Speaker 1: For all the many elements that constitute the paranormal, there
Speaker 1: are a few things quite as evocative as the ghost,
Speaker 1: equally capable of scaring as senseless as they are of
Speaker 1: inflicting us with the deepest of melancholies, the ghost holds
Speaker 1: a unique place in the world of the supernatural. There are,
Speaker 1: of course, the ghosts that we carry with us in
Speaker 1: our daily lives, memories of those we have loved and lost,
Speaker 1: or perhaps even wronged, thoughts that sit in the deepest
Speaker 1: part of the psyche, straining to become manifest. Perhaps the
Speaker 1: most famous of all ghosts is that of Shakespeare's Banquet.
Speaker 1: As he appears to the tormented mind of Macbeth. We
Speaker 1: know him not as an actual spirit, but rather he
Speaker 1: is the consequence of Macbeth's mental capitulation. But what of
Speaker 1: the apparitions that seem not to have been brought forth
Speaker 1: from the psyche, Those that have no connection to the observer,
Speaker 1: but instead seem, for all the world to be reaching
Speaker 1: out to us from a seemingly timeless space. You're listening
Speaker 1: to unexplained, and I'm rich McClain smith. For some to
Speaker 1: witness a ghost, particularly that of a relative, might bring
Speaker 1: a certain comfort, the reassuring sense of a life beyond death.
Speaker 1: But for the cultures of the ancient world, there was
Speaker 1: little doubting the portentous nature of such a sighting. If
Speaker 1: by chance, you ever find yourself walking along the banks
Speaker 1: of the Tigris around the year four thousand BC, and
Speaker 1: happened to come across the spirit of a recently deceased
Speaker 1: family member, it could surely mean only one thing. For
Speaker 1: the Sumerians, death was an act from which there was
Speaker 1: no return. Rather, souls were left to dwell in a
Speaker 1: place called Kur, otherwise known as the Land of no Return,
Speaker 1: a place where all men and women were equal, no
Speaker 1: matter how rich or poor, and there they would remain
Speaker 1: in a dreary darkness, all watched over by Irish Kigal,
Speaker 1: the dark queen of the underworld. For a relative to
Speaker 1: return from such a place would speak of something unsettled,
Speaker 1: perhaps a body not properly buried, lost at sea or
Speaker 1: abandoned on the battlefield, or even a suspicious death that
Speaker 1: needed in some way to be rectified. Often a ghost
Speaker 1: or apparition will be said to be linked to a
Speaker 1: particular place. For those of us in the UK, there
Speaker 1: are many not least their respective tourist boards that would
Speaker 1: suggest the Great Tower of London or Edinburgh Castle as
Speaker 1: the country's most haunted destinations. However, thanks largely to the
Speaker 1: controversial and self styled psychic investigator Harry Price, there is
Speaker 1: one place that has risen above all others in the
Speaker 1: history of the British ghost hunt. The full story of
Speaker 1: the place in question has drawn much criticism over the
Speaker 1: years due to the association with Price, and so it
Speaker 1: is to a time before Price's involvement that we will
Speaker 1: be going, and for that we will be heading to.
Speaker 1: Nineteen twenty eight the place Balley Rectory in Essex, routinely
Speaker 1: described as the most haunted house in England. Just what
Speaker 1: exactly took place there in the early part of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century has never been fully accounted for. It is
Speaker 1: a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. The Essex
Speaker 1: hamlet of Barley lies close to the border of Suffolk
Speaker 1: in the southeast of England. Aside from the rectory, it
Speaker 1: is perhaps best known for its church. Originally built in
Speaker 1: the twelfth century. It houses within it the tomb of
Speaker 1: Sir Edward waldergrave supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots and
Speaker 1: one of the many victims of the Great Tower of London.
Speaker 1: After upsetting Elizabeth, the first Sir Edward was banished to
Speaker 1: the Tower in fifteen fifty eight, where he would die
Speaker 1: three years later. The Rectory was built in eighteen sixty
Speaker 1: three by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis, who lived there
Speaker 1: with his wife and twelve children. Looking at old photographs
Speaker 1: of the house, it is no exaggeration to describe it
Speaker 1: as a place of intense atmosphere. Designed in a Neo
Speaker 1: Gothic style, it was described as being built from red
Speaker 1: brick and stone. The doors thick and heavy, with some
Speaker 1: of the windows iron barred, giving parts of the house
Speaker 1: a rather prison like appearance, and despite the relative vastness
Speaker 1: of the grounds, the house was almost entirely surrounded by trees,
Speaker 1: shrouding most of the property in an ever present shadow.
