The car shuddered, convulsed and strained to a halt, the engine still moaning while we panicked. My companion and driver, a pallid former proto-yuppie, reversed with his foot firmly down. Only then did we see that, in the gloom, the force that had thwarted our ghostbusting was not supernatural but a chain fence.
While I subsided into giggles, my friend sighed with relief. We then regrouped and, on foot, headed back towards our goal, which lay just beyond the fence: the parish church of Borley, a sparsely populated English village in the eastern county of Essex.
I'd seen a photograph of the church in an almanac of haunted houses, which made it look like Castle Dracula. In reality, it seemed round and reassuring, aside from the profusion of bats in the topiary, which made us both laugh hysterically. Later, over a drink, we felt relieved but cheated to have found nothing outrageously weird. After all, Borley is to ghosts what Boracay is to white, sandy beaches.
The Borley story began in 1362, when Benedictine monks built a monastery on the future site of the rectory. According to legend one monk fell under the spell of a holy sister from a nearby nunnery. They planned to elope but were caught. Consequently, the monk was hanged and the nun bricked up alive in the walls of her retreat. Tunnels connected the two locations.
Fast forward 500 years from the monastery's creation, to when the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull became rector of Borley. The next year, he built a rambling mansion.
The first recorded ripple occurred in about 1885, when a visitor saw stone throwing and 'other poltergeist activity'. After that, a nun began appearing regularly. One of the reverend's daughters was woken by a slap in the face. Another saw the silhouette of an old man in a tall hat beside her bed.