Lore - Episode 85: Creature of Habit

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Our home is supposed to be a safe space where we are free to relax and enjoy life. History, though, contains stories that break that mould. Places where people want to live in peace, and yet find themselves at odds with forces beyond their control. And if there’s a logical reason, it might very well be buried in the past. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com Access premium content!: https://www.lorepodcast.com/support See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We spend a significant amount of our lives inside some sort of dwelling. Maybe it's that bedroom in the home you're growing up in, or your apartment, or the house you and your spouse bought last year. Most people have a place to stay, and they call that place their home. A lot can happen in a home. Some of it can be wonderful, but I'm fully aware that for many, home can also be the epicenter for tragedy and pain. It's a tricky location, where we have the potential to feel comfortable and safe, and

yet none of that is guaranteed. In December of 1975, the Lutz family purchased a home on Long Island, and learned right away that home isn't always the safe haven we imagine it to be. In fact, events in the house became so dark and unbearable that the family packed up and left just four weeks later. The reason? They claimed to have been assaulted by unexplainable forces almost from the moment they moved in. Disembodied voices, moving objects, even physical violence, all from an unknown, unseen source.

It was enough to drive them away for good. It turns out their idyllic suburban home had been the setting for a grisly scene just one year before. Six members of the DeFeo family were murdered while they slept. Like any of us, they assumed they were safe inside their home, but the brutal reality of life has a way of creeping in from time to time, with horrifying results. We want to feel safe, but at the end of the day, these places we call home are nothing more than a setting for every aspect of life, rest and joy and celebration for sure, but

also a fair amount of pain and disappointment. Home is a place of both light and darkness. It seems counterintuitive, I know, but sometimes the safest place to be also has the potential to be the most frightening. I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Nothing but a skeleton remained by the time they first arrived. Henry and his wife had been expecting to find more, but it had simply wasted away until nothing but the bones survived.

Judging by the decay, it would have even been a stretch to call it a house, let alone their future home. Two decades before, in 1841, the entire structure had burned to the ground, leaving nothing but a scattering of stone walls to hint at its former glory, like bones left behind after the years have consumed a corpse. There was no roof, no doors or windows, just a husk of what once was, but it was where they wanted to live. The land had been in Henry's family for nearly three centuries.

Only given to the Walgrey family back in the 1500s, so when his appointment to the very same parish came across his desk in 1861, he jumped at the chance. He and his wife Carolyn moved to the village a short while later, and it was upon their arrival that they discovered the house was uninhabitable. But a home had been prepared for them. It was an old farmhouse nearby that also sat on Henry's ancestral land, and until very recently had been used as the dwelling place for his predecessor, the rector of the local church.

With nowhere else to go, the reverend Henry Bull turned the carriage around and headed there instead. Almost immediately, though, he began to plan how he would rebuild the burnt-out building and turn it into a manor worthy of his heritage. He did it, too. It took a year, but the ruins were demolished and a new home was raised on its foundation. It was large and stately, and looked less like a rectory than the noble house of a local lord, and Henry fit right in.

He was said to spend as little time as possible in his clerical robes, preferring instead to hunt and box, and his friends called him the old bull, hinting at his tough exterior. It all sounds idyllic, and for a while it was, but then the legends began to catch up with the Bull family. Long before Henry and Carolyn had arrived, there had already been whispers of something unusual around the house. It was a very specific sighting, and the details were repeated over and over by the people who witnessed it.

The figure of a nun, they said, could often be seen moving across the property, but if you approached her, she would vanish. Henry fought the rumors for a long while. He was a practical man with an imposing presence. He was athletic and rational and a man of the church, and he had no time for silly stories of ghostly nuns, even if they were set on his own land. But that changed a year or two after moving in, when he himself witnessed the nun with his own eyes.

