talking about. Just hearing that phrase, Borley Rectory, which a rectory, by the way, is a place

where a pastor lives. I believe for the Anglican church, maybe for just Protestantism in general, but you know, pastors are allowed to marry and they have a family. So you got to put them somewhere. You can't just make them sleep under the pews in the church. So they get their own house and that's called a rectory. And it just so happened that the one in Borley, which is this little village an hour and a half northeast of London that no one would have ever heard about had it not been for the rectory there, was a very, very haunted place. That's right. And by the way, do you know what we call those in the Baptist church at my church? What? The preacher's house. The sin box? No, we called it that crappy little house next to the church. No, that's what they get.

It was a great... For dedicating themselves. So the rectory was built in the 1880s. It burned down in the 1930s, but that property itself has a long history of haunting supposedly going way, way back to the 1360s when there was a monastery there and allegedly a headless monk would roam the fields and a nun would haunt the place who had been walled up alive inside the monastery walls. Yeah, there was another nun too that would have come later who was, I guess, who ran away from the nunnery and tried to join the Waldegrave family who owned this property and instead was strangled and buried in a cellar there. So you got at least three good ghosts wandering around the site that the Reverend Bull, the first Reverend Bull in his family come along in the 1860s

and say, this will be a fine place to build our rectory. And of course the townspeople were like, this is a really bad idea, but we're just going to sit back and not say a word because we really could use the addition to our tax base here at the town. And then they thought it through a little further and were like, darn it. Is that true in England too? I don't know. It's a great American joke though. They would hear certain things in the night like servant spells ringing, keys flying out of the locks, always a little tinkling of the keyboard with no hands nearby. Yeah, phantoms. There was a phantom stagecoach that supposedly used to arrive and the townspeople were like, of course, this is a really haunted site. It makes sense that this house would be

haunted too. And so the the rectory itself was built in 1862 and within a year there were reported sightings. But it wasn't until the 1930s and over time, like between it, it wasn't like this just started in 1862 and then stopped in the 1930s, like every family that lived there reported something, some more than others. In some cases, the family there was just clearly afflicted by a terrible poltergeist or horrible ghost activity, just constant stuff. Others were not quite as bad, but every family that lived there reported something. And so the house itself got a reputation even before it was known as the most haunted house in England. That's right. And you know, while this stuff is happening, the old German phrase geist is kind of geist.

Pretty great. You know. So polter means loud. Isn't that what poltergeist means? Loud ghost? I don't know. Was that what it was? I'm pretty sure. I should know that with my vast German knowledge base. But I don't remember. But I think another translation is Toby Hooper didn't actually direct this. The other translation. Do you think it was Spielberg pulling the strings? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Don't get me started. So yeah, the 1930s, I believe in 1929, the Daily Mail sent Harry Price, who was sort of the foremost paranormal investigator of the day. He worked with the Society for Psychical Research. And he was like Houdini in that he was a debunker of mediums or fraudulent mediums. But he was also sort of a probably a bit of a

self promoter and blow hard. And the people at the SPR were like, I don't like you so much. And he went, well, I don't like you either. I'm going to go find my own jam. And he founded the National Laboratory of, I said physical before, Josh corrected me, Psychical Research. Yeah, it'll chip you up for sure. I was raised on this stuff. Like I used to want to go to Duke and study parapsychology when I was a kid. Do that in retirement one day, my friend. Maybe I will one day. I don't think they have that research anymore. But anyway. Like Mr. Clark, we discontinued that program in 1987. Well, could you start it up again? So Harry Price, because he was such a good self promoter, he wrote a lot of books and he wrote his books to be easily consumed by the public.

