Just in time for Halloween: Berkeley Square’s Most Haunted House

The first thing you notice about 50 Berkeley Square is the blue plaque to George Canning (1770-1827), our shortest serving prime minister at 119 days (before his death from tuberculosis) until Liz Truss almost 200 hundred years later.

However, what is not at all obvious from the grand façade is that it has had the reputation since the late 19^th century of being one of the most haunted houses in Britain. Just how much that reptation is derived from its history, and how much from the imagination of those who have written about it, is as mysterious as the goings-on there themselves.

An apocryphal tale of a young woman taking her own life by throwing herself from the attic window remains the basis of the legend, although details are very sketchy indeed. More substantial is the reputation the house gathered about itself during the occupancy of Thomas Myers from 1859 to the 1870s. Said to have been driven gradually mad by the rejection of his fiancée, he withdrew from the world and locked the doors of the house behind him, becoming nocturnal and the source of reputedly strange sounds.

The house fell into disrepair around him, attracting its dubious reputation while he yet lived. Two years before his death in 1874, Lord Lyttelton, a prominent politician under Sir Robert Peel, is reported to have taken a wager to spend the night in the house. Armed with a shotgun, he fired at an apparition – the dead girl is supposed to have appeared as a brown mist – but in the morning the only trace of the drama were the used shotgun cartridges.

By coincidence, Lyttelton committed suicide four years later at the age of 59 by throwing himself down the stairs of a London house. Myers had died 18 months earlier.

Another tale relates how, in 1887, two sailors spent the night in the house; one was found dead in the morning having tripped as he fled, while the other is said to have seen the ghost of Myers.

How much of the house’s reported history is fact, and how much made up, is uncertain, but little has disturbed the peace there for the past century, and today it commands an impressive vantage point overlooking Berkeley Square…