This page addresses some of P. Shaw Jeffrey's experiences at Borley Rectory. To my knowledge, it was never mentioned which room in the Rectory that P. Shaw Jeffrey stayed in as a summer guest of Harry Bull, his college friend. I believe that Harry Bull grew up (and also died) in room 7 as indicated on the Sydney H. Glanville floor plan, room 7 being one of the better bedrooms in the Rectory in my opinion. I think that Harry Bull enticed P. Shaw Jeffrey to stay at the Rectory in the summer of 1885-86 by offering his room to Mr. Jeffrey. If this presumption is correct then the incidents concerning the French dictionary and the moved boots likely took place in room 7. (The French dictionary had dropped to the floor from out of nowhere one night. The boots were mysteriously moved from the floor to the top of the wardrobe on another night.)

The dictionary and the boots proved to be one of my more satisfying discoveries with respect to trying to make sense out of the grand scheme of the puzzle of the ghost nun's charades. I was drawing correspondences between other charades when it hit me how the dropped dictionary and the moved boots are arguably part of the same charade. Given some disembodied spirit had choreographed these incidents, I was stunned by the creativity involved. I want to tell you everything I know about this particular charade and I want to do it right.

You can go straight to the particulars of this charade if you're already familiar with the inside of the Rectory by clicking here. Or you can simply continue reading and take a picture tour from the road to room 7 to get a rough idea of P. Shaw Jeffrey's general impressions of the Rectory that summer. Shall we...

We're going to go inside the Rectory in a short while to see room 7, the "haunted room". But before we do so I have a few things for you to consider. Note that ghosts were sighted outside the Rectory as well as inside and some of you might have some reservations about getting too close to places where a ghost was spotted. And while I'm getting better at remembering where ghosts were seen at, if I forget to warn you about a particular spot that you're alreading standing at, well...sorry.

As a matter of fact, I don't believe there is any "neutral" way to approach the Rectory. Indeed, in a moment we're going to go through the gate which appears to the left of the bottom of the big tree in the middle of the picture. This was the Rectory's east gate. Note that the ghost nun was occasionally seen near one of the gate posts, seemingly leaning on it as if withdrawn and sad. I don't remember which post, if any, was mentioned. Although logic would dictate that we simply pass directly between the posts to avoid bumping into air, you should also know that Reverend Smith and his wife reported a phantom coach that came up the road and stopped right between the posts. But we'll deal with this. For right now let's talk about today's project.

As I have already mentioned, we're going to be heading for room 7, known as the "haunted room". We can see one of the two windows of room 7 in the above photograph. It is the leftmost window visible on the1st floor (the second level). room 7 must have been one of the nicer bedrooms in the Rectory as it was in the wing where the Bull Family actually lived. It was also second in size in this wing only to the master bedroom next to it. I believe that Room 7 belonged to Harry Bull, Rev. Henry Bull's oldest child and son.

It is important to note that I think that Harry was probably asked to occasionally give up his room as a friendly gesture for special guests and sleep somewhere else. I believe that one of those guests was a college student friend of Harry's, P. Shaw Jeffrey. If this assumption is correct then room 7 is the room where the famous French dictionary dropped to the floor from out of nowhere one summer night. The dictionary episode is exciting for me because it was the first incident that I started reading things into beyond what the Borley Rectory books mention about it. But for now, let's wind our way through the Rectory to room 7 and I'll continue the spook stories about it there.

Let's proceed through the gate and follow the drive to the Rectory's front door. Also, regardless that this little walk is going to take us uphill a bit let's proceed quickly through the gate and up the drive. We'll stop just before we reach the corner of the Rectory so that we can catch our breath.

We're almost there! But let's stop and catch our breath. You can see the arched front door that we're going to walk through in the lower part of the tower-like structure. But before we go on, notice the bricked up dining room window to the left of the front door. We're not going to discuss this mysterious window here but I'd like to point out something interesting.

Every time I look at this window I think that if the bricks that block up the window weren't there that I'd be able to step over the window sill and enter the building. But just how tall is this building?

That's Capt. Gregson posing in front of the bricked up window. He was the first private owner of the Rectory after Rev. Harry Bull had died. But he never moved into the Rectory because of the fire.

Note that Capt. Gregson's buttocks come up only as far as the window sill. The top of his head isn't even half the height of this window. And I was going to step over this window sill to enter the Rectory! The building was much taller than it looked.

(Also note that the caption indicates that the dining room was called the haunted room. This is incorrect. We are going to the haunted room which is room 7 upstairs.)

