31 Days of Ghosts: 50 Berkeley Square
For fifty years now the location of 50 Berkeley Square has been owned by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Booksellers. The walls are lined with many books, some from famous authors, others long forgotten.
It’s the legends and stories that go along with 50 Berkeley Square that make one of the most infamously haunted houses today. As with most ghost stories, this one starts with a love gone awry.
A Mr. Myers was living in the house and furnished it for his bride-to-be. However the discontented bride-to-be jilted him and left him with a broken heart. Myers, to escape society lived in the famous top room of the house and would often walk around the house at night to see what should have been the scene of his happiness bathed in candlelight. His midnight wanderings could have laid the foundations for ghost story.
It has been told that many a guest have stayed and quite a few of them have been frightened to death or left insane enough they cannot tell what is that scared that them so.
Now Berkeley Square has been known for it’s supernatural and paranormal activities. This could be due to plague pits that are in and around this area of London. Whatever this thing is that is haunting Berkeley Square will probably not be leaving anytime soon.
Another interesting piece of paranormal tellings that I have found about 50 Berkeley Square:
In 1840, the 20-year-old dandy and notorious rake Sir Robert Warboys heard the eerie rumours about the Berkeley Square Thing in a Holborn tavern one night, and laughingly dismissed the tales as ‘unadulterated poppycock’.
Sir Robert’s friends disagreed with him, and dared him to spend a night in the haunted second-floor room in Berkeley Square.
Warboys raised his flagon of ale in the air and announced: ‘I wholeheartedly accept your preposterous harebrained challenge!’
That same night, Sir Robert visited the haunted premises to arrange an all-night vigil with the landlord. The landlord tried to talk Sir Robert out of the dare, but the young man refused to listen, and demanded to be put up for the night in the haunted room. The landlord finally gave in to Sir Robert’s demands, but stipulated two conditions; if the young man saw anything ‘unearthly’ he was to pull a cord that would ring a bell in the landlord’s room below. Secondly, Sir Robert would have to be armed with a pistol throughout the vigil. The young libertine thought the conditions were absurd, but agreed to them just to get the landlord out of his hair.
The landlord handed Warboys a pistol and left as a clock in the room chimed the hour of midnight. Sir Robert sat at a table in the candlelit room and waited for the ‘Thing’ to put in an appearance.
Forty-five minutes after midnight, the landlord was startled out of his sleep by the violent jangling of the bell. A single gunshot in the room above echoed through the house. The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand. The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth. The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man’s terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall. He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the ‘Thing’, to no avail.
People have undoubtedly heard screams of terror from this house. Stories and legends have weaved their way into the history of the Square. The house remained unoccupied for a good while. And when the Maggs Bros. moved in it has seemed that the now shop is quiet. But that doesn’t stop the dark tales from existing.
Keep it real and rockin’
<3
