For all the many elements that constitute the paranormal, there are a few things quite as evocative as the ghost, equally capable of scaring as senseless as they are of inflicting us with the deepest of melancholies, the ghost holds a unique place in the world of the supernatural. There are, of course, the ghosts that we carry with us in our daily lives, memories of those we have loved and lost, or perhaps even wronged, thoughts that sit in the deepest
part of the psyche, straining to become manifest. Perhaps the most famous of all ghosts is that of Shakespeare's Banquet. As he appears to the tormented mind of Macbeth. We know him not as an actual spirit, but rather he is the consequence of Macbeth's mental capitulation. But what of the apparitions that seem not to have been brought forth from the psyche, Those that have no connection to the observer, but instead seem, for all the world to be reaching
out to us from a seemingly timeless space. You're listening to unexplained, and I'm rich McClain smith. For some to witness a ghost, particularly that of a relative, might bring a certain comfort, the reassuring sense of a life beyond death. But for the cultures of the ancient world, there was
little doubting the portentous nature of such a sighting. If by chance, you ever find yourself walking along the banks of the Tigris around the year four thousand BC, and happened to come across the spirit of a recently deceased family member, it could surely mean only one thing. For the Sumerians, death was an act from which there was
no return. Rather, souls were left to dwell in a place called Kur, otherwise known as the Land of no Return, a place where all men and women were equal, no matter how rich or poor, and there they would remain in a dreary darkness, all watched over by Irish Kigal, the dark queen of the underworld. For a relative to return from such a place would speak of something unsettled, perhaps a body not properly buried, lost at sea or abandoned on the battlefield, or even a suspicious death that
needed in some way to be rectified. Often a ghost or apparition will be said to be linked to a particular place. For those of us in the UK, there are many not least their respective tourist boards that would suggest the Great Tower of London or Edinburgh Castle as the country's most haunted destinations. However, thanks largely to the controversial and self styled psychic investigator Harry Price, there is one place that has risen above all others in the
history of the British ghost hunt. The full story of the place in question has drawn much criticism over the years due to the association with Price, and so it is to a time before Price's involvement that we will be going, and for that we will be heading to. Nineteen twenty eight the place Balley Rectory in Essex, routinely described as the most haunted house in England. Just what exactly took place there in the early part of the twentieth century has never been fully accounted for. It is
a mystery that remains to this day unexplained. The Essex hamlet of Barley lies close to the border of Suffolk in the southeast of England. Aside from the rectory, it is perhaps best known for its church. Originally built in the twelfth century. It houses within it the tomb of Sir Edward waldergrave supporter of Mary, Queen of Scots and one of the many victims of the Great Tower of London.
After upsetting Elizabeth, the first Sir Edward was banished to the Tower in fifteen fifty eight, where he would die three years later. The Rectory was built in eighteen sixty three by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis, who lived there with his wife and twelve children. Looking at old photographs of the house, it is no exaggeration to describe it as a place of intense atmosphere. Designed in a Neo Gothic style, it was described as being built from red
brick and stone. The doors thick and heavy, with some of the windows iron barred, giving parts of the house a rather prison like appearance, and despite the relative vastness of the grounds, the house was almost entirely surrounded by trees, shrouding most of the property in an ever present shadow. With Henry having passed away in eighteen ninety two and then later his son Harry in nineteen twenty two, the house was effectively abandoned and left to fall into disrepair.
Over time, the gloomy red brick Rectory succumbed inevitably to the ravages of nature. The garden was left to grow wild, all but reclaiming the house as its own. The pipes rusted as rats took up residency in the walls and under the floorboards, and as the frequent rains lashed down during one of the harshest of winters, the roof had
finally given way. Without regular use, the only water supply, provided by a well, began to rot and grew stagnant, and so the property remained until the summer of nineteen twenty eight. After spending a number of years working as a missionary in India, the Reverend guy Eric Smith and his wife Mabel had decided to return to their homeland. So when the opportunity came up to take on the rectory at Bawley, it seemed almost too good to be true. After all, the quiet ideal of a small English country
village was exactly what they had been yearning for. On arriving at the property, the Smiths met with an immediate sense of foreboding. It would seem they had been quite unprepared for the extent of the disrepair. The surrounding trees all but blocked out the sun entirely, and with the condition of the roof and the dilapidated heating system. Only a handful of the twenty three rooms were actually habitable. Undeterred, the plucky couple moved in and set about transforming their
new home. What followed next, as later described by the Smiths, would amount to nothing less than the darkest years of their life. Are you always taking care of your family? Do you often take care of others and not yourself? Now it's time to take care of yourself. To make time for you. You deserve it. Teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best, to feeling like yourself again. With teledoc, you can speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video.
