50 Berkeley Square Townhouse

During the Victorian era, the townhouse that stands on 50 Berkley Square in Mayfair was considered one of the most haunted places in London. There are several variations of the legend, but most of them concern its attic room, which is said to be haunted by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide there. Since the late 19th century, many cases of poltergeist phenomena and paranormal deaths have been reported, although it is believed that these ghost stories were greatly exaggerated today.

Built in 1740, the townhouse was once the home of Prime Minister George Canning, until his death in 1827. It was then leased by one Miss Curzon, and after her death was occupied by an eccentric man named Thomas Myers, during whose tenancy the rumours about the ghosts of 50 Berkeley Square started to circulate. Rejected by his fiancée and heartbroken, Myers led a recluse life while he slowly went mad, sleeping during daytime and making strange noises at night. Interestingly, when the local council sued him for failing to pay his rent, Myers failed to appear in court but was excused on account of the fact that he lived in a “haunted house”.

After Myers’s death in 1874, the number of the ghost stories about 50 Berkeley Square continued to grow. An 1879 article in The Mayfair Magazine alleged that a newly hired maidservant who had spent a night in the attic room was so shocked by something “horrible” that she had seen, that she died in an asylum the day after. One of the two sailors who stayed there was also found dead in the morning, while the other is said to have seen the ghost of Myers. Allegedly it had multiple resident ghosts, and some reported having seen a mysterious brown mist or white shadow, as well as the spirit of a young man or a little girl.

The paranormal phenomena are said to have stopped after the Maggs Bros., antiquarian booksellers famous for their purchase of Napoleon Bonaparte’s desiccated penis and sale of the Gutenberg Bible, bought the townhouse and started to operate there. They relocated to their current building in 2015, but a police notice on the wall inside the townhouse is still there, warning that the upper floors cannot be used for any purpose…for some reason.