A particular interest at Borley is Harry Price’s year-long tenancy of the Rectory and also the bibliography of the haunting of which major studies of both are included in The Borley Rectory Companion. As well as Borley Rectory, the subject of physical mediumship is also another major interest and Adams has had articles published on this and other paranormal subjects in Paranormal and Vision magazines in the UK and Ghost! magazine in the States. He lives with his wife and four children in Luton, Bedfordshire.

The Borley Rectory Companion – The Story of a Book

The origins of this latest book devoted to Borley Rectory and its ghosts lie surprisingly in a summer break on the Kent coast.  In August 2006, my wife Yasmin booked a last minute bucket-and-spades family holiday to Ramsgate for us and our four children.  Unbeknown to her there is a Borley connection at Ramsgate as one of the participants in the Rectory investigation in the early 1930s, Edwin Whitehouse, later became a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St. Augustine directly opposite the seafront and very close to our holiday lodgings.  Dom Richard Whitehouse as he became died in the mid 1970s and early one morning one of my young sons and I went to the churchyard across the road from the Abbey and I photographed his grave.

I first met Eddie Brazil at Borley in the autumn of 2003 and in the intervening years we have become very good friends.  Eddie’s interest in Borley Rectory goes back longer than mine to the late 1960s – he first visited Borley in 1971 in a snow storm and since then has made many return trips; in the early 1970s he was corresponding with Peter Underwood on the subject.  For a long time Eddie has wanted to write a book about Borley and whenever he and I met up or spoke on the ‘phone, the subject of a new book on the Rectory case always came up.  Eddie was convinced that such a book was possible and although we agreed that it would be a great thing to do, there were certain doubts in my mind – one was the format which would have to be very different from the other books that have appeared over the years, and indeed as anyone familiar with the case knows, Borley is a very well written about haunted house – since Harry Price’s ‘The Most Haunted House in England’ first appeared in 1940 there have been another six full-length books, several book-length reports and Edward Babb’s superb The Final Analysis had only appeared a year or so previously.  As much as I enjoyed studying the case and wanted to do it, I felt that it was something that perhaps had been covered in its entirety and left it as that.

As the Ramsgate week progressed I thought about Dom Richard, about Borley and Eddie’s book project and one evening, as I went for a quick stroll to the supermarket to get some odds and ends for a meal, things suddenly started coming together.  Like Ritchie Blackmore’s famous riff for Smoke on the Water, which had been floating around for a while before the Deep Purple band finally nailed it down onto a song, the title ‘The Borley Rectory Companion’ had been in my head for some time.  I ‘phoned Eddie and had a slightly bizarre conversation with him standing in an alley with seagulls screeching around over my head:  “You know that book you wanted to do on Borley?  How about something along the lines of ‘The Borley Rectory Companion’, a sort of Borley encyclopaedia.  It could be a dictionary on the Borley ghosts with an alphabetical list of people, places and phenomena all connected with the Rectory over the years.  What do you think?”  Eddie’s reply is partly unprintable but was very enthusiastic!  “And maybe we could ask Peter Underwood to write a Foreword?”

Peter Underwood is one of Britain’s most well known ghost hunters and has been writing on the paranormal for the past thirty-five years.  In 2005 he wrote an Introduction to Harry Price for the www.harryprice.co.uk website Eddie and I set up in December 2004 which is dedicated to Price and his career in organised psychical research.  In the late 1940s Peter corresponded with Harry Price and only missed meeting him by a few hours – Price died from a sudden heart attack at his home in Pulborough, West Sussex on Easter Monday, 29 March 1948 and their appointment had been for the very next day.  His involvement with the Borley case covers fifty years and includes two comprehensive books on the subject, The Ghosts of Borley (1973) and Borley Postscript (2001).