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Download the app or visit teledoc dot com forward slash Unexplained podcast today to get started. That's t e l a d s com slash Unexplained podcast. It began with footsteps, a strange shuffling sound that seemed to drag itself about the house, followed by strange studs and knocks. When the Smiths attempted to move away into the other rooms, the footsteps merely followed them. However, there was always one room, known as the Blue Room, that seemed to generate the
most noise. Although a man of faith, the Reverend was not about to succumb to the notion of ghosts in his house. Convinced the footsteps must belong to an unwelcome but very human visitor, the Reverend stayed up all night with a hockey stick in an attempt to catch the unwanted guest. Sure Enough, after waiting a few hours, the sound of the footsteps could be heard out in the hallway,
getting closer before stopping outside his room. Much to his horror, the steps then proceeded into the room, despite not having a body to go with them. As the footsteps neared, Reverend Smith swung the hockey stick wildly, but found only the emptiness of thin air, as was common for many buildings of such size, All twenty three rooms had been rigged up to a bell system that linked back to
the servant quarters. Not long after the couple moved in, the bells could be heard ringing throughout the house at all hours of the night and day, the phenomena being all the more extraordinary since not only were Guy and Mabel Smith the only occupiers in the twenty three roomed house, but most of the bell system had long since disintegrated. One afternoon, Missus Smith decided to investigate the house's many
hidden nooks and crannies. On entering the library, she became intrigued by a vast Victorian bookcase that stretched from one wall to the other, with the bottom half separated into cupboards. Examining the cupboards, Mabel came across a small round package. Slowly, she started to unwrap the paper and was horrified to
find inside the skull of a young woman. Hoping that in some way the skull had been linked to the disturbances, the reverend had the skull buried in a nearby graveyard, but was later forced to dig it up when the
strange incidences seemed only to intensify afterwards. Shortly after, the couple began to notice that a light could often be seen emanating from a far off room in the house that was known to be empty and perhaps most unnerving of all, one summer afternoon, where mister Smith was walking through the house, he began to hear strange sounds, as if someone was whispering over his head. He described the noise as soft and sibilant, but spoken with urgency and
ending in muttering sounds. There was no doubting to the reverend that it was the voice of a woman, But even more was to come. Unable to look after the rectory alone, the couple employed a young maid from London to help out in the house. The maid had only been working two days when she spotted something odd in the garden. It was a young woman who appeared to be dressed like a nun, walking across the bottom of
the grounds. When her calls to the woman were ignored, the maid approached the figure but was horrified to see it melt away into the trees right before her eyes. The following day, she handed in her notice and promptly returned to London. By now it was clear to guiand Mabel that something was clearly a miss. It was only then that they learned the full truth about Balley Rectory.
Not only had the previous occupiers frequently spoken of strange sightings and sounds heard about the house, but that as many as twelve clergyman had turned down the opportunity to take on the rectory prior to mister and missus Smith, all of them too afraid to live in the famous haunted house. And as for the Blue Room, which appeared to be the source for most of the strange noises, that was the place in which both previous owners had died.
At their wits end. The couple famously called in the help of the Daily Mirror newspaper as well as the Society for Psychical Research, and it is at this point that Harry Price enters the scene. What happened next has been the topic of intense speculation and often ridicule, as many sought to profit from the unfortunate couple's extraordinary experiences.
