Haunted place · England, United Kingdom

50 Berkeley Square

Updated November 20268 sources How to visit

Protected heritage

Mayfair townhouse once billed as London’s most haunted. Its oldest dated trace is an 1872 magazine note, and the early letters name no first-hand witness.

The story

Number 50 stands on Berkeley Square in Mayfair, in the City of Westminster. It is a Grade II listed townhouse (National Heritage List entry 1066467). A plaque at the house is said to commemorate the statesman George Canning, who is said to have lived there. An older Wikipedia text gave 1770 to 1827 as his residence, but those are the years of his life, as a contributor to its discussion page points out, and none of the sources we could read says when he actually lived in the house, so the connection should be treated as undated.

The name most often attached to the house is Thomas Myers. Wikipedia lists him as the occupant from 1859 until November 1874. A contributor to its discussion page argues instead for a tenancy from about 1865 and a conviction for unpaid taxes in May 1873, but that is one person’s unsourced account and we have not been able to check it. Popular retellings make Myers a jilted man who shut himself away and slid into madness while the house decayed. Lady Dorothy Nevill, who wrote in her 1906 Reminiscences that Myers was “in a sort of way, related to me,” offered a much flatter version: he was eccentric “to a degree which bordered upon lunacy,” a broken engagement made it worse, he stayed quiet by day and rambled from room to room at night, and the old house would sometimes “appear to be lit up at the dead of night.” She concluded that his nocturnal habits had been mistaken for a ghost, recording her conviction “that the whole story was nonsense.” She also wrote that he got the house on good terms “as there was already some idea about that it was haunted,” an undated recollection that we cannot test.

The building later became a bookshop. The booksellers Maggs Bros moved in around 1937 or 1938 (the sources disagree) and left on 27 November 2015, when the lease was sold and the firm moved to Curzon Street. We did not find who occupies the house today.

The legend

The oldest dated trace of the haunting that we have actually read is a pair of lines in the magazine Notes and Queries. On 9 November 1872 a reader asked: “Can your readers inform me of any houses now closed, as being haunted?” A week later, in the issue of 16 November, a reply signed “Lyttelton” stated: “It is quite true that there is a house in Berkeley Square (No. 50) said to be haunted, and long unoccupied on that account.” He added that there were strange stories but did not tell them. That is a witness to a reputation, not to anything seen or heard. A later note, in January 1873, signed “E. M. P.,” reported that a woman at the door would not say who lived there, that “strange noises have been heard in the adjoining houses,” and that a lady had gone “out of her mind, after sleeping a night there.” The writer was passing on talk and asked Lyttelton for his grounds. Nobody in the exchange claims to have seen anything. One contributor to Wikipedia’s discussion page mentions an earlier reference, a letter of 1871, but we could not verify it.

The story then grew. A piece in a magazine called Mayfair, in 1879, is reported to have described a maid who went mad and died after a night in the attic (we have not read it). Wikipedia lists separately, citing a 2006 newspaper, a nobleman too frightened to speak. The details of the attic ghost never settled. In one version it is a young woman who threw herself from the window to escape an abusive uncle, appearing as a brown mist that can frighten people to death. In another a young man, shut in the room and given food only through an opening in its door, loses his mind. In a third it is a little girl killed by a cruel servant. Charles Harper’s 1907 book Haunted Houses repeats a story of a sceptic who died in convulsions after ringing the bell twice, and of a lady who felt a “shock” against the party wall during a ball, but names no one and gives no dates. Harper himself calls what haunts the room only “a Something or Other, very terrible indeed.”

Modern researchers doubt several of the episodes. The tale of two sailors from HMS Penelope in 1887, one dead by morning, is said by Steve Roud, as cited by Wikipedia, to have been invented by the writer Elliott O’Donnell, with nothing to support it. A wager in which Lord Lyttelton spent a night in the attic with a shotgun has no contemporary source that we found; the only trace of him we read is the 1872 note, in which he declines to tell any stories. One contributor to Wikipedia’s discussion page calls the wager a borrowing from the legend of Raynham Hall, and another account links the attic story to Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1859 tale “The Haunted and the Haunters,” though one contributor denies that it is a ghost story at all.

The press picked up the idea early. The New-York Tribune of 9 January 1884 spoke of “the unsolved mystery of Berkeley Square.” By 31 January 1892, in the Pittsburg Dispatch, Andrew Lang was writing of “the haunted house in Berkeley Square, which is not haunted any longer.” In 1907 Harper noted that the house was still standing and was neither haunted nor empty any more, and that “there are those who declare it was never haunted.” Wikipedia credits Peter Underwood’s 1975 book Haunted London with reviving modern interest. According to one Wikipedia contributor, the Notes and Queries letters of 1872 to 1881 never produced a first-hand witness, and the usual sceptical reading is that a neglected, empty house invited gossip.

What remains today

The house survives, with its Grade II listing, and its façade can be seen from the square. It is a private building. Maggs left in November 2015 and we could not determine its present owner or use. No activity has been reported since the bookshop moved in, according to the Wikipedia article, and more recent investigators say nothing unusual has ever happened there. What is left of the haunting is mostly paper: the original Notes and Queries volumes of 1872 and 1873 and Harper’s 1907 book are both on the Internet Archive, and they show how thin the original evidence was.

Visiting

This is not a visitor attraction. The house is private property, there are no tours, and it is not open to the public. Looking at the exterior from the public pavement of the square is the only legitimate way to see it. Please do not knock, photograph through windows or linger at the door. If the story interests you more than the bricks, read the 1872 letters online.

The ghosts

Spirit

The attic apparition of No. 50

Said to be Variously a young woman who threw herself from the window, a locked-up young man, or a murdered girl; none of these identities is documented

The haunting is centered on an attic room, where a brown mist or white figure is said to frighten visitors. The identity changes from telling to telling, and the best-known episodes are either unsourced or called inventions by researchers.

Apparitions

First reported: 1872 (reputation only, Notes and Queries); the attic details come later. Reported by: Notes and Queries correspondents (1872-73), later retold by Charles Harper (1907) and Peter Underwood (1975)