BERKELEY SQUARE BLUNDERS

Early on in my esoteric research, many moons before I first heard the Barghest Wyrd howl, I imagined myself as something of an adventurer. Spurred on by a love of Hellblazer and the unusual exploits of Mulder and Scully I spent many an evening exploring abandoned and supposedly haunted sites all around London. Indeed it was inevitable that I would seek out urban legends in the shadows between the streetlamps. The Highgate Vampire, Spring-Heeled Jack and the Goose at Crossbones Graveyard, England’s capitol has more than its fair share of tall tales spread from west to east like paw prints upon the age worn flagstones.

While there may be truth hidden like diamonds in the mountains of coal that formed the capital’s folklore, the Beast of Berkeley Square is sadly one of the least believable. For a long time it was my one that got away, a terrible supernatural horror that had killed on multiple occasions and unless confronted may well do so again. Erroneously believing myself skilled enough in the occult arts to try and banish the entity in those heady days when I first began dabbling in the necromantic, I kept an eye out for a ghost hunting group that would be allowed into the antiquarian booksellers then occupying the building.

This quest ultimately failed, however, as it seemed that Maggs Bros. Ltd were not only disinterested in the paranormal aspects of their weekday home but also hostile to any talk of ghosts and ghouls on the premises too. While this attitude was ridiculous to me at the time it is understandable in hindsight, especially in light of the research others have done towards debunking the case. Plus allowing mere commoners the chance to tramp around the premises by torchlight would be unseemly for a company that specialised in procuring rare documents by appointment to the Queen herself.

Sadly despite the many and varied reports associated with the case the fact remains that the entire narrative is built on some very shaky ground. Indeed the only thing elevating this tallest of tales above the standard urban legend territory was the continued interest of a few notable authors as well as the tabloid rags of the original period. Obviously the existence of The Beast remains doubtful at best, though as with much the realms of Forteana, and indeed the flash bang eye of the Barghest Wyrd, the story itself has value as a memetic vector if nothing else. Still, there is more of gravy than of grave at work here.

     Then few people questioned the truth of its once having been really haunted, the stories told about it were generally accepted as facts, and not, as what many people now consider them, fabrications. There is still much diversity of opinion as to the origin of the reports of the hauntings.
     Some think they arose from the fact that the house was for some time occupied by a very eccentric hypochondriac, who shut himself up there and saw no one, inhabiting one room only and letting the other rooms go to wrack and ruin. Sometimes he wandered around them at night, a lighted candle in his hand, and this, it was surmised, led his neighbours and people passing by to believe that the premises were haunted. Moreover, as the recluse was tall and haggard, the fitful light from the candle, accentuating his pallor, made him appear eerie and spectre-like; and thus it may have been that the report got about that the house was haunted by a very terrible-looking apparition. 
     Other sceptics with regard to the superphysical were of the opinion that the story of the hauntings was merely an invention on the part of some caretaker, who wanted to prevent people, by scaring them, from buying or renting the house, in order that he (or she) might go on living there. [1]

So no, it seems less and less likely that an aristocrat died of fright in the master bedroom, nor can any evidence of a maid having a nervous breakdown when something conveniently indescribable tried to pry beneath her petticoats be found outside of the suspiciously modern accounts given by the kind of low effort AI slop popular on YouTube in the post truth era. Little in the way of Lovecraftian horror to be found within the walls of Number 50 it seems, and yet the location continues to raise discussion even now. There is a glimmer of hope, however, as couple of reports may have a small basis in fact.

First, we have the above case of a Mr Myers who, having been abandoned by his fiancée mere days before their marriage is thought to have became unsound of mind, living like a recluse in the upper floors of the building and admitting no visitors. During this period the ramshackle state of the property and drifting candlelight behind darkened windows would have sent a chill down the spine of any but the hardiest of Dickensian gentlemen and kept the tall tales flowing along with the gin in East End tap houses way after sundown. And then, perhaps more spectrally, there is the account of the Lord Lyttleton of that era.

Staying in the supposedly fatal room on a bet during the tenancy of a Miss Curzon, he appears to have insisted upon bringing a pair of blunderbusses loaded with a mixture of normal shot and silver sixpences to his midnight vigil. It was these firearms that is said to have saved his life when, later that same night, he fired both weapons directly into the centre of a jet black shape that jumped across the room at him. Accounts vary as to what happened next, of course, but it is safe to assume from his later political exploits that he did indeed survive the encounter relatively unscathed despite what some books claim.

Everything else that is said to have occurred beneath that once leaky roof in Berkeley Square is equally, if not more, questionable than even Lord Lyttleton’s possibly posthumous account. Window jumping sailors impaled on railings or found dead with necks broken at the basement door. Caretaker couples willingly locked in the parlour for the evening while the actual owner visited the building and did who knows what in an upstairs room. The aforementioned maid gasping nonsense before the light died in her eyes. More evidence of the muddy paw prints that the Barghest Wyrd leaves in the cultural group mind.

     Stories continued to generate. A Mr Bentley took the house with his two teenage daughters, who complained of a musky, feral smell, as if an animal was prowling the house. A maid found one guest, a Captain Kentfield, screaming 'Don't let it touch me!' as he cowered in horror in his bedroom, and later, after foolishly returning to the room, he was found dead of fright. Later stories include the wraith of a sobbing child either tortured or frightened to death in the nursery, and the ghost of a woman who fled the embraces of a lecherous uncle by throwing herself through the window.  
     Another dating from the 1920's told of sailors breaking in and being frightened to death by the same ghost, usually described as being formless and smoke-like.[2]

The Ghosts of Berkeley Square is a charming, if little known 1947 black and white film that turns the tales of terror on their head and generates some genuine, if dated, laughs along the way. A tall tale about long expired military men and the ever changing occupancy of the house that they are forced to haunt until royalty visits to break their self inflicted curse, it is notable for introducing a number of tropes which would become staples of the genre. These include time moving unnaturally, a book of rules set by an undead governing body, and the spooks interacting with the inhabitants of the house for their own entertainment.

