The Ghost Hunters (59 page)
Authors: Neil Spring
Marianne Foyster was born in 1899 and died in 1992. It is true that she married a man by the name of Greenwood at just fifteen and that when she married Foyster in 1922 there was no evidence of any divorce. According to evidence from Trevor Hall and Robert Wood, author of
The Widow Of Borley
, the Foysters’ lives were extremely dysfunctional, with Marianne pursuing a sexual relationship with Frank Peerless, the lodger at Borley Rectory.
During the fire which destroyed Borley Rectory on 27 February 1939, a police constable and locals watched what they thought were ghostly figures walking in the flames. Captain
W. H. Gregson’s son, Alan William Gregson, later claimed that the fire started while his father was shelving books in the library when an oil lamp accidentally tipped over; but another son, Anthony, claimed that the house was torched for insurance purposes.
My character Sarah’s interpretation of the wall writings ‘well tank bottom me’ is based on an elaborate theory devised by Canon W. J. Phythian-Adams, who wrote to Harry Price in January 1941 urging him to dig in order to substantiate the theory. Although the writings appear to have been written in Marianne’s hand, some witnesses claimed that the wall writing appeared in front of their eyes.
In July 1943, human remains – the jawbone of a woman and the left side of a skull – were discovered at the site of the Rectory. The jawbone was analysed by a dental surgeon, Leslie J. Godden, who found it was severely infected and was likely to have caused great pain during life. Harry Price theorised that this was the reason the phantom nun of Borley was always seen looking pale and haggard and unhappy.
Harry Price died suddenly of a heart attack at his home in Pulborough on 29 March 1948. The St Ignatius Borley medallion was found on his body, after his former secretary, Lucy Kay, sent it to him at his request. Until recently, the location of the Borley medallion was unknown; but shortly before the completion of this novel, its whereabouts were privately disclosed to me.
In January 1956, Eric J. Dingwall, Kathleen M. Goldney and Trevor H. Hall published their ‘Borley Report’ in the
Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research
. The results of their five-year investigation destroyed Price’s reputation as a reliable psychical researcher, accusing him of fraud in practically
all aspects of the Borley case. Professor Anthony Flew, who reviewed the report in the
Spectator
on 27 January 1956, referred to the Borley case as ‘a house of cards which Harry Price built out of little more than a pack of lies’. By then Charles Suttton, a journalist, had gone public with the news that he had witnessed Price throwing stones at the Rectory.
In March 2004, the fourteenth-century tithe barn, which was positioned just next to where the Rectory had stood, was converted into a handsome private house. During the course of the work human skeletal remains were unearthed in its foundations: fragments of skull, ribs and leg bones. Analysis of the remains confirmed they were female.
Reports of unusual sounds and occurrences at the site of Borley Rectory continue to this day.
As for Harry, his character – brilliant and ambitious, impatient, selfish and unreliable, charming and riddled with contradictions – is based on the true Harry Price, who was born to a working-class family and certainly embellished his upbringing and his credentials. I have exaggerated and imagined aspects of his character. The real Harry Price was not, for example, a good public speaker and showed much greater initial enthusiasm for the Borley investigation than is implied in my story. He never employed an assistant named Radley and he never kept his paper bag business a secret. Nor is it necessarily true that he sympathised with the Nazi regime, although he did possess a great many photographs of German architecture, and in July 1939 he drafted a letter to Hitler, requesting ‘facilities for attending – in comfort – the Nuremberg Rally in August’.
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Harry’s foil, Sarah Grey, is my creation. I found some small inspiration for her character in Harry’s former secretary, Lucy
Kay (born Violet Lucy Kaltenbach). Lucy, whose father was a commercial clerk named Maximilian, was a young actress of German descent who trained at RADA, and was first introduced to Harry at the opening of his Laboratory. Their meeting wasn’t at all hostile or dramatic in the way Sarah’s encounter is presented. Nor did she move to Wales and live out her days with Vernon Wall. In fact she died from cirrhosis of the liver in Hammersmith on 7 May 1955, and although she was only involved in the initial investigation of Borley Rectory – having left Price’s employ in the early 1930s – unlike Sarah, she was a willing believer in the phenomena encountered there, as well as a staunch defender of Harry Price. ‘It is my considered conviction that Harry Price never, at any time, faked phenomena,’ she wrote. ‘I am convinced he was a man of unimpeachable integrity.’
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There are indications that Lucy Kay led rather an unpredictable, irresponsible life. According to her son David, she frequently moved between addresses in the Paddington area of London, enjoyed betting on horses and was not sensible with financial affairs. In fact, she even borrowed money from Harry Price, whom she found ‘hypnotic’. The pair formed a close friendship which lasted until Price’s death, after which Lucy had replicas of the Borley medallion made, and sold them for profit.
Despite suspicions, there is no conclusive evidence that Harry and Lucy’s closeness ever developed into a romance. In my novel, Sarah’s Grey’s child by Harry, Dr Caxton, is entirely fictional. His character brings us to the heart of the book through layered narrative – a well-worn technique in the ghost-story genre.
When people ask me what makes a good ghost story, I invariably tell them that the reader must be made to care about the ghost. We have to know something of their life on earth if we are to care about them in death. So it might seem odd that in
this novel we learn very little about the phantom nun, but we do learn a great deal about Harry, Sarah and the residents of Borley Rectory. This is deliberate, because ultimately they are the true ghosts of the piece.
I like to think that Sarah and Harry are still out there somewhere, chasing ghosts and solving mysteries, a conception I hope will be realised one day through dramatic adaptations. Harry Price, ever the showman, might approve of this idea.