Let's now go to the front door and enter the Rectory. Note that a choir member went to the Rectory to meet with Rev. Harry Bull one time but saw that a "guest," a robed figure (perhaps the ghost nun), "entering" this door and so decided to meet with the Reverend at a later time. When this choir member later mentioned this guest to the Reverend, the Reverend said that he hadn't had a guest. Interestingly, the Reverend also mentioned that the ghost nun had been active that night.

Otherwise, note that there were never any mysterious knockings reported with respect to this door that I am aware of. In other words, the front door was never opened because a bell rang or a knock was heard on it but nobody was there when the door was opened.

(To my knowledge, no picture was ever taken specifically of the front door. Also note that most of these pictures of the inside of the Rectory seem to have been taken without flash, the photographer seemingly standing next to a window to take advantage of natural light in such cases.)

We find another door immediatly past the front door. This second door distinguises the tower-like structure that contains the front door from the rest of the Rectory. However, the tower was really never anything special although Marianne Foyster made the upper floor part of the tower into a tiny chapel when she and her husband lived in the Rectory.

As we start down this long hall I'm sorry if you find it a bit cool in here. Harry Price had noted that the Rectory was always rather cool inside. And regardless of its many fireplaces, Price had also noted the futility in trying to warm the place up.

Also, listen to your footsteps echo as you walk down this corridore. Can you imagine anybody entering or leaving the Rectory through the front door and not being noticed? And we don't find any doors until we get to the end of the hall, the door to the left , the door to the dining room, being the first door we come up to. (You can just barely see the moulding around the dining room door in the left part of the picture.)

As we near the other end of the entry hall please remember that want to go to Room 7 upstairs. So don't spend too much time with the next two pictures. Since we're passing first by the dining room door to our left and then the kitchen hallway door to the right, I wanted you to be able to "glance" through these doors. However, the only pictures that I know about that would be applicable for these views may be more confusing then they are informative. This is because they show more of the inside features of the Rectory than I've indicated in the captions.

This picture was actually taken from the kitchen. It looks down the kitchen hall and through the open dining room doorway where we're at. You can see a window straight across from this doorway (approximately in the middle of the picture). This window was a part of the bay window that overlooked the tennis court and the garden. If you really look hard out the window you can see the Stour River in the valley below and Sudbury on the other side of the river (just kidding).

This picture was actually taken from inside the dining room. It looks across the entry hall where we're at, down the kitchen hall and into both the kitchen and the "dairy" (aka pantry) beyond the kitchen. The pantry is actually to the right of the stairwell that you can just barely see in the distance (center of the picture). Note that the Rectory's mysterious servant bells (alleged to be self-ringing on occasion) would probably be visible in this shot of the kitchen hall if it weren't for the heavy shadows near the ceiling of the hall.

(I've copied the entry hall picture here so that we can easily remember where we were at.)

Note that as we enter the main stairwell area we are entering what is probably the Rectory's most notorious "hard hat" area. (This is one place where you would definitiely mount a web cam, one having a microphone. It also wouldn't be a bad idea to secure the cam with some sandbags - I'm not kidding.) The floorboards that you are now walking on are one clue as to why this area is so "sensitive". The cellar is below these floorboards. In fact, notice the door to the left of the arched opening you see in the distance, the door that opens into the now empty drawing room. I believe that the abandoned well that the nun fell down was located in the cellar below the floor boards in front of this drawing room door. In fact, directly above this door upstairs is where a very active cold spot was. In fact, it's where we're going now as the door to room 7 is only a few steps away from the cold spot. (This should give you a clue as to why room 7 was such a troublemaker.)

Let's now go up the stairs since there's at least nothing visible on the stairs at this time. Also, please watch your step on the stairs because the Foysters polished the wood when they moved into the Rectory so the steps are slick.

Note the coal stove near the base of the stairs. As I have already indicated, the Rectory was always though to be a bit cool. This stove probably helped to warm people wanting to get away from any commotion in the drawing room.

I hope you didn't feel any cold drafts on the stairwell. The drafts were known to cause candles to flicker.

Before we step onto the landing I will again remind you that the landing was a cold spot, being right above what I believe to be at least the edge of the abandoned murder well in the cellar. Just ignore it.

When you get to the top of the stairs this is your main impression of the landing is to the left. (You are not looking at the cold spot - you are now standing on the cold spot.) Note the stained window in the distance. I believe this window is a piece of plastic put in by Marianne Foyster when she converted the space to a small chapel. This window is in the entry "tower" and is directly above the Rectory's front door that we walked through a short while ago. Room 7 is to our right as we step on to the landing so let's have look to our right. (Room 7 is behind us with respect to the picture view.)