He wasn't alone, either. Guests in the house reported seeing the dark figure as well. They also reported another strange vision on the grounds, a shadowy carriage that would roll along the edge of the grounds before vanishing into the trees. And with 14 children, the Bull family had a lot of potential witnesses, one of which was a young man named Shaw Jeffrey, a friend of their oldest son, Harry. In the summer of 1885, Jeffrey described an unusual event. He had been using a dictionary from the Bull's library while he stayed there for a time,

but one day the book went missing. The house was searched, but it never turned up. Then one night while Jeffrey slept in his room, a loud thump woke him, and he scrambled to light a candle and see what it could be. There on the floor lay the missing book. His door, however, had been locked. Henry Bull passed away in his bedroom, affectionately known as the Blue Room, in June of 1892, but the family stayed in the home.

By then, his son Harry had followed in the same career path and managed to take over as rector of Henry's church in town. It was poetic in a way, like father, like son, but the absence of the old Bull possibly opened the door for new, darker experiences. The day after Henry's death, his daughter Ethel awoke in the night to find the dark figure of a man standing over her bed. It was the first of many nightly visions in her room, and she wasn't alone in her experiences. One of the young women hired to care for the youngest of the children claimed that just

weeks after arriving, she heard footsteps outside her bedroom during the night, when no one confessed to playing a trick on her. She quit. Years later, Ethel and two of her sisters were outside during a garden party when they looked up to see a woman walking down the path along the edge of the property. Her head was bowed low, but she was dressed in the easily recognizable habit of a nun. When one of the women tried chasing after the figure, the nun turned toward her briefly and then instantly vanished.

They weren't alone in their sightings, either. Apparently, young Harry inherited more than his father's occupation and title. According to a story he passed on to some of his colleagues, he too came to experience the ghostly nun for himself. But it wasn't something he enjoyed, if the tale is true. One late afternoon, he told them, he left the church to walk home as the sun was fading. At some point, a noise behind him caught his attention, and he turned to discover someone was following him.

Not just anyone, though. No, this was a nun, head bowed low and dressed in black. Not knowing what else to do, Harry walked faster and headed down the lane toward his house. When he finally reached his front door, he paused and looked back. The nun was closer now, and she appeared to be headed straight toward him as if she were coming to visit the house. For a moment, he forced himself to find a rational explanation.

Surely, it was just a visiting nun who had missed him at the church and been sent to find him at home. But why, then, had she never once called out for attention? Staying in his open doorway, he briefly considered stepping aside and letting her in, but fear drove him in a different direction. After casting one last glance at the dark, silent figure that was fast approaching, he stepped inside, slammed the door shut, and then waited. When moments passed without the sound of a visitor knocking, Harry reached for the door's

handle, and pulled it open wide. The path that led to the front door was empty. In 1911, Harry moved out of the house his father had built 50 years before in the English village of Borley. He said it was because he'd gotten married, but it's a bit suspicious that he, the rector of the local church, had moved out of the rectory and left it for his mother and siblings. It's almost as if he'd been running from something. And honestly, can you blame him?

Sightings of the Phantom Nun continued for years. While the while more and more servants came to work at the house, only to leave after some unsettling experience drove them away. One of those people was the family cook, a woman named Miss Newman. If her story is true, it's beyond unsettling. According to Newman, she slept in a very large bedroom that had been divided in half by a curtain. She slept on the side of the room with the door, while the other half, the one with

the window, was intended for a roommate. On the wall, just on the other side of the curtain, was a row of hooks that she used for hanging things like clothes. One night, Newman was pulled from sleep by something she couldn't quite put a finger on. The other half of the room was unoccupied at the time, and there was no noise in the room. And yet, something bothered her.

That's when she glanced at the part of the curtain near the hooks on the wall, and saw a shape move. She later described it as if someone were standing at the hooks, rummaging through her clothes. She could see the silhouette of whoever it was thanks to the moonlight pouring in through the window, and could even see her clothing move on their hooks. Suspecting another of the servants had somehow snuck into her room to steal from her, she quietly climbed out of bed and crept over to the end of the curtain.

Then, with a quick movement, she yanked the curtain back to reveal the intruder. But there was no one there. Harry and his wife eventually moved back to the rectory in 1920. They lived there for another seven years in much the same way his father and mother had before them. Then in 1928, Harry passed away. In the very same bedroom his father had died in 35 years before, and the stately brick rectory went empty for a while.

