50 Berkeley Square

The building at 50 Berkeley Square in Mayfair is a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse designed by architect William Kent around 1740. Former Prime Minister George Canning lived there. A blue plaque marks his tenancy. The building’s other reputation is harder to commemorate.

The Recluse

After Elizabeth Curzon died in the house in 1859 at age ninety-one, Thomas Myers bought it. He had been rejected by his fiancee. He became a recluse, sleeping by day and roaming the rooms by night, making sounds that alarmed the neighbors. He stopped paying taxes in 1773. A tax agent visited, observed the decaying condition, and declined to levy further. Myers died the following year. His sister inherited the property and abandoned it.

The Reputation

Victorian journalists filled the vacancy. A Mayfair Magazine article in 1879 claimed a maid who spent a night in the attic room was found insane the next morning and died in an asylum the following day. In 1887, two sailors from HMS Penelope allegedly broke into the empty house. One was found dead. The other claimed attack by the ghost of Thomas Myers. Modern researchers consider the sailor story fabricated.

Lord Lyttelton reportedly spent a night armed with a gun, encountered “brown smoke,” and fired at it. Charles G. Harper described the house in 1907 as haunted by “an unnamed Raw Head and Bloody Bones.” The contrast between the elegant square and the decaying, supposedly cursed building was irresistible to the press.

The Cure

Maggs Bros, the antiquarian book dealers, occupied the building from the late 1930s until 2015. During their seventy-eight-year tenancy, no paranormal phenomena were reported. The most haunted house in London turned out to need a functioning business and regular occupants more than an exorcism.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Mayfair Magazine article (1879)
• Charles G. Harper, Haunted Houses (1907)
• Peter Underwood, Haunted London (1975)