Speaker 1: With Henry having passed away in eighteen ninety two and
Speaker 1: then later his son Harry in nineteen twenty two, the
Speaker 1: house was effectively abandoned and left to fall into disrepair.
Speaker 1: Over time, the gloomy red brick Rectory succumbed inevitably to
Speaker 1: the ravages of nature. The garden was left to grow wild,
Speaker 1: all but reclaiming the house as its own. The pipes
Speaker 1: rusted as rats took up residency in the walls and
Speaker 1: under the floorboards, and as the frequent rains lashed down
Speaker 1: during one of the harshest of winters, the roof had
Speaker 1: finally given way. Without regular use, the only water supply,
Speaker 1: provided by a well, began to rot and grew stagnant,
Speaker 1: and so the property remained until the summer of nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty eight. After spending a number of years working as
Speaker 1: a missionary in India, the Reverend guy Eric Smith and
Speaker 1: his wife Mabel had decided to return to their homeland.
Speaker 1: So when the opportunity came up to take on the
Speaker 1: rectory at Bawley, it seemed almost too good to be true.
Speaker 1: After all, the quiet ideal of a small English country
Speaker 1: village was exactly what they had been yearning for. On
Speaker 1: arriving at the property, the Smiths met with an immediate
Speaker 1: sense of foreboding. It would seem they had been quite
Speaker 1: unprepared for the extent of the disrepair. The surrounding trees
Speaker 1: all but blocked out the sun entirely, and with the
Speaker 1: condition of the roof and the dilapidated heating system. Only
Speaker 1: a handful of the twenty three rooms were actually habitable. Undeterred,
Speaker 1: the plucky couple moved in and set about transforming their
Speaker 1: new home. What followed next, as later described by the Smiths,
Speaker 1: would amount to nothing less than the darkest years of
Speaker 1: their life. Are you always taking care of your family?
Speaker 1: Do you often take care of others and not yourself?
Speaker 1: Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make
Speaker 1: time for you. You deserve it. Teledoc gives you access
Speaker 1: to a licensed therapist to help you get back to
Speaker 1: feeling your best, to feeling like yourself again. With teledoc,
Speaker 1: you can speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video.
Speaker 1: Therapy appointments are available seven days a week from seven
Speaker 1: am to nine pm local time. If you feel overwhelmed sometimes,
Speaker 1: maybe you feel stressed or anxious, depressed or lonely, or
Speaker 1: you might be struggling with a personal or family issue,
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Speaker 1: Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's t e l
Speaker 1: a d s com slash Unexplained podcast. It began with footsteps,
Speaker 1: a strange shuffling sound that seemed to drag itself about
Speaker 1: the house, followed by strange studs and knocks. When the
Speaker 1: Smiths attempted to move away into the other rooms, the
Speaker 1: footsteps merely followed them. However, there was always one room,
Speaker 1: known as the Blue Room, that seemed to generate the
Speaker 1: most noise. Although a man of faith, the Reverend was
Speaker 1: not about to succumb to the notion of ghosts in
Speaker 1: his house. Convinced the footsteps must belong to an unwelcome
Speaker 1: but very human visitor, the Reverend stayed up all night
Speaker 1: with a hockey stick in an attempt to catch the
Speaker 1: unwanted guest. Sure Enough, after waiting a few hours, the
Speaker 1: sound of the footsteps could be heard out in the hallway,
Speaker 1: getting closer before stopping outside his room. Much to his horror,
Speaker 1: the steps then proceeded into the room, despite not having
Speaker 1: a body to go with them. As the footsteps neared,
Speaker 1: Reverend Smith swung the hockey stick wildly, but found only
Speaker 1: the emptiness of thin air, as was common for many
Speaker 1: buildings of such size, All twenty three rooms had been
Speaker 1: rigged up to a bell system that linked back to
Speaker 1: the servant quarters. Not long after the couple moved in,
Speaker 1: the bells could be heard ringing throughout the house at
Speaker 1: all hours of the night and day, the phenomena being
Speaker 1: all the more extraordinary since not only were Guy and
Speaker 1: Mabel Smith the only occupiers in the twenty three roomed house,
Speaker 1: but most of the bell system had long since disintegrated.
