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Is 50 Berkeley Square the most haunted house in London?

50 Berkeley Square, said to be the most haunted house in Britain, is an otherwise rather ordinary-looking townhouse in the Mayfair district of London. With a plain Georgian exterior hiding a grand 18th century interior, the house has commonly been associated with a ghostly apparition nicknamed Raw Head due to the reddish, raw tone of the skin on its face. The legend of the house began in 1907, when a nobleman scoffed at tales of supernatural entities and volunteered to spend a night in the room of the house said to be particularly afflicted by ghostly events. A little after midnight, he rang a bell to call the servants; when they arrived, they found the man struck dumb with terror, and he was unable to tell them what he'd seen before he died of shock. Since reports of the incident became public, the house has gathered an increasingly macabre reputation, and has become one of the hotspots for paranormal investigators in London.

In many ways, the haunting of 50 Berkeley Square can be seen as the archetypal haunted house legend. As is common with such stories, there is said to be a historical link to a particularly traumatic period in the house's past, as a Mr. Myers was said to have bought the house as a marital home only to be jilted by his fiance at the last minute; consequently, he became a recluse and took to wandering the house at night by candlelight, thereby starting the rumour of a mysterious figure who was sometimes glimpsed through the windows late at night. Another commonly-told story concerns a Mr. du Pre, who is said to have lived in the house with his insane brother, locking the latter in the attic. Many stories of hauntings at the house have involved mysterious banging and wailing sounds coming from the attic, and although ghostly attics are a common feature of haunted house legends, in this case the ghostly activity is said to be felt in all parts of the building.

The haunted house myth is one of the oldest variations of the ghost story, and became particularly popular in England in the eighteenth century as a kind of parlour story that was related during late-night gatherings. As David O'Hare points out, "it's not particularly difficult to use ghost stories to send an impressionable person into a state of terrible fear late at night, and then send them off to bed, where they'll doubtless imagine various sounds and perhaps even visions" (O'Hare, 2008). Furthermore, although many subsequent attempts have been made to detect evidence of unusual events at haunted houses around the world, it's notable that no firm evidence has ever been detected. In order to cover this problem, many paranormal investigators propagate the myth that ghosts are either unwilling or unable to be recorded by cameras and sound recorders, adding weight to the idea that only people of a sensitive psychic disposition are able to detect paranormal activity. In this way, the cycle of paranormal reports is able to be maintained.

In fact, many haunted house stories are based on exaggerated or distorted fact. For example, the legend of 50 Berkeley Square is based, in part, on the mystery of its ownership during the past two centuries. The London Directory lists the building as being empty from 1859 until 1880, by which point it had apparently been acquired by a Mr. Myers. At some point, Mr. Myers was prosecuted for unpaid taxes, and a warrant for his arrest was issued at Marlborough Street Police Court. The issue of the taxes was eventually settled, and upon Mr. Myers' death, his legatee, a Miss. Myers, allowed the house to remain entirely empty. Stories of a haunting at the house appear to have arisen not due to any particular fact, but due to gossip surrounding the house's apparent emptiness for long periods of time, which led to speculation that paranormal activity made it impossible to sell or rent out. In fact, a number of the most prominent and most detailed stories about the haunting at 50 Berkeley Square are remarkably similar to other local ghost stories, including another one in the same street in London, and it seems likely that the story of 50 Berkeley Square is for the most part a piece of fiction dreamt up to explain the apparent periodic abandonment of an otherwise desirable residence.

Ghost stories are an important part of cultural folklore around the world, and the case of 50 Berkeley Square shows how easy it is for myths and legends to accumulate once a few basic unusual facts have been established. There are notably few direct reports of ghostly activity at 50 Berkeley Square from before the 1990's, and most of the tales about the house are mere conjecture surrounding the reasons for its abandonment. It certainly seems to be true that the house has had an unusually eventful past, in terms of a series of owners who seem to have had little interest in maintaining the property in an appropriate manner. However, in recent years parts of the building have been inhabited, and there have apparently been no substantial reports of ghosts or other paranormal activity, supporting the idea that the legend of 50 Berkeley Square, supposedly Britain's most haunted house, is based entirely on conjecture and fantasy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burke, Thomas (2001). 'Haunted Houses of England and Wales'. London: P.J. Cooper Press

Ferguson, Nathan (2005). 'Paranormal Hotspots in London'. Birmingham: David Drake Publishing

O'Hare, David (2008). 'Is This England's Most Haunted House?', in 'The Journal of Paranormal Events', vol. 56, no. 8, Autumn 2008

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