Like they were very readable, I saw. And so he became a very, very well known debunker of mediums and well known skeptic. So when he went to inspect Borley Rectory himself at the behest of the Daily Mail, and he came out of there and said, yeah, this actually checks out this place is a haunted house. People definitely took notice. Like he lent his credibility to it. And not because he was a fraud or a sham necessarily. Like he seemed to have really been convinced at least at first. Maybe always. All right. I think that's a good spot for a break. Okay. And we'll talk a little bit more about this rectory right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise

or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids relationships life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody everybody about my new podcast and

make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye bye bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But

just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So one interesting thing that happened at the Borley Rectory was it burned down. This is in 1939. And if you believe the story, then it seems very suspicious. But the owner at the time, Mr. William Gregson, said that he saw with his own eyeballs a stack of books that

were sitting there on a shelf, flew off on their own and ended up knocking over a lamp, a paraffin wick lamp, and that ended up burning the house down. Yes. And fortunately, that happened after Harry Price had spent the previous year there. So he leased the place in 1937, 1938. That's committed. Yeah. He went and lived there for a year with 48 assistants that he hired, so that they could all work basically around the clock studying and recording all the ghostly phenomenon that was there. And he made his career like even further. This cemented Harry Price and

the annals of parapsychology were his studies on Borley Rectory. And he published two books, The Most Haunted House in England, which coined that phrase, I believe. I don't think he used it before then, and cemented in everyone's mind, like, yeah, Borley Rectory is proof positive there are haunted houses. And then after the fire, I believe he wrote a second book, a follow-up book, called The End of Borley Rectory. And so for years until Price's death and a few years beyond, anybody who believed in the world basically, in ghosts, had probably heard of Borley Rectory and considered it as, like I was saying, proof that haunted houses can exist because of the work of Harry Price. But then his work was kind of undone later on, right?

Yeah. So his old, I don't know about enemies, but at least his rivals. Frenemies. Yeah. Frenemies at the Society for Psychical Research said, you know what? This guy's dead. He was a bit of a jerk to us. And so let's go undo the work that he did. Let's debunk the debunker. Yeah. So they, like they explained, they gave alternative explanations rather than ghosts for some of this stuff. But the thing that really kind of like pulled the, pulled the wool down or the curtain down on the whole thing was apparently these guys found in Harry Price's unpublished notes. He implicated a woman named Marianne Foister, who was the Reverend Foister's

wife, who lived there for several years. And she apparently was at the center of carrying out a lot of these ghost hoaxes. And Harry Price knew it too. So that was a really... But he buried it, right? He definitely buried it. And also the SPR researchers suggested, I don't know where they found this out, but they suggested that Harry Price was also not shy to do things like throw pebbles in a darkened seance room to just scare people and make noise and just kind of add to the whole thing. So the book really kind of cut the legs out from under the idea that Harry Price had discovered a real haunted house. Not entirely. There's plenty of people who still believed, but

it definitely put a dent in the whole thing. Then there was another book. This one came out in 2000. And this was a memoir by a man named, I don't know if it's Lewis or Louis Merling, who said, you know what? I lived at that home a couple of times. I lived with the family of Reverend Henry Bull in the 1910s and 1920s. And then with Bull in the 10s and 20s, then the foisters, that foister, Mrs. Foister, in the 1930s. And he said, I worked with both of these families. And we did a bunch of these hoaxes. We would tickle the piano strings behind a hole in the wall and stuff like that. And it was kind of really all us. But here's a twist to that story.

A twist. He said he could explain everything, save one, that in Easter, 1935, he and the aforementioned Marianne Foister and some other folks attended a séance there and went to an underground cellar about midnight, sat there in the dark in the quiet. And someone gave a little nervous cough as if they were about to speak. And all of a sudden, all those kitchen bells start clanging together at once, which is supposedly impossible to ring all those things at once. And supposedly, no one else was there. Yeah. So Mrs. Foister was there at the time, too. And Lewis Merling suggests they looked at each other like, what's really going on? These hoaxes were suddenly

or overcome with ghostly phenomenon, right? But then Chuck, there's another twist. That's right. It turns out that the Lewis Merling, who wrote this book in 2000, was researched themself and found that there was nobody by the name of Lewis Merling who was ever recorded living at Borley Rectory, let alone twice. Wow. Yeah. Which, I mean, technically could just mean that that book is a work of fiction or whatever. But still, it's a great extra twist, don't you think? Sure. I love a double twist. You thought the ghost twist was it. And then bam, bam, bam, there's like the anonymous book twist. And then M. Night Shyamalan delivers flowers to the front door or something.

That's very nice. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, everyone, thank you for joining us on this scariest short stuff of the year, the short stuff on Borley Rectory, which is now out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.