Also note the molding visible at the right side of the picture. This is the doorway to room 6, the master bedroom suite which is two rooms.

Note the white oval spot to the left in the shadow on the landing. This spot marks the cold spot, although the whole area of the landing was probably affected; you couldn't just tip-toe over the cold spot. The door to room 7 is beyond the arched opening and to the left although this door wouldn't be visible in this picture. But we know that this door is open because the light on the floor beyond the arched opening is coming through a window in Room 7.

Note that:

• Marianne Foyster got a black eye as a result of being slapped in the face by an invisible hand on this landing.
• Reverend Eric Smith heard the words "Don't Carlos, don't" from this spot.
• "Sensitive" people sometimes suddenly felt ice cold at this spot.
• People in the master bedroom which is on the other side of the landing wall to the left sometimes reported noises coming from this landing at night. (Noises often stopped when a door was opened to invesigate.)
• Again, the landing is directly above at least the edge of what I believe was the abandoned murder well in the cellar, two floors below.

Also note that the door of room 8 would be at least partly visible in the heavy shadows beyond the arched opening. These shadows probably wouldn't have been so dark if the photographer (Syndey H. Glansville?) had opened this door so we could see into Room 8 which had a window.

Let's now go through the arch and veer to the left to go into room 7.

This is it folks. I'm afraid that this is as close to Room 7 as we're going to get.

(As I mentioned earlier, many of these pictures were taken without a flash, using only the light coming through a room's window. The photographer chose to take a picture of this particular corner of Room 7 because this is the corner that the natural light coming through the windows that he was standing between was shining on.)

Out the door you can see the top part of the bannister of main stairwell which we just came up. Also notice the side of a rather large fire place. The Rectory never had gas or electricity so the trick was to put a fireplace in nearly every room so that people could burn a log to keep warm if they needed to. Also, the rope against the wall to our left is one of the bell pulls which connected to one of the 20 some odd bells hanging in a row on the wall in the kitchen hall. If you will remember, I gave you an idea where these bells were right before we started up the stairs. Many of the rooms had a bell pull. Each bell was numbered. A servant would simply note the bell that was moving because of a tug and go to the corresponding room.

The two walls behind us (not visible) each had a window. In fact, the wall behind us to our left is the window that I pointed out on the upper floor before we came into the Rectory. People were also known to see lights in these windows, lights that there was no ready explanation for. These windows were also probably the best place in the Rectory from which to watch for the ghost nun when she walked (floated?) along the side of the garden which this room overlooks.

Relax now (Yeah, right. Relax in Borley Rectory.) and I'll tell you about the dictionary and the boots.

To begin this discussion about P. Shaw Jeffrey's experience with the dropped French dictionary, note that Mr. Jeffrey indicated that he had locked the door to this room one evening and had gone to sleep. But before he had dosed off he heard a thump on the floor. So he lit a candle and had a look around. He saw his missing French dictionary on the floor. He surmised because of the thump that that the dictionary had fallen to the floor. At this point we want to think that some practical joker had dropped the dictionary from the attic through an access door in the ceiling of this room. But if that were the case then we'd probably have never heard about this incident. Given Mr. Jeffrey's assertion that the door was locked, we must presume that Mr. Jeffrey was looking for some reasonable explanation for the incident which was difficult because there was no access door in the ceiling of this room to attic. This is why we are discussing it now.

Keeping in mind the theory of the a nun falling down a well as suggested by Rev. Pythian-Adams in Harry Price's "The End of Borley Rectory," I wondered why the possibility that the dictionary had fallen to the floor had not been correlated with the nun's fall down the well. But I supposed that taking such a possibility into consideration was also difficult to prove too. How do you read a well and possibly a nun's murderer into a dictionary that fell a few feet to the floor regardless if it seemingly materialized from out of nowhere? On the other hand, don't underestimate the ghost nun like I did.

This dictionary charade was the fourth charade I had deciphered. By this time I had decided that the ghost nun was deliberately taking advantage of men in the Rectory to stage in her charades. The ghost was seemingly using men to suggest that a man was at least present when she fell down the well. I presume that the man that she was suggesting was her murderer. But I was puzzled as to why the dictionary charade didn't seem to suggest that a man was present. Yes, Mr. Jeffrey was trying to fall asleep in the bed but his mere presence in the room seemed to be a weak way to emphasize a man, especially a murderer. I wanted a more exciting clue.

