A bewildered boy is tucked in bed, his wrists tied to a brass bedhead by strips of fabric. It’s like a production still from The Exorcist, but this disturbing photograph is real, taken just after the Second World War in a modest bungalow near Crawley, West Sussex.
I came across the picture in the 1945 Christmas issue of Picture Post while researching my book about the ghost hunter Harry Price and his investigation of Borley Rectory, the “most haunted house in England”. I guessed that the boy, Alan Rhodes, must be the only surviving person to have met Price, who died in 1948. I scoured the electoral register and I found him, but our plans to meet were scuppered by the pandemic. Which is why this month I found myself in a quiet cul-de-sac in West Sussex, where, over tea and fruit cake, finally I was able to ask Rhodes — now 90 — for the truth about the Crawley poltergeist.
Born out of wedlock in 1932, Rhodes had no relationship with his mother, who married in 1939. “She didn’t really want me,” he reflects sadly. So he lived with his grandmother, Alice, a 63-year-old widow of the First World War. It was she who wrote to Price in 1945, concerned about strange phenomena that they had endured for more than a year. She worried that her 12-year-old grandson was being targeted by poltergeists. “Everything is done against the boy,” she wrote.
In the 1930s Price had established himself as the pre-eminent ghost hunter of the day, although the Society for Psychical Research despised his methods as well as his desire for self-promotion. Price had a busy war investigating a near-epidemic of poltergeist activity across Britain. As the country faced invasion by air for the first time, the authorities ordered a million coffins for the expected casualties. Ghosts and poltergeists were the expression of an age of anxiety and fear.
On November 28, 1945, Price arrived at the bungalow with a photographer, the journalist Sydney Jacobson and a vicar. Price found Rhodes to be “intelligent and cheerful”, although “highly strung”. The boy’s experiences had begun during the war, when he and his grandmother had sought protection from air raids in a government-issued Morrison shelter, a rectangular steel table with wire-cage sides. During a raid in August 1944 Rhodes heard a tapping on the metal. He thought it was the reverberation of anti-aircraft guns, but when it happened again he felt it was the beat of a recognisable tune — a military march or a hymn. So disturbed were they that they dismantled the shelter and put it in the garden. But the tapping continued inside the house.
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From then on they heard regular tapping, banging and scratching, particularly at dusk. The clocks ran too fast or too slow, the wireless was found to be disconnected and often the lights would turn off. As the months wore on they found that pictures, keys, scissors and pencils would move from one room to another through closed doors, or they would come home to find the fireplace ablaze, cushions arranged before it.
“It likes company,” Alice told Price, “and it likes the fire.”
One night when Rhodes was in bed his bedclothes were snatched away and he was slapped in the face. Most eerily, the cabinet gramophone would play records — from Don’t Fence Me In to Abide with Me. Although initially frightened, they got used to the mischievous spirit and even gave it a name, Spooky Bill. But the unnerving activity, which took place only when Rhodes was at home and usually when he was in bed, dominated their lives.
A spiritualist suggested that it might be Alice’s father, George, who had died in the house in 1941. Alice had once found a note that read: “Play the Gram[ophone] or Truble, Love George.” She’d had Rhodes write a reply: “Dear Grandad, what do you want, what can we do for you?” The next day a line had been scratched through “Grandad”.
A seance revealed that a vagrant had hanged himself in the woods behind the house. Might he be responsible for the weird happenings?
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Price asked Alice if he could observe the phenomena focused on the boy that evening. At 9.55pm Rhodes retired to bed. He remembers not feeling frightened when Price tied his arms to the bedhead. Price was calm, kind, even fatherly. He sealed the window and door, and sprinkled chalk dust on the floor in case anything should leave marks. Rhodes was to knock if anything occurred, while the adults kept vigil in the sitting room in darkness. Through the night a spanner, an alarm clock and a jewellery box moved to the bed or to the floor while Rhodes remained tied up. At 1.30am the lights went out. At 1.45am, as the investigators were leaving the house, Alice called out that things were “flying about like mad”, and Price rushed back to find the bungalow in chaos.
Jacobson’s feature, “We Investigate a Haunted House”, appeared in Picture Post on December 22. He ruled out deliberate fraud. Rhodes could have staged the activity, but why would he do so? And would he really have the patience to keep it up for more than a year? Or was he the “unconscious agent” of some malevolent force? Some readers were convinced, others were sceptical. Many were concerned and wondered if the boy should see a doctor. He was examined by a psychologist and sent to have a holiday in Newmarket, where he stayed for 18 months. Picture Post assured its readers that “this change of environment and occupation is effecting a cure which there is reason to hope will be permanent”. The phenomena at the bungalow petered out and finally stopped on February 5. In March the magazine reported that a grateful Alice had written to Price that “Spooky Bill is never mentioned … we have found some good friends through Picture Post, for which I am most grateful to you”.
Rhodes, a retired engineer, never again experienced strange phenomena. He is a sceptic about the supernatural and looks back with some amusement at the drama that surrounded his youth. Was it childish pranks? Persecution by paranormal forces? Or the manifestations of a family living during a time of fear?
He can’t say what happened in that bungalow all those years ago — only that something did.
The Haunting of Borley Rectory by Sean O’Connor (Simon & Schuster £20). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
1. The Exorcist
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1973, iPlayer
Forget the lacklustre remake, this is still the ultimate horror film 50 years after its release, when cinemas had ambulance crews on standby.
2. Hereditary
2018, Channel 4 streaming
A volcanic turn from Toni Collette as a woman haunted by her abusive mother makes this debut from Ari Aster a shocking success.
3. The Blair Witch Project
1999, Sky/Now
A bone-chilling film that many mistook for a real documentary in which “found footage” of lost students taps into the imagination.
4. It Follows
2014, Prime Video
David Robert Mitchell smartly spins a well-worn cliché with this tale of victims who are pursued by an evil that’s passed on through sex.
5. Don’t Look Now
1973, iPlayer/ITVX
This haunting story about grieving couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) has one of the most shocking endings in cinema.
