Welcome to Unexplained Extra with me Richard McClane Smith, where for the weeks in between episodes, we look at stories and ideas that, for one reason or other, didn't make it into the previous show. In last week's episode, The Cold Black Cloud, we heard the chilling tale of the so called Runcorn Thing. We're back in nineteen fifty two, the Jones and Glynn family of number one Byron Street in Runcorn, in the northwest of England were apparently harassed
by a terrifying poltergeist. For me writing these stories, peculiar events like this are about as good as it gets for Unexplained, With multiple participants and numerous locations all seemingly linked by this strange and unnerving event. The involvement of Richard Whittington Egan, who at the time was a well known chronicler of true crime and the history of the local area, was an added bonus, not least of all because he provides me with the useful, if somewhat stretched
segue into this week's extra. In twenty sixteen, Whittington Egan published a biography of Eliot O'Donnell titled The Master ghost Hunter. As a writer of numerous works of fiction spanning a variety of genres. It was mostly for his work chronicling apparent real life ghost stories that O'Donnell became most renowned. Born in eighteen seventy two in Clifton in the southwest of England, by the nineteen tens, O'Donnell had established himself as a leading figure in what was becoming an increasingly
popular genre. O'Donnell wrote widely about all manner of apparent hauntings in Britain and the United States, but there was one story, or rather location, for which he had a particular soft spot. The place, a mid terrorist George townhouse in London's Berkeley Square, is often referred to as quite
simply the most haunted house in London. It was as a schoolboy that O'Donnell first apparently visited the property, making his way to it alone through the dark and grimy streets of Victorian London, feeling not so much that it was his choice, but more that the house was somehow summoning him to its door. On arrival, he was struck by its grim and tattered fasart that stuck out immediately amongst its more sophisticated neighbors, even then, Berkeley Square was
one of the most exclusive locations in the capital. But something seemed to have infected this particular property of rot, that had seemingly seeped into the brick and would not let go. It was easy to see how it had garnered its unnerving reputation, and for the young schoolboy standing in its sadow and gazing up but its four stories of darkened, dusty windows, the sense of something heavy pulling at him from inside it. There was absolutely no doubt
that the rumors about it were true. Having been completed in seventeen fifty fifty, Berkeley Square began life as the home of one General Frampton. However, it wasn't until the late nineteenth century that the properties apparently haunted reputation is thought to have been established. How and why this reputation
took hold is not entirely clear. Writing in the Quarterly Journal Notes and Queries in November eighteen seventy two, Lord Lyttleton said, of the ominous abode, it is quite true there is a house in Berkeley Square said to be haunted and long unoccupied. On that account, there are strained
stories about it into which this opponent cannot enter. Then, in eighteen seventy nine, one journalist writing in Mayfair magazine made a startling revelation stating the house in Berkeley Square contains at least one room, of which the atmosphere is supernaturally fatal to body and mind alike. 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. Rumors suggest other cases of the same kind, all ending in death, madness, or both as the result of sleeping or trying to sleep in that room. The very party walls of the house, when touched, are found saturated with electric horror. The writer continued.
It is uninhabited save by an elderly man and woman who act as care takers, but even they have no access to the room that is kept locked and the key kept in the hands of a mysterious and seemingly nameless person who comes to the house once every six months, locks up the elderly people in the basement, and occupies himself in it for hours, all of which writer Eliot
O'Donnell would later lap up with great enthusiasm. As his fascination for the property and its haunted tales intensifight, he became an advocate for its haunted status, taking any opportunity he could to promote it. Many dismissed the stories, claiming that they were simply the invention of a disgruntled caretaker of the time who was keen to determine people from
buying the property. Others believed they stemmed from stories relating to one specific owner, an apparently eccentric recluse who let the property fall into disrepair. The man, described as being tall with a haggard appearance, apparently only ever used one room of the house, but was said to sometimes be seen wandering the other rooms at night, taking with him
a candle to light the way. If seen from the street, it is easy to see how this strange, unknown figure, glimpsed only as a silhouette through flickers of soft orange light, could have been mistaken for something more ominous. O'Donnell counted all this, however, with a number of stories he collated over the years, each of which gave a little more flesh to the bones of the rumors, and there was one story above all that seemed to lend them particular weight.
