The car shuddered, convulsed and strained to a halt, the engine still moaning while we panicked. My companion and driver, a pallid former proto-yuppie, reversed with his foot firmly down. Only then did we see that, in the gloom, the force that had thwarted our ghostbusting was not supernatural but a chain fence.

While I subsided into giggles, my friend sighed with relief. We then regrouped and, on foot, headed back towards our goal, which lay just beyond the fence: the parish church of Borley, a sparsely populated English village in the eastern county of Essex.

I'd seen a photograph of the church in an almanac of haunted houses, which made it look like Castle Dracula. In reality, it seemed round and reassuring, aside from the profusion of bats in the topiary, which made us both laugh hysterically. Later, over a drink, we felt relieved but cheated to have found nothing outrageously weird. After all, Borley is to ghosts what Boracay is to white, sandy beaches.

The Borley story began in 1362, when Benedictine monks built a monastery on the future site of the rectory. According to legend one monk fell under the spell of a holy sister from a nearby nunnery. They planned to elope but were caught. Consequently, the monk was hanged and the nun bricked up alive in the walls of her retreat. Tunnels connected the two locations.

Fast forward 500 years from the monastery's creation, to when the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull became rector of Borley. The next year, he built a rambling mansion.

The first recorded ripple occurred in about 1885, when a visitor saw stone throwing and 'other poltergeist activity'. After that, a nun began appearing regularly. One of the reverend's daughters was woken by a slap in the face. Another saw the silhouette of an old man in a tall hat beside her bed.

After a descendant of the original reverend, Harry Bull, died in the Blue Room in 1892, there were more disturbances. Phenomena ranged from whispering voices and slippered footsteps to visions of a headless man in the bushes and the sound of a phantom coach.

Enter the founder of Britain's National Laboratory of Psychical Research, Harry Price, who first visited the rectory in 1929 and kept returning, fascinated by activity such as outbreaks of bell ringing. According to Price, from 1930 to 1935, at least 2,000 poltergeist phenomena occurred at the rectory.

In 1939, it inexplicably caught fire. Even then, during the blaze, locals witnessed a ghost or two inside the building as it disintegrated. Price afterwards reported unearthing the skeleton of a young woman in the cellar.

Now nothing of the rectory remains but, defying sceptics, the mystery lingers. In The Enigma of Borley Rectory (Foulsham), Ivan Banks writes: 'Over the past 30 years or so, this extraordinary story has alternated between scorn and high praise, and in spite of the frequent attempts to destroy the credibility of the haunting, each time when the dust settles, there it stands still ... overseen by the beleaguered but obstinately resolute figure of Harry Price!'

If the story beguiles, you can visit the 12th-century church opposite the site, which, like the village, is now said to be a focus for the occult. Reported sounds range from hollow footsteps to the creaking of an absent door and a deep sigh of sadness. Could it be that, after the fire, the ghost of the tragic nun wafted over the road and set up home again?

Borley is just west of Sudbury, off the B1064 road. For more details, see www.ukvillages.co.uk/ukvillages.nsf/villages/England/Borley-Essex. For information on the hauntings, visit Borley Ghost Society's website at www.borleyrectory.com