News From The Nutters: No, This Photograph Is NOT The Phantom Nun Of Borley Rectory – Behave Yourselves!

Over at the Spooky Isle website, which is to objectivity in paranormal research what Donald Trump is to mature adult politics (although not as bad as The Fortean Times – the basis of The Quibber in the Harry Potter series), they claim to have a photograph of a ghost. Again.

Not any old ghost, but the phantom nun which haunted Borley Rectory in Essex until it was burned down in an insurance fraud by William Hart Gregson (a convicted slum landlord, a leading member of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and an associate of Harry Price – the former fraud medium buster of the Daily Mirror long accused of embellishing events there to make himself rich and famous). The legend goes that the nun along with the other ghosts crossed the road to reside in the local church thereafter.

For those Simmers wondering what Borley Rectory was all about, go here.

The photographer in question, Jonathan Moor of Ludlow, claims to have taken the picture during an expedition in the summer of 1986 while visiting sites containing monumental brasses in Suffolk as a member of the Monumental Brass Society §.

This would not of course be the first photo from Borley, and it isn’t the first which would be wishful thinking either.

Moor claims:

‘Looking at it a year later, having been tucked away in a book, standing in front of one of the topiary bushes is the unmistakable figure of a nun. You can see the face eyes, nose mouth wimple, gorget and mantle. From where I was standing I would estimate her to be about 5′ 6″ in height.outline. Clearly I saw nothing when I took the photo but I’ve just looked at it again and the figure is still there. Or is it wishful thinking? I don’t think it is.’

Here’s the photo, judge for yourself:

Yes, you can’t see anything either, can you?

It’s like the picture of the tabby cat camouflaged by its markings which Black Pearl Sims (RIP) put up on the forum years ago to drive its members mad. Except the cat was there.

Let Jazz-Hands help you.

‘Seeing’ a ghost in such cases is dependent on how much you are susceptible to pareidolia, which is seeing other things in unconnected objects because of the way your brain is wired to detect patterns. It has long been an endless source of amusement to low brow media digestors with Jesus in those potatoes and tomatoes which were not in amusing shapes of human genitalia (this is almost a sport in the British Isles. Pity us).

Those with Lewy Body dementia see all kinds of wacky stuff in near enough everything, which at least makes their lives interesting if they reside in one of those towns or cities where architect graduates from the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe school of soulless grey concrete cubes have been given free reign to turn municipalities into Soviet Union theme parks.

But seeing anything in the above is really reaching. There’s as much a case for there being a giant floating skull right next to the ‘nun’.

Monumental Brass Society? Monumental Brass Neck Society more like it.

Oh well, if it keeps Jonathan Moor from phoning up the Daily Express to complain about there being too much sex on television and complaining to the Radio Times about a ‘love romp’, perhaps it is best to leave him to his hobby of finding non-existent ghosts on old photographs and vigorously rubbing others brasses.

§ If you have ever played the game Skyrim and done the Thieves Guild quest ‘Hard Answers’ where you have to do a charcoal rubbing of Calcelmo’s Falmer Rosetta Stone, you’ll get the gist of these people. They go around rubbing brasses the same way others spot trains. It’s a British thing for the sort of people who wear anoraks and carry flasks around with them everywhere who refuse to accept brass or stone rubbing has been long rendered obsolete in the era of digital photography where you can take microscopically detailed pictures which don’t cause wear and tear to valuable old artifacts the way rubbing does.