And if any of that sounds familiar, it should. All of this was seen on the postwar sliver screen some forty or so years before Beetlejuice hit cinemas. A global smash that seems to have least peaked at the earlier movie’s homework, if not photocopied it wholesale to create the backdrop for a modern horror comedy, it is loved on the strength of the performances if not script. Coincidence, perhaps. But it cannot be understated just how much influence that at one time ramshackle edifice in Central London had on the anatomy of the modern ghost story, regardless of the lack of real evidence to support the rumours from that bygone era.

In the first chapter of The Lurking Fear an unnamed paranormal investigator and his two burley companions deliberately set out to spend the night in the thunderstruck derelict house atop Tempest Hill in the Catskills, New York State. Indeed Lovecraft’s description of the forlorn Martense Mansion seems to harken back to the earlier urban legends surrounding the equally squalid building in Berkeley Square, and the dark shadows upon the fireplace when the three adventurers awaken to face the at the time unseen inbred denizens of that warren like hill is eerily reminiscent of the sailor’s yarn from fifty or so years prior.

As for the monster itself, it has always been multiple choice. A ghost is the preferred culprit, usually misty black with snaking tendrils. Demons get a mention, especially in relation to the ritualistic intentions of that occasionally visiting owner. Poltergeists are cited, as are particularly annoyed owls. Some claim that the beast was a squid like cryptid living in the pipework of the house, killing to protect its territory and in doing so bringing a whole new meaning to the term ‘Thomas Crapper’. And while I no longer believe in the validity of the case from a paranormal point of view I do still find that last idea highly amusing.

     The rumours had also been discussed in an exchange of letters in Notes and Queries earlier in the 1870s, some supporting the alleged tragedies (though always at second or third hand), and others debunking them; maids who had worked in the house  in Mr Myers' time, and a butler who had served the previous owner in the 1850s all denied any ghostly happenings.
     Fictional writers picked up versions of the legend, wittingly or unwittingly. Rhoda Broughton, a novelist, agreed that one of her short stories ('The Truth, the Whole Truth', 1873) closely resembled the supposed Events at Berkeley Square, but she said she had actually been inspired by something that she had been told happened in a country house, not in London at all. In her version, the maid and the rash young visitor both cry out, 'Oh my God. I've seen it!' before falling dead. [3]

The urban legend as a concept is not a modern invention. Tall tales filtered through society before the terminology existed to explain their spread. Some of the reasons for the notoriety of Number 50 are obvious in hindsight of course. Monetary in the case of publications that derived much needed income from outlandish claims of the macabre, and philosophically in the case of those witnessing the strange lights or odd noises after dark. We have long added monstrous glosses over what seems strange, even in supposedly enlightened times, and the haunted house as a trope has been intimately tied to language for millennia.

Some less meticulous commentators have recently mentioned both Shadow People and the Hat Man as potential culprits, and while I am always happy to see those hypnogogic denizens of the bedroom get some airtime it is almost impossible to infer their presence from the scattered sightings in the literature. Too many authors have placed their own stamp on the case at this point to pinpoint a single monster, and unless the building is some form of hitherto unrecognised paranormal nexus point, or gateway to the realms of the Lovecraftian Dreamlands, the lack of definition is telling as far as authenticity goes.

Modern eyes may rightly see evidence of legend tripping and to a lesser extent paranormal investigation being undertaken by such luminaries as Kentfield and Lyttleton in the above reports. The late Victorian era was awash with such a fervour for seeking out the dead in darkened rooms, amongst both the bored and likely brandy soaked gentlemen of the upper classes as well as their dutifully repressed wives, for whom the seance or circle afforded a rare excuse to act out and show less than prim emotions around others. Spiritualism was slowly seeping in from across the North Atlantic, and Skepticism soon followed too.

I have always tried to keep an objective distance from the idea of truth or falsehood in the strange things that I research. Personal brushes with the Barghest’s Wyrd influence aside, it is a requirement for those tracking the paw prints of my Keelian black dog through culture to weigh such narratives, no matter how bloated by embellishment, on a sliding scale. Possible to unlikely to doubtful to fake, a bell curve of improbability keeping us sane. But as much as this case was important to the early years of my research, albeit from afar, it is in truth lacking the sort of validity that would make it worth chasing in my older, wiser years.

Ultimately what we have here is hearsay weakly supported by the testimony of a few learned men, paranormal authors and unscrupulous potboiler journalists, all driven by profit. Remember this tale was birthed within a London that, while yet to witness the horrors of Jack the Ripper, was still terrified from living with the ever present fear of a returning Spring-Heeled Jack. Maggs Bros. Ltd left the building a while ago, with talk of converting both 49 and 50 Berkeley Square into a wellness retreat in the heart of the city now. But just how easily the new owners manage to shoo away the Barghest Wyrd remains to be seen.

[1] Elliot O'Donnell, Ghosts Of London, Philip Allen, 1832, Pages 26 - 27.
[2] Roger Clarke, A Natural History Of Ghosts, Penguin Books, 2012, Pages 289 - 290.
[3] Jennifer Westwood And Jacqueline Simpson, The Penguin Book Of Ghosts, Penguin Books, 2008, Pages 221 - 222.