Talk:50 Berkeley Square

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The article contains text from [[1]] and [[2]]. Grim23 (talk) 21:13, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: moved, without prejudice toward revisiting 25 Berkeley Square. ErikHaugen (talk | contribs) 17:41, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

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25 Berkeley Square → 50 Berkeley Square — The house is still clearly marked as number 50, I've just been there and checked. Relisted. Favonian (talk) 17:29, 3 August 2011 (UTC) Peter spikings (talk) 14:19, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Survey

Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *'''Support''' or *'''Oppose''', then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.

Discussion

Any additional comments:

• Even since the first edit, this house was '50 Berkeley Square'. So how come someone halved the house number? Ghosts? ;-) --Ohconfucius ^¡digame! 03:41, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Point-by-point debunking

25 Berkeley Square

DC: Why 25? Wrong house altogether. We've known it was No. 50 since 1872.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DC: Overall impression: as Douglas Adams put it, definitively wrong.

50 Berkeley Square is a reportedly haunted townhouse on Berkeley Square in Mayfair, in Central London. In the 1900s it became known as "The Most Haunted House in London";[1] mostly due to Peter Underwood's description of the house in Haunted London.[2]

DC: First sentence -- no argument. As for the rest: the house was known to be "haunted" from at least 1871; it was first mentioned in a letter to Bishop Thirlwall on 22 January that year; it became famous from November 1872; Underwood's book was published in 1975, so couldn't really have caused much sensation in the 1900s.

History and Occupants

The four-storey brick town house was constructed in the late eighteenth century.[3] From 1770 to 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, commemorated by a plaque on the house today. The house was then bought by the First Viscount Bearsted, who rented the property to one Mr Myers.[4] It was later bought by BP.[4]

DC: The dates given for Canning are those of his birth and death, not his residence in 50 BS. Thomas Myers rented the place in 1865, when Bearstead was only two years old. He wasn't created Viscount Bearstead till 1925, and even according to your writer's source was the owner of the site, not the lessee or the tenant.

Since 1937 the building has been occupied by Maggs Bros, a firm of antiquarian book dealers.[1] In 1998 the building was thought to be the oldest unaltered building in London.[5]

DC: Maggs Brothers moved in in 1938.

Legend

Legend varies, but mostly states that the attic room of the house is haunted by a spirit of a young woman who committed suicide there.[6] She purportedly threw herself from the top floor windows after being abused by her uncle;[7] and is said to be capable of frightening people to death. The spirit is said to take the form of a brown mist; though sometimes it is reported as a white figure.[8] One, rarer, version of the tale is that a young man was locked in the attic room, fed only through a hole in the door, until he eventually went mad and died.[9]

DC: The story of the girl flinging herself from the window is authentic. The second story -- far more commonly told -- concerns a Mr Du Pré who locked his (already) mad brother in the attic. The Du Prés never had any connection with 50 BS.

In the Victorian era at least two deaths were said to have occured after people spent the night in the room.[10] However, the first ghostly happenings were reported by George Canning, who claimed to have heard strange noises and have experienced psychic phenomena whilst living there.[6]

DC: The first sentence is correct, in that they were said to have occurred. The second is nonsense. Canning never reported any such thing.

After George Canning's residency in 1885, the house was bought by a Mr. Myers, who had recently been jilted by his fiancee.[6] It was said that he would lock himself in the attic room and slowly went mad over the rest of his life.[7] During his stay at the house, it fell into gross disrepair and it is during this time that its reputation began to build.[7][6]

DC: Canning died in 1827; see above. Mr Myers died in 1874. The link between Myers's neglect of the place and the reputation for being haunted is authentic, but is in fact an argument against the house being haunted. It was advanced in Notes and Queries (see below) as a theory of why the error was made. The theory is good, but doesn't work; Myers rented the house, but lived at 4 Tilney Street with his sister Mary.

As a bet, in 1872, Lord Lyttleton stayed a night in the building's attic.[8] He brought his shotgun with him, and during the night fired at an apparition which had appeared. In the morning, he attempted to find what he had shot at, but could only find shotgun cartridges.[8] The next year the local council brought a summons to the house's owners for failure to pay taxes, but due to the house's reputation as haunted they were let off.[11]

DC: The report of Lyttelton staying the night at 50 BS is moonshine, taken wholesale from the story of Raynham Hall, Norfolk, where Captain Marryat apparently really did fire off a shot at the Brown Lady who walks there. Myers was taken to court in May 1873 for failure to pay rates, was convicted, and an order for distraint was issued: he was not let off at all.