That's because the church had a hard time filling the position. Harry had been the rector there for a long time, as had his father before him, and over the decades those unusual tales from inside the house had managed to leak out and spread. When the church set out to find a replacement for Harry, they discovered it was almost impossible to find someone who hadn't already heard about the hauntings. Each and every one of them refused. Finally, in early 1929, the reverend Eric Smith volunteered to take the position there in Borley.

He might have been the perfect candidate for the job, sure, but he and his wife Mabel had also never interacted with Harry or any of the others who'd whispered stories about the house. They arrived blind and unaware of what they'd gotten themselves into. Not long after they moved in, the Smiths were awoken in the night by the sound of the bell ringing at the front door. Eric pulled on his robe and made his way quickly to see who might have come, but when he arrived, no one was there.

He glanced around outside and even made a quick search of the inside of the house, but finally gave up. After climbing back into bed a short while later, the bell sounded again. Just as before, the front steps were still empty. This went on for some time, and even expanded into other parts of the house, sometimes with the interior bells used by servants ringing on their own. Eventually, though, Smith and his wife decided to get help, so they reached out to the local newspaper for someone who might be able to come and investigate it all for them, to bring

an outsider's perspective and a fresh eye. And that's how Harry Price got involved in the experiences at the rectory. He was a paranormal investigator with an established reputation for uncovering frauds and people trying to gain fame from fakery. So when he arrived in the summer of 1929, he asked if he could stay in the house with the Smiths for a few days. They welcomed him in, and he began the process of observing and investigating the things that he witnessed.

Apparently, it didn't take long before Price had his own encounter with the ghostly nun. He even tried chasing after her, but claimed that she vanished right before his eyes. On another occasion, all three of them were standing outside the house together when a pane of glass fell out of a window from the unoccupied top floor. After dashing up the stairs to see who had done it, they found the entire floor empty. Price went on to describe how he and the Smiths slowly descended the staircase, frustrated by the lack of evidence of an intruder. They were, in fact, the only people in the house, and that top floor was nothing more

than an unused attic, so it was all a bit bizarre. Then, as they were nearing the bottom of the stairs to the first floor, a red glass candlestick that belonged in the blue room, the bedroom at the top of the stairs where both Henry and Harry Bull had passed away, somehow managed to fly out and down the stairwell. After nearly striking one of them in the head, it shattered into hundreds of blood red pieces. To Harry Price, this was evidence he simply couldn't ignore. It would spark a love affair between him and the house that would last for many years. The Smiths, however, had experienced enough.

They quickly packed up their belongings, locked the house, and then moved to a new home a bit closer to the church. The borly rectory had won. The Smiths would never return. They would never return. They would never return. Eric Smith's replacement at the church and rectory was no stranger to Borley. In fact, he had visited a number of times in the past.

Lionel Foyster might not have been descended from the great Walgrey family as Henry and Harry Bull had, but his older cousin had been Henry's wife, Carolyn. From the very moment Lionel and his wife Mary Ann moved in, the Borley rectory was old and familiar. The Foysters immediately began to experience the same types of unusual events that the Bulls and Smiths had before them. Lionel told the story of how early on in their stay there, the front door opened and someone walked in.

Mary Ann, assuming that Lionel had come home from work, came down to greet him, only to see the figure of a large man in an old dressing gown walking up toward her. When she later described the man to her husband, he was convinced it had been Henry Bull. On another occasion, a couple was upstairs getting ready for bed when something hard flew out of the darkness and struck Mary Ann in the face, cutting her skin and giving her a black eye. And it wasn't the first or last time that objects would move about their home. Books had been seen moving off of shelves.

Bells rang in odd parts of the house, and other items would just disappear entirely. A few nights after Mary Ann had been struck by the floating object, the couple went to bed and turned off the lights, only to hear things moving around their room in the dark. They could hear objects collide with the wall or floor, as if someone were standing in the corner, tossing books, trying to hit them in bed. After a relatively large collision just above Mary Ann's head, Lionel turned on the lamp and discovered it had been the steel head of a hammer that someone, or something, had broken off its handle.

