A ghost? No, just a very naughty vicar's wife! The truth about the 'most haunted house in England'- and other ghoulish encounters - as revealed in a spine-tingling new compendium

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BOOK OF THE WEEK

Hauntings: A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them

by Neil Oliver (Bantam £25, 384pp)

Borley Rectory, near the village of Long Melford in Suffolk, was once known as ‘the most haunted house in England’. 

The ghost of a nun would peer in through windows, servants’ bells rang when no one was near them, and footsteps would sound from rooms that were known to be empty.

Books and articles were written about the place, and locals got so annoyed by ghost-hunting tourists that they removed the road signs.

The peak period of strange events was the 1930s, when the house was inhabited by the Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster. Years later, Foyster’s wife, Marianne, confessed that she had been having an affair with their lodger.

‘Perhaps,’ writes Neil Oliver, ‘some of the bumps in the night were altogether more earthly than spiritual.’

In Hauntings: A Book of Ghosts and Where to Find Them, author Neil Oliver takes readers on a tour of haunted Britain 

The conclusion is typical of Oliver’s even-handedness in his tour around haunted Britain. ‘All my life,’ runs his opening sentence, ‘I’ve wanted to see a ghost.’ 

I was braced for a few hundred pages of gullibility, of proof that — as any magician will tell you — the easiest people to fool are the ones who want to be fooled. They’re the sort of people who say ‘absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence’. Correct, but it isn’t evidence of presence either, and you can rarely prove a negative.

Although Oliver never says he doesn’t believe in ghosts (‘I cannot come down on either side of the debate’), his book offers just as many rational explanations for sightings as it does sightings themselves.

He introduces us, for instance, to the ‘Big Grey Man’, an apparition seen on the Scottish mountain of Ben MacDui — then he refers us specifically to James Hogg, an 18th-century poet who fled in terror when he saw the figure, but returned the next day, this time standing his ground, and noticed that when he lifted his hat, the figure did the same. 

Hogg realised it was his own shadow magnified against the mist. This is an acknowledged meteorological phenomenon, one that’s common on the mountain.

Then there’s the story of a factory where people often felt uneasy, even seeing indistinct figures at the edge of their vision. One day, someone noticed that a thin piece of metal being held in a vice was vibrating slightly.

He knew enough science to remember that low-frequency sound waves can cause this effect, and was able to trace the source of the all-but inaudible noise to a faulty extractor fan. Such waves can induce unease and visual phenomena. The fan was fixed, and the ‘ghostly’ incidents stopped.

Other possibilities include smudges on camera lenses. This is the explanation favoured by many for a 1936 photograph of the ‘Brown Lady’ on the stairs at Raynham Hall in Norfolk. (I agree — the gap in the middle of the image doesn’t look brown and it doesn’t look like a lady.) 

The remains of Borley Rectory, near the village of Long Melford in Suffolk, which was once known as ‘the most haunted house in England’

There’s also the tendency of the brain, if your eyesight deteriorates, to invent sightings simply because it’s bored.

But Oliver also examines the psychological explanations, the times when ‘we see what we want to, or need to, whether it is there or not’. This might be for historical reasons.

Over 300 years since the Battle of Aughrim in County Galway, people in Ireland still have strong political loyalties, and as the American writer William Faulkner put it: ‘The past is never dead. It is not even past.’ 

Some claim to see the ghost of a wolfhound which, after the battle, stood guard over its master’s dead body. ‘Visitors to Aughrim bring their own thoughts,’ writes Oliver. ‘A spectral hound glimpsed at the corner of an eye. Is it any wonder?’

It’s the same at Derwent reservoir in Derbyshire, where the Dambuster pilots practised for their famous World War II raid on a German dam. The reservoir is still used for reconstructions on anniversaries of the mission. 

It has been suggested that these images, broadcast on television, may have inspired ‘the imaginations of those witnesses subsequently reporting seeing “ghostly Dambusters” where the real raiders once flew’.

Or perhaps, says Oliver, a belief in ghosts ‘comes ultimately from fear of death. Anything being better than dying, might we cling instead to the idea of disembodied spirits in hopes that something of us survives, somehow?’

But if reason isn’t your thing, and you’re one of those who want to believe, you’ll be able to enjoy the ghostly tales for their own sake. 

Although Oliver never says he doesn’t believe in ghosts, his book offers just as many rational explanations for sightings as it does sightings themselves

There are executed witches in Lancashire, a Scottish fisherman and his son who tied themselves together with rope when a storm hit (so that death wouldn’t part them), and — fulfilling our need for celebrity even beyond the grave —Henry VIII at Windsor Castle and William Wordsworth in his sister’s bedroom.

A common sighting at Glamis Castle in Scotland is an old lady carrying a pile of laundry towards the middle of the main courtyard, where she disappears into thin air.

Glamis was the childhood home of the Queen Mother, who claimed to have had her own ghoulish experiences there — more than once she saw the ghost of an African servant who had been badly treated at the castle in the 18th century. 

If Her Majesty was still alive today, she wouldn’t just be a character in The Crown, she could be one of its scriptwriters, too.

Oliver wears his historian’s hat to good effect. We learn about the Luddites opposing new technology (interesting in light of current AI fears), and Peter Pan author J.M.Barrie having to be dissuaded by his publisher from calling the book The Boy Who Hated Mothers.

Oliver explains that the brain has a tendency, if your eyesight deteriorates, to invent sightings simply because it’s bored

If all the British and Empire soldiers who died in World War I marched four abreast past the Cenotaph, the procession would take three and a half days. 

And Virginia Woolf said that the Bloomsbury Group — the artists and writers associated with said part of central London — ‘lived in squares [and] loved in triangles’.

Most of us can appreciate a good ghost story, whether we see it as fact or fiction. Oliver thinks that, such tales ‘inhabit that part of us between the known and the unknown’. 

He’s probably right. Though the vicar might still want to keep an eye on his wife.