Speaker 1: One afternoon, Missus Smith decided to investigate the house's many
Speaker 1: hidden nooks and crannies. On entering the library, she became
Speaker 1: intrigued by a vast Victorian bookcase that stretched from one
Speaker 1: wall to the other, with the bottom half separated into cupboards.
Speaker 1: Examining the cupboards, Mabel came across a small round package. Slowly,
Speaker 1: she started to unwrap the paper and was horrified to
Speaker 1: find inside the skull of a young woman. Hoping that
Speaker 1: in some way the skull had been linked to the disturbances,
Speaker 1: the reverend had the skull buried in a nearby graveyard,
Speaker 1: but was later forced to dig it up when the
Speaker 1: strange incidences seemed only to intensify afterwards. Shortly after, the
Speaker 1: couple began to notice that a light could often be
Speaker 1: seen emanating from a far off room in the house
Speaker 1: that was known to be empty and perhaps most unnerving
Speaker 1: of all, one summer afternoon, where mister Smith was walking
Speaker 1: through the house, he began to hear strange sounds, as
Speaker 1: if someone was whispering over his head. He described the
Speaker 1: noise as soft and sibilant, but spoken with urgency and
Speaker 1: ending in muttering sounds. There was no doubting to the
Speaker 1: reverend that it was the voice of a woman, But
Speaker 1: even more was to come. Unable to look after the
Speaker 1: rectory alone, the couple employed a young maid from London
Speaker 1: to help out in the house. The maid had only
Speaker 1: been working two days when she spotted something odd in
Speaker 1: the garden. It was a young woman who appeared to
Speaker 1: be dressed like a nun, walking across the bottom of
Speaker 1: the grounds. When her calls to the woman were ignored,
Speaker 1: the maid approached the figure but was horrified to see
Speaker 1: it melt away into the trees right before her eyes.
Speaker 1: The following day, she handed in her notice and promptly
Speaker 1: returned to London. By now it was clear to guiand
Speaker 1: Mabel that something was clearly a miss. It was only
Speaker 1: then that they learned the full truth about Balley Rectory.
Speaker 1: Not only had the previous occupiers frequently spoken of strange
Speaker 1: sightings and sounds heard about the house, but that as
Speaker 1: many as twelve clergyman had turned down the opportunity to
Speaker 1: take on the rectory prior to mister and missus Smith,
Speaker 1: all of them too afraid to live in the famous
Speaker 1: haunted house. And as for the Blue Room, which appeared
Speaker 1: to be the source for most of the strange noises,
Speaker 1: that was the place in which both previous owners had died.
Speaker 1: At their wits end. The couple famously called in the
Speaker 1: help of the Daily Mirror newspaper as well as the
Speaker 1: Society for Psychical Research, and it is at this point
Speaker 1: that Harry Price enters the scene. What happened next has
Speaker 1: been the topic of intense speculation and often ridicule, as
Speaker 1: many sought to profit from the unfortunate couple's extraordinary experiences.
Speaker 1: For subsequent publicity only intensified the stress upon Mabel and George,
Speaker 1: and the couple vacated the property in nineteen twenty nine,
Speaker 1: moving to the relative serenity of the seaside town of
Speaker 1: Cromer in Norfolk. And as for the house itself, it
Speaker 1: was destroyed by fire under suspicious circumstances in nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 1: For a spooky and quietly menacing look at the subsequent
Speaker 1: events involving the controversial Harry Price, I can recommend The
Speaker 1: Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring to while away a few
Speaker 1: sleepless nights. But for me it is the accounts of
Speaker 1: the plainly innocent and reputable mister and Missus Smith, taken
Speaker 1: before all the noise that followed, that is the most fascinating. Clearly,
Speaker 1: they had no desire to profit from their ordeal, and
Speaker 1: nor did they so what then exactly did they hear?
Speaker 1: And in the case of the unfortunate maid from London
Speaker 1: see On one dark December night in two thousand and two,
Speaker 1: a phone call was placed to a police station in Surrey,
Speaker 1: in the south of England. It was an anxious member
Speaker 1: of the public calling to report a horrific car crash
Speaker 1: that they had witnessed that night. Whilst traveling southbound along
Speaker 1: the A three towards the town of Guildford. They had
Speaker 1: seen a car lose control at high speed before spinning
Speaker 1: violent off the road. Moments later, more calls were taken
Speaker 1: from many different witnesses reporting the exact same thing. A
Speaker 1: number of police were immediately dispatched and promptly arrived at
Speaker 1: the scene. Only they couldn't find any trace of the incident.