In 1879, Mayfair reported that a maid who had stayed in the attic room had been found mad.[7] It was later reported that she died in an asylum the day after.[6] On the day she was found, a nobleman purportedly took up the challenge to spend a night in the room, and his was the first death recorded in the house. The coroner pronounced him dead of fright.[6]

DC: The Mayfair report is correct, but your link takes us to the modern porno mag. Mayfair was a literary magazine with society pretensions. No English coroner has ever "pronounced" anyone "dead of fright:" they would be laughed into retirement. In any case, there is no record of any such deaths, or any such inquest.

It is said that after one nobleman had spent the night in the attic room, he was so paralysed with fear that he couldn't speak.[12]

DC: This and the above were taken from Rhoda Broughton's short story "The Truth, the Whole truth, and nothing but the Truth," published in Temple Bar magazine in 1868. Broughton denied it was about 50 BS, leaving the true mystery of the house: how anyone ever thought it was haunted, and why this particular story was attached to it.

In 1887, sailors from HMS Penelope stayed a night in the house.[6] By morning one was found dead, having tripped as he ran from the house.[6] The other reported having seen the ghost of Mr. Myers, coming at them aggressively.[6]

DC: The story of the two sailors was invented in December 1924 by Elliott O'Donnell, self-styled "ghost-hunter" and charlatan, for his book Ghosts Helpful and Harmful. Even O'Donnell does not claim they saw Myers. He retold the story repeatedly for the next forty years, each time changing details of it.

Victorian medium Florence Cook held a seance at the house and claimed to have contacted the spirits of those killed by the ghost.[13]

DC: Rubbish, from start to finish. The writer seems to have visited the website of the London dungeon, where an exhibit of 50 BS stands quite near a model of the alluring Miss Cook, probably the most famous fake medium of the nineteenth century. Florence never went near 50 BS -- partly because, strangely, she seems to have been afraid the ghosts would take revenge on her for her fakery! (See Trevor H. Hall, The Medium and the Scientist, I forget the year.)

No phenomenon have been reported since the house was bought by the Magg's Brothers in the mid 1930s[6] and though many contemporary media outlets reported happenings at the house, more recent investigators claim nothing untowards has ever taken place there.[14] They remark that Lord Lytton's story The Haunted and the Haunters – bears a remarkable resemblance to the supposed hauntings at 50 Berkeley Square.[15]

DC: Passing over the poor grammar, this is better. Lytton's story was published in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in August 1859, when 50 BS was happily occupied by Sir Charles Young. It places the house just north of Oxford Street, and neither the description nor the history of his haunted house has any resemblance to 50 BS. It is not a ghost story, but a romance on the idea of mesmerism from afar. None of the incidents in the story bear any resemblance to those reported of 50 BS. Lytton had no connection to the place at all, except that he was linked to it by a lunatic priest, the Rev F. G. Lee, who was convinced he had taken part in an attempted ritual of magic there. Lee refers the reader to Eliphas Levi for a full account; Levi's story is entirely different.

DC: Concclusion

In general: the essential reference in this case is to three correspondences in Notes and Queries (1872-3, 1879, and 1880-1). This produced not one first-hand witness to the haunting, and in the end they concluded that it was untrue. There is no mention of these here: your writer seems not to suspect their existence. The other canonical texts -- Middleton [1915], Lee [1885], Price [1945] -- all seem to be foreign to this writer. The references and sources are all taken from the internet, or from popular books that regurgitate the internet; I notice that the reference to Peter Underwood, a respectable writer, is actually one to someone entirely different. Very little of what is written here has anything at all to do with 50 BS. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is utter bilge.

I would love to know who wrote this rubbish, so that I can send them a get-well card. Do you divulge names?

Dick Collins, MA (Cantab.), PhD (Cantab.) [email address redacted]

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The preceding comment section was added by User:86.142.155.121 on 22 September 2011. I have retained it but restored the overwritten sections above it. jnestorius^(talk) 23:19, 25 June 2013 (UTC)

Alleged police sign

Various internet sources state that there is a police notice from the 1950s hanging inside the building, which warns about not to use the top floor, not even for storage. Has anyone of you Londoners ever seen this "legendary" sign or can show photographic evidence of it? Or is it simply a fabrication of a journalist? Earlier there was a photo tour available on the Maggs Bros.' website, but they have already moved out. On Instagram they shared that they never experienced any sort of paranormal activity. Gyurika (talk) 16:23, 10 July 2016 (UTC)