Notes from the Archive

We spent three weeks in the Suffolk Record Office this month, reading Henry Bull's diary in its entirety. It is a curious document: 1,847 pages of cramped handwriting, covering forty years of parish business, weather observations, and domestic detail. The entry for 12 August 1863 — the day the rectory's foundations were laid — reads, in full: "Began the new house today. Weather fine. Mrs. Bull unwell."

This is the problem with primary sources. They are rarely dramatic. The drama is imposed later, by writers who need a story. Harry Price needed the Bull diary to contain evidence of the haunting; it does not. It contains evidence of a man who worried about his strawberries, his sermons, and his wife's health. The strawberries failed in 1872. The sermons were, by his own account, "indifferent." Mrs. Bull died in 1889, after a long illness he recorded with the same meticulousness he applied to rainfall.

What the diary does contain, and what we found fascinating, is a record of the rectory's construction. Bull was his own clerk of works, ordering materials, paying labourers, complaining about the plasterer. The house was built cheaply and quickly, on ground that turned out to be unstable. By 1880, the walls were cracking. By 1890, the roof was leaking. By 1900, the Bull children were complaining of draughts that could not be traced to any obvious source. It is not difficult to see how a house that groaned, creaked, and let in the wind at night might acquire a reputation.

We are not debunking. We are describing. The difference matters. A house that makes noise because its foundations are poor is not a haunted house; it is a poorly built house. But a poorly built house in a culture that believes in ghosts becomes, over time, something else. The Borley Rectory affair is not a story about a haunting. It is a story about how a particular kind of house, in a particular kind of culture, at a particular moment in the history of the press, became the most investigated haunting in British history.

Next month: the Essex Record Office, and the quarter sessions records for 1645. The summer Matthew Hopkins came to town.