It was on one late midwinter night sometime in the mid nineteenth century that two sailors recorded only as Mick and Bill found themselves aimlessly wandering the streets of London after a night of heavy drinking. With no money and only a half drunk bottle of rum left a share between them. As the air grew increasingly icy, the pair began to hunt around desperately for somewhere to shelter for the night. After plodding the streets for hours, they eventually
ended up at Berkeley Square. When they spotted of the sale sign outside one particularly darkened townhouse on the square's western side. Bill suggested they try and find a way into it, having failed to open any of the ground floor windows, The men converged on the front doorstep and stared up at the large brass door knocker that glinted in the moonlight the number fifty painted in gold on
the glass paneling above it. After giving each other a conspiratorial look, the pair quickly glanced about the square to make sure they were alone. Then at the count of three gave the door a hefty shove. With a muffled crack, The door inched open, and the men pushed through into the house, Relieved to be finally out of the wind. Mick quickly closed the door behind them and lit a match, revealing a grand stone hallway with a wide stairwell at
the end of it. With the thick smell of damp in the air, the pair decided to find somewhere upstairs where they could light a fire for warmth. Having spied a dresser in one of the rooms, the men quickly dismantled it for firewood. Then, along with some ripped up skirting and strips of wallpaper, they carried it all to
a small back room on the second floor. After bundling some of the wood into the rusty fire grate, the men was soon basking in the glow of a small fire, sat huddled together on the floor as they cheerily passed the bottle of rum between themselves. Having soon grown tired, the men eventually bed it down for the night. It was some time later when Bill woke with a start to find the fire had all but burned out. Bill tossed some more wood onto it as He shivered in
the dark, his breath billowing out in clouds before him. Then, just as he was about to lie down again, he heard the faint sound of something banging from somewhere deep in the recesses of the house. As Bill listened carefully trying to establish where exactly the sound was coming from, Mick stirred beside him and then opened his eyes. What is it, he asked, Listen, said Bill, pointing to his ear. Then the sound came again, like something heavy being knocked
against a wall. It's just the front door, suggested Mick. However, with both of them too tired and cold to move, neither were particularly keen on going down to fix it. But as they lay down once more to sleep, they soon became aware of a second sound, something softer like footsteps that seemed to be making their way up the stairs.
Mick and Bill looked anxiously to each other. What if it was a police officer coming to inspect the property, they thought, But something in the footsteps seemed to suggest otherwise. It was hard to put their finger on it exactly. It was almost as if the steps didn't have any weight to them or the While the sound drew nearer, approaching up the stairs and on to the landing, before eventually stopping outside the door of their room. Who's there,
they cried, but there was no reply. Then the rattling of the door handle was followed by the creak of the hinges as the door was slowly pushed open. When the police discovered Bill some hours later, he was found lying on the pavement outside the house, babbling incoherently. After finally coming round, he explained all to the officers about how he and Mick had broken into the property and about the hideous, unnameable thing that had attacked them in it.
Bill had somehow managed to run past the thing and escape out the door as he heard Mix's screams coming down the hall behind him. He didn't know where Mick was and had been too scared to go back inside. Sometime later, Bill accompanied the police on a search of the property, where in the back yard they found Mick's dead body lying in a pool of blood, surrounded by shards of glass, his neck hideously broken from the fall, and above the huge splintered hole in the second floor
window from where he had evidently jumped. Eliot O'Donnell recounted the story of Bill and Mick the Sailors in his nineteen thirty two book Ghosts of London, but as Yan Bondison, in an article in the Christmas twenty fifteen edition of The forteen Times magazine pointed out, he had also given the story in his nineteen twenty four book Ghosts Helpful and Harmful, and had in fact been telling the story since at least as far back as nineteen oh eight,
the main problem with this being that it had changed significantly with each telling. The story began at first as a simple tale of two sailors being scared out at the property by some kind of phantom, before evolving to become a story about two sailors called Bert and Charlie, who, again, although being horrifically scarred by the incident, was still both
fortunate to escape with their lives. By the nineteen thirty two retelling, however, Bert and Charlie had morphed again, this time to Bill and Mick, with the latter not being so fortunate. All of which suggests, of course, that O'Donnell made the whole thing up, or at least embellished an earlier tale which most likely had no substance to it today. Fifty Berkeley Square, which up until twenty fifteen was home to the antiquarian bookstore Mags Brothers, remains the subject of
many ghost related stories. None, however, it seems, have been verified by anyone who's actually lived or worked at the property, all of whom claimed not to have seen or experienced anything untoward. In truth. As well suggested earlier, the stories seemed to stem from the impression taken of the house and the so called eccentric man who occupied it in the late nineteenth century, as opposed to any genuine recording
of supernatural events. It is said that the man Thomas Myers, took ownership of the property sometime around eighteen sixty with the intention of making it a home for himself and his fiancee. Only days before the two were due to get married, however, Thomas's fiance broke up with him, leaving
him to live in the house alone. Myers is said to have been so devastated as a result that he became a recluse, employing two house servants to look after him while he remained mostly cocooned within the walls of only one room, not even having the energy to unwrap the carpets and furniture he'd ordered for himself and his
one time future wife. As a result, the house fell steadily into disrepair, leaving it with the gloomy, disheveled air that it was later to become known for, and which would prove such fertile ground for the belief that it was indeed haunted by ghoulish and malignant specters. Instead, like so many ghost stories, its walls were not haunted by something physical, but the abstract, yet very real pain of heartbreak. If you enjoy Unexplained and would like to help support us,
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