Price, Harry (1881 - 1948)
Perhaps the best-known British popular "ghost hunter" and investigator of the supernatural whose major investigation was of Borley Rectory, a house which stood in a small village in the Essex-Suffolk border, between Sudbury and Long Melford.
Price called Borley Rectory "the most haunted house in England," though whether there were really any ghosts there has been heatedly disputed. Price died in 1948, after writing two books about Borley.
The rectory was built in 1863 on the site of a much older building. In 1929, Mr. Price was asked by a national newspaper to look into the strange events which were occurring there. Mr. Price heard many of these stories from the Rev and Mrs. Eric Smith — who eventually left the house, partly because they could no longer stand the atmosphere there (their experiences included Mrs. Smith finding the skull of a young woman wrapped in brown paper in a cupboard).
Price concerned himself with the rectory for some years, particularly between 1930 and 1935, when it was occupied by the Rev Lionel Foyster and his wife Marianne. He saw keys shoot from their locks, heard bells ring (sometimes when he requested the spirits to ring them), had an empty bottle thrown at him, heard footsteps, saw materializations. He estimated that while the Foysters were in residence, at least 2, 000 poltergeist phenomena were observed at the rectory.
Leasing the building for a year, Price not only kept watch himself, but invited many interested people to visit the house, organizing a rota of 48 observers to occupy it day and night. In his book The End of Borley Rectory (1946) he lists 100 other people who noted improbable things.
Price suffered a massive heart attack at his home in Pulborough, West Sussex, and died almost instantly on 29 March 1948.
See The Enigma of Borley Rectory, The Ghosts of Borley; Annals of the Haunted Rectory, The Most Haunted House in England: Ten Years' Investigation of Borley Rectory, Ghost, Altered State of Consciousness, ESP, Seance, Materialization, Asport, Automatic Writing, Findhorn, Glastonbury Scripts, Theosophy, Poltergeist, Psychic Archaeology, Spiritualism, Casting Black Magic Spells, Commanding Spirits, The Tarot Store, Divination & Scrying Tools and Supplies, and The Pyramid Collection.
Sources: Article is scheduled to be reviewed.
| | |
.
.
