Borley Rectory: When fiction becomes immoral
We all love a good story based in folklore. But when you dishonestly pitch it as real, you've crossed a line.
I’ve talked about Danny Robins’s BBC podcast Uncanny on my own podcast, Skeptoid, a couple of times — most recently a long-form critique where I had to fill in the missing skepticism on one of his shows that followed up on a bunch of previous ghost stories. The premise is a familiar, but Danny and his team at BBC handled it very well: An eyewitness told their ghost story, then it was separately and politely analyzed by both a professional skeptic (usually a scientist of some sort) and a professional believer (usually a ghost hunter). It seemed clear to me that Danny himself was a skeptic and understood the importance of giving each story a proper scientific slamdown; he was just also very good at telling a creepy story and moderating a truly interesting conversation. I was a fan.
I’ve decided I’m no longer a fan.
Danny’s current season is titled “Cold Cases,” and it consists entirely of very old, long debunked “famous ghost cases.” There is usually no living eyewitness so Danny tells all the stories himself (very well; he’s quite good at the storytelling thing). Finding a ghost hunter who believes every bit is trivial, and then for a skeptic, he’s using exclusively the same guy for this season: Ciarán O'Keeffe, an actual academic and psychologist, but who seems1 to have left the field in favor of pursuing jobs as the token skeptic in various paranormal TV series. I find his skeptical explanations weak and unresearched — and that’s likely why Danny has him there.
What put me over the edge was the current episode on Borley Rectory. Having done a show on this myself, I knew a lot about it. Here are the two versions.
Uncanny: Borley Rectory was plagued by hauntings such as headless horsemen and ghosts of nuns from the moment it was built. Various rectors refused to live there. It got so bad that they brought in a real scientist: Harry Price, an esteemed science-based ghost buster. But poor Harry was himself plagued by the events: lots of apparitions, objects thrown, noises, things broken. Even Ciarán O’Keeffe couldn’t explain most of it, but perhaps lead-based paint might have given people hallucinations???????2
Skeptoid: Almost the entire Borley Rectory mythology was invented from whole cloth by Harry Price, a lifelong professional con artist3 with no science background at all — but was a talented magician quite capable of fooling people in the room with fake manifestations. Price wrote three books about Borley Rectory, in which he himself gave it the moniker “The most haunted house in England.” There are no contemporary, independent published accounts of ANY hauntings at Borley Rectory outside of Price’s own books, and articles he wrote or edited for the Daily Mirror.
Repeat that last line, if needed.
The entire story of Borley Rectory is hopelessly tainted by Harry Price’s involvement. After his death, two reports by chapters of the Society for Psychical Research made three important conclusions:
There were no verifiable events that could not have had natural explanations;
That Harry Price's duplicity made it hopeless to determine the validity of his findings; and
That the most popularized events were caused by Harry Price himself.
I assert, for the record, that both Danny Robins and Ciarán O’Keeffe either know this and simply don’t care what’s true — or else they are hopelessly incompetent researchers.
“But wait, Dunning — what’s the harm in telling a fun ghost story? Why get so worked up, and declare that you’ve dropped your fandom of the show?”
Because Danny crossed a line here that I consider to be the divider between entertainer and predator.
