The Terror of Berkeley Square
50 Berkeley Square was the most famous of London's hauntings in Victorian times. Often families would take a detour to look at the house, during tours of the houses of heroes such as William Pitt, Earl Grey and Clive of India. At the time, Prime Minister, George Canning lived two doors away from No.50 until his death in 1927.
Mystery Magazine has detailed the Victorian's love of the macabre in the Spring Heeled Jack and Victorian Ghost sections of this website. Popular newspapers and magazines of the day would excite the imaginations of the populace with stories such as the following about Berkeley Square:
“The house in Berkeley Square contains at least one room in which the atmosphere is supernaturally charged, fatal to mind and body. A girl saw, heard and felt such horror in it that she went mad, and never recovered sanity enough to tell how or why"
A gentleman, a disbeliever in ghosts, dared to sleep in it, and was found a corpse in the middle of the floor, after frantically ringing for help in vain. Rumour suggests other cases of the same kind, all ending in death" Mayfair Magazine, 10 May 1879.
In 1840, there were reports of "supernatural" noises coming from the house, which was often empty and deserted for long periods. Jessie Middleton in her Grey Ghost Book wrote that a little Scots girl in a kilt haunted the house. The child was supposed to have been tortured to death in the top-most room of the house. Another of Jessie's stories suggests a girl called Adeline jumped from the top floor window to escape from her lecherous Uncle and since has haunted that room.