Haunted London by Peter Underwood

of the top-floor window to escape the attentions of her lecherous uncle. Her ghost haunted the house and would be seen clinging to the window-ledge, screaming and screaming, as she must have done before she fell to her death. Yet another story, which may have a grain of truth in it, is told of the house being occupied by a gang of counterfeit coiners who made weird noises at night and constructed strange sights to scare away inquisitive visitors. Such a story would tie in well with the sounds of furniture, or heavy boxes, being dragged across bare floors every two months or so at a time when the house was empty. Bells were heard ringing too, a window would be flung open and stones, old books and similar objects would land in the street at the feet of startled onlookers. Whenever investigations were made, it is said, the house was found to be deserted. In a later issue of Notes and Queries (2 August 1879) a correspondent stated that the house contained ‘at least’ one room where the atmosphere ‘is supernaturally fatal to body and mind’. He went on to say that a girl saw, heard or felt such horror that she went mad and never recovered sufficiently to relate her experience, whilst a man, sceptical of ghosts and haunted houses, arranged to spend a night in the same room and was found dead in the morning. Even the party-walls of the house, when touched, were stated to be ‘saturated with electric horror’. Certainly during the course of the enquiries that he made Lord Lyttelton discovered that people occupying the neighbouring houses were troubled by odd noises that they could not explain. Probably the story that did more than any other to enhance the reputation of the house concerned two sailors who found themselves penniless in London in the 1870s. Chancing to walk through Berkeley Square, they saw the ‘For Sale’ sign outside Number 50 and broke in to obtain a roof over their heads for the night, Settling themselves into a room on the top floor, they were disturbed during the night first by banging noises, like doors slamming, and then by footsteps that seemed to slither and slide up the stairs and approach the door of the room the two men were occupying. After a moment, the door handle turned and ‘something shapeless and horrible’ oozed into the room. One of the sailors dodged past the shuddering mass and fled down the stairs and out of the house, deaf to the screams of his terrified companion. Dashing into the arms of a policeman who chanced to be passing, the frightened man blurted out his story and the policeman proceeded to search the house. He saw no sign of any ghost but he did discover the body of the other sailor in the garden, with his neck broken. It appeared that he had fallen, or been pushed, from the upstairs window and was impaled on the spiked railings bordering the pavement.
    Number 50, the famous ‘haunted house in Berkeley Square’ long reputed to be haunted by a frightful ‘appearance’ that caused madness and sudden death.
    It is difficult to discover any facts about the haunting, and the basis of the whole story may well lie in the eccentric behaviour of a certain Mr Myers who leased the property in 1859 in readiness for his forthcoming marriage. But Mr Myers was jilted and the shock and sadness caused him to become a broken, morose and solitary man, who would never allow a woman near him. He existed for the rest of his life in the ill-fated room at the top of the house, only opening the door to receive sustenance from a manservant. Often, he would sleep most of the day and at night wander about the room, candle in hand, a sad and lonely man whose shadows on the curtains and movements at dead of night became part and parcel of a legend of haunting — a legend that still persists.
    When I called there in June 1970, I learned that the occupants are still pestered by curiosity seekers as they have been for the past thirty years. During the Second World War, fire-watchers used the building