There is a plain Georgian townhouse on the west side of Berkeley Square in Mayfair, one of the most expensive districts in London. Number 50 looks much like its neighbours — four storeys of dark brick, tall sash windows, black iron railings guarding the basement area below. And for the whole of the late nineteenth century it carried a reputation no other address in the capital could match. It was called, quite flatly and quite widely, the most haunted house in London.
The legends all cluster around a single place inside it: a small, plain room up in the attic. In the Victorian tellings, something lived up there. It was never clearly seen — described only as a shapeless brown mist, or a pale crawling thing, or simply an overwhelming presence in the dark — and it was said to possess a terrible power. It could kill anyone who spent a night alone in that room, not by touch or by claw, but by sheer, stopping terror. To sleep there was to risk being frightened literally to death.
The Horror
The stories came down thick, lurid and much-repeated. In one, a maid was sent to sleep in the attic to air and prepare it for an expected guest. In the small hours the household was woken by screaming, and found the young woman collapsed on the floor, rigid, her eyes bulging, entirely out of her mind. She could not, or would not, say what she had seen, and in the version printed in 1879 she died the following day, her reason gone and her secret with her. No name, no date and no death record has ever been attached to her. In another, a sceptical gentleman guest laughed the whole thing off and insisted on sleeping in the attic himself to prove there was nothing to it; he was discovered in the morning speechless and paralysed with fright, and in some tellings simply dead, his face frozen in horror. Most famous of the ‘brave man’ stories is that of a visitor who arranged a signal with the household below — he would ring a bell once if all was well, and twice, urgently, if he needed help, and they were to come only on the second ring. In the night a single ring came. Then, almost at once, a frantic second. They ran up the stairs and burst in. He was dead, they said, his face fixed in terror, staring at one corner of the room. The man has been given three different names across three different tellings, and none of them can be traced.
The tale most often retold, though it came late and rests on nothing, is the story of the two sailors. On a bitter winter’s night, so the story goes, two destitute sailors on shore leave broke in looking for somewhere out of the cold to sleep. They climbed up through the dark building until they found the one room that seemed usable — the attic — and settled down there. In the dead of night one of them woke to a sound, and to something moving in the blackness: a shape, formless and wrong, oozing across the floor towards them. Blind with panic, he fought free of it and ran — but in his terror he did not find the stairs. He went out through the attic window instead, and was said to have been found in the morning dead in the area far below, impaled, in the best-known version, on the iron railings. His companion, who fled the other way and survived, could afterwards only babble about a shapeless thing coming for them out of the shadows. The record will not hold the scene. Number 50 stood empty only between Myers’s death in 1874 and 1884, when the lease passed to Lord and Lady Selkirk, and the date usually given for the sailors falls well after that; the names, the ship and even the decade shift from one telling to the next, and the account appears to originate with the ghost writer Elliott O’Donnell rather than with any inquest or newspaper.
Where did such a horror supposedly come from? The real history of the house feeds the legend at every turn. For fifteen years, from 1859 until his death in November 1874, number 50 was occupied by a reclusive man named Thomas Myers, said to have been jilted by his bride and to have shut himself away in bitter grief, refusing ever to leave, letting the once-fine house rot and moulder around him until it became a byword for gloom and neglect on an otherwise glittering, fashionable square. No record supports either the jilting or the madness; the researchers who have gone back to the censuses and the rate books have found not a line of evidence for them. What is documented is the neglect, and it is striking enough: in 1873 the rate collector for the parish of St George Hanover Square had to apply to the magistrates for a warrant of distress against Myers’s goods. A genuinely derelict mansion sitting like a rotten tooth among the mansions of the rich gave the ghost stories a perfect natural home. Other versions layer on further tragedies — a young woman who threw herself from the top-floor window to escape a cruel and predatory uncle, a child mistreated and killed in the nursery — the classic ingredients of every haunted house, accreted over decades of retelling.
So how much of it is true? Almost certainly the deaths and the killer attic are folklore, inflated by Victorian magazines hungry for a delicious horror and by the very real, very visible sight of a rotting house in the middle of rich Mayfair. Sober researchers have pointed out that the wildest of the tales — the dead maid, the dead nobleman, the impaled sailor — cannot be tied to firmly documented, named victims with dates. But that, in the end, is exactly how the most haunted house in London was built. Not by one verified ghost, but by a real derelict mansion, a real recluse who let it rot around him, and a great city that simply could not stop telling itself the story.
The Modern Relic
And you can go and stand in front of it tomorrow. Number 50 Berkeley Square still stands, immaculate now, its dark and derelict days long behind it — from the late 1930s until 2015 it was the dignified home of the antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros, and no shapeless horror has troubled it in living memory. But the address has never quite shaken its legend. Walk the west side of Berkeley Square, find the number on the door, and look up at the four storeys of blackened brick to the top of the house — and you are looking at the part of the building that Victorian London swore, in a hundred breathless retellings, could frighten a grown man to death.
