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  • The Haunting of Borley Rectory

  • The Story of a Ghost Story
  • By: Sean O'Connor
  • Narrated by: Richard Attlee
  • Length: 14 hrs and 35 mins
  • 5.0 out of 5 stars (4 ratings)

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The Haunting of Borley Rectory

By: Sean O'Connor
Narrated by: Richard Attlee
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Publisher's Summary

Marianne Foyster, Harry Price and the most haunted house in England - the perfect listen for Halloween.

In 1928, Eric and Mabel Smith took over a lonely parish on the northern border of Essex. When they moved into Borley Rectory, Mrs Smith made a gruesome discovery in a cupboard: a human skull. Soon the house was electric with ghosts. Within the year, the Smiths had abandoned it and the Rectory became notorious as the ‘most haunted house in England’.

When Reverend Lionel Foyster moved in he experienced a further explosion of poltergeist activity with an increasing violence directed at his attractive young wife. Marianne was a passionate and sensuous woman isolated in a village haunted by ancient superstition and deep-rooted prejudice. She would be accused not only of faking the ghosts but of adultery, bigamy – and even murder.

The haunting, sensationally reported in the tabloid press, gripped the nation. It was investigated by Harry Price, a self-made ‘psychic detective’. This was the case that would make Price’s name as the most celebrated ghost-hunter of the age. He recorded the evidence of 200 witnesses to over 2,000 supernatural incidents. This surely confirmed that not only did ghosts exist but, finally, here was proof of life after death.

With the tension of a thriller and the uncanny chills of a classic English ghost story, Sean O’Connor brings the story of Borley Rectory to vivid life as an allegory for an age fraught with anxiety, haunted by the shadow of the Great War and terrified of the apocalypse to come.

©2022 Sean O'Connor (P)2022 Simon & Schuster, UK

Critic Reviews

"Borley Rectory is perhaps the definition of an old haunt, still exerting an extraordinary grip on the popular imagination.... Balanced, surprising and strangely moving." (Mark Gatiss)

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Best book I've read in ages

A diverse cast of remarkable characters, an ideal setting for ghost stories, ghost hunters, gossips, set against a backdrop of troubled times and social upheaval - all brought together by a masterful storyteller and perfectly narrated by Richard Attlee. I fear it may be a long time before I come across another book as absorbing.

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