Then it hit me. Mr. Jeffery's most notable experience in the room was the dropped dictionary. But consider an incident that got honorable mention. This was his boots having been mysteriously moved from the floor to the top of the wardrobe while he was sleeping but on a different night than when the dictionary had fallen. I had been remembering P. Shaw Jeffery in terms of both the dropped dictionary and the man's boots in general, not just the dropped dictionary. And the raised boots turned out to be the key!

Wow! I was trying to find clues for both the well and the nun's murder and the moved boots were the clue. Yes, the dictionary had fallen to the floor but the ghost had also thought to suggest another reference for ground level to imply the well. The ghost had done this by moving the boots to the top of the wardrobe. This was the ghost's way of reestablishing ground level. The ghost had given us a way to think of the dictionary as having fallen to a point below ground level as suggested by the boots winding on top of the wardrobe, again, an implicit reference to a well! I was astonished with this thought. But I wanted more. So I asked myself, "where's the water in this well?". There's no shattered glass in this charade as there was in the previous charades I had stumbled onto.

Consider how Mr. Jeffery had described the dictionary as it set on the floor. It was sprawled on the floor. But how does a book lay sprawled on a floor? Doesn't a book generally lay flat or at least open, at least if its not the dropped dictionary in Borley Rectory? But was I understimating the ghost nun again?

Yes, I was underestimating the ghost nun again. Take a look at this artist's rendering of the dropped dictionary. It's interesting that the artist took Mr. Jeffrey's "sprawled" dictionary to mean that the dictionary had fallen with its cover open with the pages bunch up and pressing into the floor.

The pages! Although the pages can be regarded as a solid object they are nonetheless bending in curls going in all different directions. This suggest fluid properties in other words - a clue that can be construed as meaning water. I had found the water at the bottom of the "well" that I was looking for!

Also note that there is no hint of the moved boots in this drawing. This is because nobody had considered that the dictionary and the boots were a part of the same charade.

Our nun was thorough too. We've got three more clues associated with this charade to discuss.

Consider that the hard book cover over the "water," that is, protecting the pages of the dictionary can be regarded as a hard surface in general. Given this hard surface is over "water" it would parallel the bricks in the bricked up dining room window which would also indicate that it was intended to correspond to the murder scene well having been filled in.

Mr. Jeffrey had noted that the dictionary had been missing for three days and that it was also a bit tattered when it was found. Sadly, I read these seemingly minor observations as additional clues from the ghost nun about the nun herself. By hiding the dictionary for three days I suspect that she was trying to infer that she had possibly been confined, perhaps for three days, by the man who would murder her. The observation that the dictionary was a bit tattered suggests that she had also been hurt in some way, possibly even dead, before her body fell down the well. These clues are actually consistant with details noted in other charades. (Wyatt, a friend of mine, caught on to the charade aspect of the dropped dictionary quite well. He volunteered the possibility of the nun wanting to emphasize a certain word by having the dictionary fall so that it was opened on the page having that word - we'll never know.)

So previous Rectory researchers seem to have appropriately noted that the French aspect of the dictionary was a hint of the nationality of the nun. The nun, having been confined (missing dictionary) and hurt (tattered dictionary) fell (dictionary dropped to the floor) into water (curled pages of the dictionary) at the bottom (below the boots) of a well shaft (dark room) which was later filled in (hard dictionary cover over the "water".)

Mr. Jeffrey's lighting the candle to investigate the thump does make me think of the nuns murderer likewise holding a candle over the well to see the results of his crime. I'm also pondering if the lights seen in the window(s?) of this room were intended to charade the nuns murder looking down the well with a flame.

Let's compare this charade to the dining room charade. First of all, we seemingly have two completely different scenes. We have the dining room with its bricked up window and associated imagry. And we have now added the dropped dictionary and the moved boots and that associated imagry. Isn't it a "coincidence" how these two totally different collections of imagry, the bricked up window and Mr. Jeffrey's experiences, arguably charade the reenactment of the same murder!

Also, note that the first hint that a nun had been thrown down a well wouldn't appear until about 50 years after these incidents had taken place. And this hint would be in the form of a mysterious wall writing! I can show you where Marianne Foyster suspect Edwin Whitehouse of making the wall writings and also where Edwin Whitehouse returned the "complement". Who/what had dared to change the traditional story of a nun who had been bricked up alive behind a wall?