29 December 2000

Dear Sir/Madam,

I would like to register the fact that I find the book that you publish, ‘We faked the Ghosts of Borley Rectory’, by Louis Meyerling, a tiresome and offensive screed. The author claims that what he writes is a factual first-person account of the Borley Rectory incident. It requires very little effort to prove that it is no such thing, and it would have saved a great deal of distress to relatives of the unfortunate people involved, as well as local people around the parish, if the book had been checked out before publication. Its’ publication, and the publicity surrounding it, happened around Halloween, and led to a considerable increase in nuisance to local residents and farmers.

Let us look at the offence in a bit more detail. Although it is portrayed as a debunking of the Borley Myths, the book actually tries to perpetuate them, with a fictional account of a séance which had a ‘paranormal ‘ consequence. It muddies the water by skirting around the obvious exposé of the so-called hauntings, which have been so well documented already, in favour of explanations that are difficult to accept and do not fit the facts and incidents. Worse still, it accuses the poor rector at the time of being a drug-addict and a homosexual, and his wife of being promiscuous.

The distress that the book has caused to Vince O’Neil, Marianne Foyster’s son, has been considerable. I can imagine that Lionel Foyster’s surviving relatives must also be very displeased by the accusations. Even I, who am not an active churchgoer, find the slur on a former rector of one of the ‘four parishes’, distasteful. Even if the stories in the book were true, I find the morality of digging up the Foysters’ private life, for nothing more than profit and entertainment, very questionable. The ministry of the Bulls and Foysters in our parishes was exemplary, and the families are still held in deep respect by local people.

Whilst, in public, one tries to dismiss books such as this as trivia to be laughed off, one must not forget that Borley really exists as a community that wants no more of the Halloween fable that the Borley Rectory incident has become. The authors of recent books on Borley forget that these events concerned real people and a real parish. Every upsurge in interest, every television program, every book, produces a rash of incidents where the church and churchyard is invaded by sightseers, pranksters and hooligans. This is a sacred place, the focus of the spiritual life of the village for over two millennia. It is not a Disney theme-park.

Please withdraw this book.