(2 of 2)
From that time on, Borley Rectory's position as the No. 1 haunted house of the land went virtually unchallenged. Tenants came and went, but scarcely a year passed without some new and startling account of Borley's restless specters. Even the destruction of the old place by fire in 1939 failed to calm the ghosts who were seen by some disporting themselves in the flames. If there were any skeptics left, Price's own volumes, The Most Haunted House in England and The End of Borley Rectory, soon dispelled them. Even Sir Ernest Jelf, Senior Master of His Majesty's Supreme Court, examined Price's evidence and confessed himself "at a loss to understand what cross-examination could possibly shake it."
Pebbles & Pranks. Only Britain's learned and incorruptible Society of Psychical Research, to which Harry Price himself belonged, held out. An institution as fussily scrupulous about the authenticity of English ghosts as are the royal heralds over English titles, the society appointed three researchers to check Price's facts. Just published in England in a volume worthy to stand on any bookshelf alongside the best of Dorothy Sayers' adult mysteries, their findings seem destined to lay for all time the ghosts of Borley Rectory. At the least, say Researchers Eric Dingwall, Kathleen Goldney and Trevor Hall, Price was guilty of "overtelling" his tale.
In retracing Price's steps, Dingwall & Co. have found many explanations for the goings-on at Borley that require no ghosts to support them. An early rector, to whom some of the first visions appeared, was found to have been a chronic victim of a disease which caused him to sleep, perchance to dream, almost constantly. Price's own unpublished papers reveal that Mrs. Foyster, the young and restless wife of the aged and ineffective rector who followed the Smiths into Borley Rectory, showed a naughty tendency to fake ghostly manifestations. And Price, himself, it turned out, was not above tossing a pebble or two from a well-stocked pocket to enliven a ghostless séance.
In the close fellowship of British ghost hunters, whose passionate efforts to expose psychic hoaxes are coupled with an ardent desire to believe in the real thing, there was no more joy over the exposure of Harry Price than there was among anthropologists over the fall of the Piltdown man (TIME, Nov. 30, 1953). "Our criticisms have given us no satisfaction," wrote Price's accusers. Harry Price himself, having died in 1948, was beyond making any rebuttal, unless by further spiritual manifestation. The whole business, mourned the Glasgow Herald, "is a melancholy proof of human frailty."