anthony bliss - photography

      There is more than one preternatural portal to the paranormal to be found in Berkeley Square, but only Number 50, deserves the sobriquet ‘The Most Haunted House In London’.

       Among the many tales of terror told: Arriving late one night, a new maidservant was given a room at the top of the house. Within hours her fearful screams had awakened the entire household. On entering the room, she was found rigid, wide-eyed and catatonic with a hideous expression on her face. She died in hospital the next day but not before stating that "it was 'orrible".

       In the 1800’s, Sir Robert Warboys, for a wager of 100 guineas, agreed to spend the night there armed with a pistol. Shortly after 2.00 am there were heard two sharp peels of the room bell followed by a shot. He was found scared to death, lying upside down on the bed with a look of indescribable horror on his face. Some years later Lord Lyttleton also spent the night there armed with a giant blunderbuss loaded with buckshot and silver sixpences. He survived but not after discharging his gun at ‘a thing, a vague shape that came leaping at me out of the darkness’.

       Two sailors, Robert Martin and Edward Blundell, drunk, penniless and looking for somewhere to sleep broke into the deserted house on Christmas Eve 1887.
They were startled awake in the early hours by the sound of heavy deliberate footsteps coming up the stairs followed by a terrifying grotesque shapeless oozing white mass that burst through the door. Martin, later to spend the rest of his life in an insane asylum because of the encounter escaped from the house and on returning with the police found Blundell, dying and terror-stricken, impaled on the railings in front of the house.