It had all become a bit too much to deal with, and so Lionel decided to lean on his experience as the spiritual leader of his church and prepared to conduct an exorcism right there in his home. He reached out to a friend, another nearby rector, and traveled most of the day to pick him up and bring him home. When both men returned to the house the next day, bottles of holy water in their hands, they found Mary Ann crying at the foot of the stairs. Something, she said, had flown out of another room and struck her in the neck while they'd

been outside. The two men didn't waste any time and began the exorcism that very moment, moving from room to room as they did. But if there really were demonic forces in the house, they were not about to go quietly. Lionel later described how objects were thrown at them as they worked. Mary Ann seemed to be the focus of their attacks, but both men were also struck by flying items. Entire bookshelves were dumped into rooms with no one in them, and a number of the framed photos hanging in the front hall were dropped on the floor.

It was as if their efforts to expel the spirits of the house had only angered them more, and they were fighting back with destruction and chaos. Much of the activity seemed to come from the vicinity of the blue room, although no part of the house remained untouched. They even discovered writing on the wall of one of the upstairs bedrooms, but no one knew how it got there. One of the messages was chilling. Mary Ann, it said.

Please get help. Over the years to come, these unusual experiences would become typical for the foisters. But before you tell yourself that these were the rantings of a very eccentric couple, it's important to note that even their house guests witnessed it. Once, with friends visiting from out of town, everyone noticed the smell of smoke in the air. When they each saw it pouring in from the hallway, they rushed out to find its source. After searching the house, they unlocked the door to an unused bedroom, only to discover

a fire burning at the foot of the far wall. As if fires inside locked rooms weren't unusual enough, there was also no logical reason for the fire to be there in the first place. The room had no stove or fireplace, and the window had been shut tight. The fire had just appeared. After five years in the borly rectory, the foisters began to fall apart. Mary Ann apparently left Lionel and married another man, but without getting a divorce. And there were rumors that she might actually have been legally married to someone else

prior to her marriage with Lionel. She and her new husband moved to Ipswich, while Lionel stayed on and managed the church on his own. In 1935, Lionel Foister collapsed while preaching one Sunday morning. Needing someone to care for him, he actually moved in with Mary Ann and her new husband. But other things were collapsing too. Word spread about her infidelity, and it acted like acid, eating away at her credibility as a witness to the events inside the borly rectory. Some claimed that she made the whole thing up, that she took the stories she had heard

from the Bull family when she had visited them years before, and simply repackaged and enhanced them as a way of torturing her husband. But Lionel was quick to point out that the stories existed long before Mary Ann ever set foot in the house, and they persisted even after she moved away. I'll be honest, it's easy to believe the stories. With dozens of sightings and experiences spanning 75 years, three families, and countless visitors and staff, it's no wonder so many people did their best to avoid that house. As crazy as it might have seemed at the time, most people connected to the borly rectory

seemed to come to the same conclusion. Everything just might be true. Home, sweet home. That's the pitch we've been sold for as long as we can remember. Home is where the heart is, where we build our lives and our futures, where we can truly be ourselves and feel safe. Thankfully, that's true a lot of the time, but not always. Every now and then, a story comes along that challenges those notions.

Most of the time, it's us, those flawed humans in the middle of the story, that disrupt the peace in our homes. We are a creature of habit, after all, but out there on the fringes of the bell chart, where the remotest of possibilities meets the general population, sometimes unusual things happen. History backs this up, too. Scattered among the pages of the past, hidden between tales of normal idyllic life, are events that break the rules and leave us with more questions than answers, objects that seem to move on their own, sounds that echo from uninhabited parts of the house, messages from

an unknown source. These things aren't supposed to happen, and yet they have, and right in the middle of our homes. Most of us, though, aren't being chased by ghostly nuns, something we can all be glad for, I'm sure, but it's one of those details that makes the events at the Borley Rectory so unique and intriguing. The story seems to have more than just noise and chaos. It has character.

On one level, the Borley Rectory was no different from a lot of homes. It was full of life and the laughter of children. Harry Bull grew up there with 13 siblings, after all. But it also played host to its fair share of tragedy. Two generations of rectors died there. Marriages fell apart there. It was life, with all its typical ups and downs. Lionel Feuster was the last rector to ever live in that house.