On my return from Ramsgate we started sketching an outline for the book and Eddie wrote to Peter.  As we began dissecting the Borley story we realised that it was possible to examine and present the much familiar case in a completely new light.  Peter Underwood’s response to Eddie’s enquiry was prompt and enthusiastic.  In fact he was so forthcoming with information and offers of help that Eddie suggested that we ask him if he would like to come in as a co-author on the project; we were both honoured and delighted when on 1 September he wrote saying: ‘I will be delighted to join you and Paul Adams as joint author on this truly fascinating venture…I am off to Poland; probably for a month or so but I will be making notes while I am over there and will let you have some material which you can incorporate as you wish.’

With Peter on board our ‘Borley Rectory Companion’ went to a completely different level as we were now in the position of being able to research from Peter’s unique casebook and correspondence files on the haunting as well as draw on his personal fifty-year examination of Borley which included meetings and personal interviews with practically all of the major players in the drama. 

On Peter’s return from Poland and with a substantial list of people, events and happenings alleged to have occurred in and around the Rectory between 1863 and the present day drafted out, we all met on 8 November at Peter’s London club, the Savage in Whitehall Place where we discussed the project in detail and divided up the dictionary entries to work on.  Eddie’s interest and knowledge of English history and church architecture made him ideal to tackle the many historical threads of the Borley tale; I elected to examine the many reports of phenomena associated with the Rectory over the years including the séances and the Harry Price tenancy of the building; and Peter concentrated on persons and events for which he had personal experience and involvement.  He also set to work on a comprehensive introduction to the case that would enable newcomers to the Borley phenomenon to become quickly familiar with the unique background of the ‘most haunted house in England’.

Soon Peter was sending through parcels of research material.  For any enthusiast of the haunted rectory and its ghosts they contained jaw-dropping slices of Borley history – original letters from Harry Price to his correspondents; séance transcripts and planchette scripts; rare and never before published photographs; Peter’s own correspondence with many of the Borley characters including Marianne Foyster, Trevor Hall and James Turner; there were also newspaper cuttings, unpublished reports and letters from the readers of Peter’s many books who claimed to have experienced inexplicable happenings on and around the former site of Borley Rectory and Borley Church.  By combining extensive reference to the above with several visits to the Harry Price Collection at the University of London and the SPR archive at Cambridge it has been possible to realise one of our major provisos in attempting a new book on the Borley case, that is to undertake as much original research as possible and not simply recycle what has been published in the past.

Although all three of the present authors are by our own admission supportive of Borley Rectory as a genuine case of haunting, another emphasis has been to examine and discuss the many varied aspects of the Borley case, and particularly the role of Harry Price, its chief investigator and publicist, without the personal involvement and animosity that has pervaded commentaries in the past, particularly the reappraisal of Price’s involvement undertaken by Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall in the early 1950s, where the authors personal relationships with Price produced an outwardly impressive but ultimately flawed document.

The writing of the Borley Companion continued throughout the following year and involved more meetings in London and dozens of letters and e-mails between the three of us, and gradually the project took shape.  At the beginning of October 2007 we signed a contract for publication with Sutton Publishing of Stroud, Gloucestershire and it became clear that as the sixtieth anniversary of Harry Price’s death approached in March 2008, we would soon be able to mark this event by issuing the most extensive reference work ever compiled about not only his most famous and controversial case in paranormal investigation, but the most famous British haunted house of all time. 

The intention has been to write a book that appeals on different levels and pro-paranormal enthusiasts and perhaps even hardened Borley sceptics alike will find the presentation and content of this latest addition to the published literature of the Rectory haunting of great interest and use, even if simply from a historical or sociological point of view.  For those people actively studying the paranormal and carrying out their own research, the book gives an insight into the way ghost hunting and the investigation of the supernatural has originated from the work of Harry Price, the foremost ghost hunter of his day and still a seminal figure in today’s media-driven paranormal community.  But if you simply want to wallow in nostalgia and recapture a time when ghost hunters wore ‘Oxford Bags’ and listened to records on a wind-up gramophone while conducting their haunted house vigils then The Borley Rectory Companion will take you there.  

The book will also feature an original Foreword written by the philosopher and writer Colin Wilson, the well-respected author of over eighty books, many of them on aspects of the occult and the paranormal, something for which the three authors are particularly appreciative. 

The Borley Companion is now being printed and will be available to buy from the beginning of April 2009.