For subsequent publicity only intensified the stress upon Mabel and George, and the couple vacated the property in nineteen twenty nine, moving to the relative serenity of the seaside town of Cromer in Norfolk. And as for the house itself, it was destroyed by fire under suspicious circumstances in nineteen thirty nine. For a spooky and quietly menacing look at the subsequent events involving the controversial Harry Price, I can recommend The Ghost Hunters by Neil Spring to while away a few
sleepless nights. But for me it is the accounts of the plainly innocent and reputable mister and Missus Smith, taken before all the noise that followed, that is the most fascinating. Clearly, they had no desire to profit from their ordeal, and nor did they so what then exactly did they hear? And in the case of the unfortunate maid from London see On one dark December night in two thousand and two, a phone call was placed to a police station in Surrey,
in the south of England. It was an anxious member of the public calling to report a horrific car crash that they had witnessed that night. Whilst traveling southbound along the A three towards the town of Guildford. They had seen a car lose control at high speed before spinning violent off the road. Moments later, more calls were taken from many different witnesses reporting the exact same thing. A number of police were immediately dispatched and promptly arrived at
the scene. Only they couldn't find any trace of the incident. That was until one officer, who had been searching the nearby undergrowth, stumbled upon a smashed up maroon Vauxhall Astra, nose down in a ditch, but something was off. Shining his torch into the driver's side of the car, the officer received a terrible Fright there, sat in his seat was the driver of the vehicle, reduced to the bare
bones of his skeleton. The car had indeed spun off the road, as reported, but it certainly hadn't happened that night. In fact, the police later discovered that the driver of the vehicle had been declared missing almost six months before. Is it possible that, rather than seeing the actual moment of the accident, the witnesses had in fact seemed kind of echo of the event, or maybe something even stranger.
When we think of time, we tend to picture a clock or a set of numbers with which to reference our day. We may say that time is the aging of things, or talk about the passing of time. We see it in the revolutions of the earth or the rising and setting of the sun. And yet this isn't time in any meaningful sense, but rather how we frame
it in the absence of the actual thing itself. In the mid nineteen sixties, John Wheeler and Bryce de Witt, two physicists from Princeton and the University of North Carolina, came up with an extraordinary idea. Together, they had devised no less than a possible framework to marry the seeming incompatibility of Einstein's theories of relativity and the mechanations of the quantum world. Now known as the Wheeler DeWitt equation,
its implications are staggering. What Wheeler and de Witt potentially discovered was that the only way to make the two worlds compatible was to do away completely with the notion of time, that the fundamental description of the universe was in fact timeless. If such a thing were to be true, you might rightly assume that the past, present, and future is nothing but an illusion. That the only thing that
is real is the whole of it, existing constantly. As one might, it be possible that the ghosts of Ballyrectory, and perhaps all ghosts for that matter, rather than being the spirits of the dead, are in fact the bodies
of the very much alive, existing alongsiders in another time. Perhaps, if we were so blessed, we might imagine ourselves like Kurt Vonnegut's fictional characters, the Trialphamadurians, creatures who have evolved to be able to see it's only the present, but the entirety of everything that has been and will ever be. In a quote tentatively attributed to the Australian author Christina Stead, it is said that every love story is a ghost story. But might it be more correct to say that every
story is a ghost story? That every tale we tell is something that has once passed, yet somehow remains. And isn't all of life really just a story that we tell each other, whether it be shared by memory or through the very genetic imprint of our blood. And when or if all stories were to finally disappear, we might hope that somewhere still a ghostly imprint will remain. But if indeed there is no such thing as time, and nothing ever truly dies, then really there would be no
ghosts only us existing together Forever. All elements of Unexplained are produced by me, Richard McClain Smith. Please subscribe and rate the show on iTunes, and feel free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas regarding the stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you have an explanation of your own you'd like to share. You can reach us online at Unexplained podcast dot com or on Twitter at Unexplained Pod. Now. It's time to take care of yourself.
To make time for you, teledoc gives you access to a licensed therapist to help you get back to feeling your best. Speak to a licensed therapist by phone or video anytime between seven am to nine pm local time, seven days a week. Teledoc Therapy is available through most insurance or employers. Download the app or visit telldoc dot com. Forward slash Unexplained Podcast Today to get start. That's t e l a d oc dot com Slash Unexplained Podcast