Those who came after him in the decade since 1935 have all chosen to live elsewhere in town, and I can't really blame them for that. In February of 1939, a fire broke out in the empty house, burning everything but the brick exterior walls. When it was over, it looked a lot like the ruins Henry Bull first saw in 1861. Things had come full circle, it seems. That didn't mean the story was over, though. During the fire, witnesses claimed they saw dark shapes moving through the house.

Afterward, neighbors and people passing by reported seeing a figure standing in one of the upstairs windows, which was impossible because there was no longer a floor there to stand on. Oh, and the room beyond that window? It was the blue room, of course. In the decade since the fire, dozens of witnesses have seen the familiar shape of a nun walking past the edge of the property, along the path that some locals still refer to as the nuns walk.

Curious tourists and paranormal investigators alike are drawn to Borley every year, like moths to a flame. I'm not sure they ever leave fully satisfied. Even Harry Price couldn't stay away from Borley for long. He spent nearly 15 years returning off and on, but it became more and more difficult once the house had been locked up and abandoned. Four years after the fire, though, he paid the ruins another visit and ended up in the center of it all, digging into what would have been the cellar of the house.

He found something, too. A fragment of human skull and a full jawbone. After taking them to a pathologist for analysis, they estimated the bones came from a woman, no older than 30 years of age. Quite the unusual discovery to make beneath the ruins of a rectory. But there might be an explanation why. According to Price, all the way back in 1667, a French woman named Marie Laird traveled to England to marry one of the Walgraves there in Borley.

If you don't remember, the Walgraves were the famous local family who owned the land the rectory would later be built on. Things didn't go well for Marie, though, and according to legend, she was killed a short while later by her suitor. If the story is true, it might very well explain why the bones of a young woman were discovered there nearly three centuries later. In the process, it also sheds new light on the rectory's biggest mystery of all. Marie Laird, you see, was more than just a young woman lured away from France by the

dream of true love. She was also a former nun. The Borley Rectory is not the only house to be invaded by unseen forces. The Lutz family from today's introduction are another example. But while I might have only hinted at it, there's a lot more to what they experienced in 1975. Stick around after this short break to learn more. Stories like that of the Lutz family from the beginning of today's episode have a way of capturing our attention.

A house that seemed to be haunted by the violent murders that took place inside it. Or maybe something else. Perhaps it was something older and darker that caused the suffering of both families. It's difficult to say. But what George and Kathy Lutz claimed to have experienced during that month in 1975 was far from normal and impossible to rationalize away. And much of it centers around their five-year-old daughter, Missy. According to the family, Missy invented a new invisible friend after they moved in.

And that's not unusual for a child her age, but it was the details she revealed about this friend that caused her parents to wonder. It wasn't an invisible human or a made-up pet that followed her around the house. No, she said it was a pig. A pig that walked on two legs. A pig that had red eyes. Once after learning that Missy had opened her bedroom window and climbed out onto the roof, Kathy rushed to pull her daughter back inside.

Then, as she closed the window, she claimed to have seen a strange reflection in the glass. She said it looked like a pair of glowing red eyes. On a separate occasion, George looked up from the yard one night to see Missy standing in her bedroom window looking back down at him. Beside her, though, was something else. George later described it as a pig-like creature. She rushed up to check on her, though. She was asleep in bed.

If their story sounds familiar, that's because it was eventually adapted into a novel, and then a blockbuster horror film, both by the same name, eventually becoming one of the most successful horror stories of all time. Whether it was all fact, all fiction, or some blend of the two, it's become the quintessential story about a safe space invaded by the unknown. The Amityville Horror Maybe we have the Lutz family to thank, or perhaps it's the countless other stories that have been told over the centuries.

But even today, it's hard to hear a thump in the house and not stop to wonder. Sure, it could be nothing. But what if it's something more? This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research help from Marsette Crockett and Carl Nellis, and music by Chad Lawson. If you're new around here, this is my friendly reminder that Lore is a lot more than just bi-weekly audio stories.

There is an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more. You can learn about everything over in one place, theworldoflore.com slash now. And hey, if you're a social media sort of person, you can also follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word,

and then click that follow button. When you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening. Thank you.