Speaker 1: That was until one officer, who had been searching the
Speaker 1: nearby undergrowth, stumbled upon a smashed up maroon Vauxhall Astra,
Speaker 1: nose down in a ditch, but something was off. Shining
Speaker 1: his torch into the driver's side of the car, the
Speaker 1: officer received a terrible Fright there, sat in his seat
Speaker 1: was the driver of the vehicle, reduced to the bare
Speaker 1: bones of his skeleton. The car had indeed spun off
Speaker 1: the road, as reported, but it certainly hadn't happened that night.
Speaker 1: In fact, the police later discovered that the driver of
Speaker 1: the vehicle had been declared missing almost six months before.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that, rather than seeing the actual moment
Speaker 1: of the accident, the witnesses had in fact seemed kind
Speaker 1: of echo of the event, or maybe something even stranger.
Speaker 1: When we think of time, we tend to picture a
Speaker 1: clock or a set of numbers with which to reference
Speaker 1: our day. We may say that time is the aging
Speaker 1: of things, or talk about the passing of time. We
Speaker 1: see it in the revolutions of the earth or the
Speaker 1: rising and setting of the sun. And yet this isn't
Speaker 1: time in any meaningful sense, but rather how we frame
Speaker 1: it in the absence of the actual thing itself. In
Speaker 1: the mid nineteen sixties, John Wheeler and Bryce de Witt,
Speaker 1: two physicists from Princeton and the University of North Carolina,
Speaker 1: came up with an extraordinary idea. Together, they had devised
Speaker 1: no less than a possible framework to marry the seeming
Speaker 1: incompatibility of Einstein's theories of relativity and the mechanations of
Speaker 1: the quantum world. Now known as the Wheeler DeWitt equation,
Speaker 1: its implications are staggering. What Wheeler and de Witt potentially
Speaker 1: discovered was that the only way to make the two
Speaker 1: worlds compatible was to do away completely with the notion
Speaker 1: of time, that the fundamental description of the universe was
Speaker 1: in fact timeless. If such a thing were to be true,
Speaker 1: you might rightly assume that the past, present, and future
Speaker 1: is nothing but an illusion. That the only thing that
Speaker 1: is real is the whole of it, existing constantly. As
Speaker 1: one might, it be possible that the ghosts of Ballyrectory,
Speaker 1: and perhaps all ghosts for that matter, rather than being
Speaker 1: the spirits of the dead, are in fact the bodies
Speaker 1: of the very much alive, existing alongsiders in another time. Perhaps,
Speaker 1: if we were so blessed, we might imagine ourselves like
Speaker 1: Kurt Vonnegut's fictional characters, the Trialphamadurians, creatures who have evolved
Speaker 1: to be able to see it's only the present, but
Speaker 1: the entirety of everything that has been and will ever be.
Speaker 1: In a quote tentatively attributed to the Australian author Christina Stead,
Speaker 1: it is said that every love story is a ghost story.
Speaker 1: But might it be more correct to say that every
Speaker 1: story is a ghost story? That every tale we tell
Speaker 1: is something that has once passed, yet somehow remains. And
Speaker 1: isn't all of life really just a story that we
Speaker 1: tell each other, whether it be shared by memory or
Speaker 1: through the very genetic imprint of our blood. And when
Speaker 1: or if all stories were to finally disappear, we might
Speaker 1: hope that somewhere still a ghostly imprint will remain. But
Speaker 1: if indeed there is no such thing as time, and
Speaker 1: nothing ever truly dies, then really there would be no
Speaker 1: ghosts only us existing together Forever. All elements of Unexplained
Speaker 1: are produced by me, Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and
Speaker 1: rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get
Speaker 1: in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories
Speaker 1: you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation
Speaker 1: of your own you'd like to share. You can reach
Speaker 1: us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter
Speaker 1: at Unexplained Pod. Now. It's time to take care of yourself.
Speaker 1: To make time for you, teledoc gives you access to
Speaker 1: a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling
Speaker 1: your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or
Speaker 1: video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time,
Speaker 1: seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most
Speaker 1: insurance or employers. Download the app or visit telldoc dot com.
Speaker 1: Forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get start. That's t
Speaker 1: e l a d oc dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast