The Antonine Itineraries

Another character who has appeared in these pages before was also briefly involved with Borley Rectory.  For insight into the true nature of this ardent patriot, sportsman and naturalist with a 'love of old houses and old traditions' see this interview by our friend Dan Farson.  Maybe it should be shown on one of those current tv shows where stand-up comedians sit smugly open-mouthed at the appalling nature of much of the old telly, although it's probably too offensive even for that.  Wentworth Day's prose is almost beyond parody, for example the chapter from which this extract is taken begins:

'There died on Monday, March 9th, 1936, an old friend whom I mourn.  He was a man unique - the best storyteller and the best cricketer, one of the best shots and, after Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart [who he?], the most picturesque soldier of his world and time - Lieutenant-Colonel Cyril Foley.'  [Here are] Ghosts and Witches p.58  

Here is his experience at Borley (pp.70-71):

'I spent a night under a harvest moon of 1939 in Borley Rectory, which is on the Suffolk-Essex border.  It is they say "the most haunted house in England".  The late Mr Harry Price, who was the Honorary Secretary of the Psychical Research Society [no he wasn't], wrote a book about it under that title.  They will tell you that an uneasy spirit throws things about in the rectory.  Doors open and shut.  Footsteps ring where no feet walk.  Bloody fingermarks appear, suddenly, on the dining-room walls, oozing blood. [I've read a lot about Borley this year and I've not come across a single report of this phenomenon.]  And there are one or two lighter sides.
Some years ago Borley Rectory was burnt out.
I went into the roofless room, taking a friend and a double-barrelled gun.  We found no bloody fingerprints downstairs.  We stood at the foot of the staircase and looked up it to a landing and passage where wallpaper flickered in  tattered streamers and the moon made shifting shadows.
"Let's go upstairs" I suggested to my friend, who is young and a soldier.  He shuddered.
"Not for anything."  There's Something up the top of those stairs.  it's watching us.  I can feel It.  I can damn nearly see It - huge and black.  Something squatting. "
I raised my gun.
"Come outside" he said.  "For God's sake, don't shoot.  I don't like it.  In any case, you'll fetch the neighbours, and we shall get into trouble for being here.
Now there are no neighbours near to Borley Rectory, but an old empty church and a farmhouse.  But we went outside.  We stood under a tree in the bright moon and looked at the black, staring, empty windows of the house that no one could live in for long.  And Something seemed to be watching us, malevolently, from those eyeless windows.
Then it shot between my legs.  I felt its harsh bristles, its snaky undulating muscles.  It was a black cat.  It went into the house with a bound.  And it did not come out again.
Now one can put what construction one likes on that.  Harvest mice are the likeliest.  But when, a year later, I met a man whose London newspaper had sent him to spend an inquisitive night at Borley he said:
"I wouldn't go up those stairs for a fortune in the dark.  There's Something very odd in the upper regions.  I stood outside and watched the house - and do you know a damn great black cat came between my legs like a bullet and went into the house like a shot out of a gun.  It never came out again.  And when I asked at the farm they said they had no black cats.  No one round there has a black cat.  But anyone who stands in that garden at night always [always??] sees that cat go into the house.  It's a spook!  That's what I think."
So do I.'

Another unreliable ghost 'researcher' Elliott O'Donnell has been honoured with a biography this year by Richard Whittington Egan that I must get round to reading at some point.

I recently acquired a copy of [Here are] Ghosts and Witches (Batsford, 1954) by J. Wentworth Day, illustrated by Michael Ayrton, wherein another East Anglian secret tunnel legend can be found [pp.22-24], told in Wentworth Day's inimitable style:

'Spinney has several ghosts.  No place is better fitted for them.  Founded by Lady Mary  Bassingbourne, 'of the Wykes', in the twelfth or thirteenth century, it was a lonely outpost of the Augustinian Canons, standing grey and grim, enisled amid reefy leagues of fen and mere.  A bare wind-twisted belt of scrubby firs was all that protected it from the wild nor'easters that howled down on the wings of the frost and battered its doors, rattled its windows, and beat flat the winter reeds in the great fish-stews.

They lived a good life, those old monks - asceticism offset by old wine and the best that the Fen netsmen and decoymen could bring as tribute.  It was too good to last.  When Henry VIII fell upon them Spinney suffered with the rest.  That is how the first ghosts began their earthly span.

The legend is that when Henry's men-at-arms marched on Spinney, the monks fled in terror down the subterranean passage which is supposed to connect the Abbey with Denny Abbey, five miles across the fens, on the other side of the Cam.  They took with them the plate and all else moveable of value.  Half-way down the tunnel they met the monks of Denny, who also had been turned out by Henry's ruffians.  They decided that it was better to yield up the holy treasures and be saved than perish and be glorified.  So they trotted back to Spinney.  There they found the Abbey wrecked and cast down, and tons of debris over the door to the outer world.  The same had happened at Denny.

Thus the monks expatiated their carnal backslidings by dying in that nightmare tunnel.  Some of my family tried to explore the tunnel fifty years or more ago, but it was full of water and noisome gases.'

He goes on to say that a later owner of the house, built on the cellars of the priory, was troubled by tapping under the floor (said to be the ghosts of the monks tapping on the roof of the tunnel).  'At other times footsteps have been heard and horrible sliding, serpentine rustles, as of gigantic snakes slipping about on the brick steps.  Water fills the tunnel to within a few steps of the top. it is extremely probable that the river has broken in at some time and flooded the passage.  This belief has given rise to stories that the tunnel is inhabited by great eels, which accounts for the "slippery ghosts".'  He also reports that workmen digging on the fens 'found the arched brick roof of a tunnel which seemed to run in a straight line between the two abbeys.  The men got down to gault before they struck the roof, so it is possible that the tunnel might have been driven through the sticky tenacious gault with little fear of inundation from the marshes above.  Gault is impervious to water.'

A more prosaic history of the Priory of Spinney can be found here and some information on the subsequent history here.  One important feature of such tunnel legends, common after the Dissolution, was that they reinforced the official propaganda of the 'carnal backslidings' of the monks, as Wentworth Day puts it.