50 Berkeley Square

OVERVIEW

A Georgian townhouse on the west side of Berkeley Square, Mayfair, once the home of the prime minister George Canning and, from the late 1930s until 2015, of the antiquarian booksellers Maggs Bros. Its reputation as 'the most haunted house in London' dates from the 1870s, when it stood neglected, and was fixed by Peter Underwood's Haunted London (1975).

HISTORY

Correspondence in Notes and Queries in 1872–73, 1879 and 1880–81 discussed the house and mostly concluded that its dereliction had bred the stories. The owner, a Mr Myers, had shut himself up in it after a broken engagement and wandered it at night; his relative Lady Dorothy Nevill wrote in 1906 that this had been mistaken for a ghost and that 'the whole story was nonsense'. The tale of two sailors from HMS Penelope, one of whom died fleeing the attic in 1887, was invented by the writer Elliott O'Donnell.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The versions vary: a girl who threw herself from the attic window, a man kept in the attic until he went mad, a nameless thing in the attic room that frightened people to death, Lord Lyttelton firing a shotgun at it in 1872. Researchers note how closely they follow Bulwer-Lytton's story 'The Haunted and the Haunters' (1859). Nothing has been reported since the 1930s. The entry records a famous legend and the reasons the record gives for doubting it.

VISITING

A private office building on a public square; view from outside only.