This unidentifiable monstrosity is said, by some, to be a vile,
phantasmagorical killer from beyond the grave… though there is some
evidence to suggest that it may be a bizarre, mutant cephalopod, which
lurks in the filthy labyrinth of the London sewer system waiting to rise
up and kill again.
Considered by most paranormal experts to fit more accurately into the
realm of haunting, the Nameless Thing of Berkeley Square has left
behind tantalizing shreds of evidence – and, unfortunately, more than
one corpse – which suggests that the “ghost,” which inhabits the 4
th floor (although some claim it’s the 2
nd)
of number 50 Berkeley Square, in what has been referred to as “the most
haunted house in London,” may not really be a case of spiritual
infestation at all, but rather a semi-aquatic, predatory, cryptid
phenomenon.
Although
no one is exactly sure when the first encounter with this beast
occurred, the first known account of the “Thing” date as far back as the
early 1840′s, when 20-year-old, Sir Robert Warboys, came across strange
rumors surrounding the notorious Berkeley Square address while
imbibing at a tavern in London’s Holborn district one evening. Evidently
Warboys was a man not prone to superstitious claptrap as he derisively
dismissed the legend as “unadulterated poppycock.”
Warboys’ barroom compatriots wholeheartedly disagreed with his
assessment and, in what one can only assume was an effort to knock him
down a peg or two, challenged the young noble to spend the night in the
haunted 2
nd floor room. Warboys, with what was no doubt the
heady rush of alcohol fueled confidence, raised his pitcher of ale
skyward and announced to his cohorts: “I wholeheartedly accept your
preposterous harebrained challenge!”
Sir Robert then proceeded to the allegedly haunted dwelling, where he
insisted the landlord allow him to spend the night in the
“ghost-filled” quarters. After some debate, the landlord reluctantly
agreed to Warboys request, but only with the caveat that the young man
be armed with a pistol and that at the first sign of anything even
remotely “out of the ordinary,” he would yank the cord that was attached
to a bell in the landlord’s room below. Warboys apparently scoffed at
the notion, but agreed to the terms.
As the clock chimed midnight, Warboys settled down at a table to
await the “Thing’s” arrival. The landlord, with, what one must assume
was a great lack of enthusiasm, left his temporary tenant alone in the
dreaded room, save for his pistol and a single candle, but it wouldn’t
be long before the two would meet again.
Less than an hour following the landlord’s departure, at precisely
Forty-five minutes past the hour, the proprietor was startled from an
unfit slumber by the violent clanging of the bell adjacent to his bed.
Before he even had time to clear his thoughts and react, a gunshot
echoed from above his room. With a burst of adrenaline, the landlord
leapt from his bed, and climbed the stairs at a rapid pace. When he
arrived at the door to the notorious room, he pushed it open to reveal a
sight which he would never forget…
The
room was apparently unchanged except for the notable fact that Sir
Robert had left his perch at the table and was now wedged in the corner
of the room, the still smoking pistol caught in his white-knuckled grip
of his fear contorted corpse.
In the very short time the landlord spent in the room he noted that
Warboys’ his lips were peeled back from his clenched teeth in a grimace
of horror and eyes seemed to be literally bulging from his skull. The
landlord followed Sir Robert’s gaze to a lone bullet hole in the
opposite wall and speculated that Warboys had fired at the infamous
“Thing,” but, for reasons he could not surmise, the bullet had had no
effect on the beast.
There can be no doubt that 50 Berkeley Square can boast a horrific
array of ostensibly paranormal encounters (ranging from strange sounds
reported by neighbors to the confirmed deaths of guests and domestic
servants,) but there is one confrontation which has become the benchmark
of this legend.
Just three years following the horrific death of Sir Robert Warboys,
50 Berkeley Square became the sight of yet another gruesome demise.
Although the details of this narrative have varied in minor degrees from
one retelling to another, the core of the account has always remained
the same:
In
1943, two sailors from Portsmouth, Robert Martin and Edward Blunden,
after having squandered their lodging funds on an evening of drunken
ribaldry, noticed a “To Let” on the then abandoned Berkeley Square abode
and managed to break into a basement window of the dwelling in search
of a night’s rest. Discovering that the lower level of the house was
uncomfortably damp (not to mention rat infested,) the sailors migrated
upwards, finally settling down in the now notorious room.
Blunden, presumably the more sober of the two, expressed the anxiety
he felt upon entering the room. He claimed that he felt a “presence,”
but these fears were promptly dismissed by his shipmate, who used his
rifle to prop open a window to allow for a breeze and built a fire in
the long unused hearth with bits of broken furniture and rotting
floorboards. It wasn’t long before the two men were huddled on the
relative warmth of floor, fast asleep.
Sometime after midnight Blunden awoke to see the door to the room
creaking open. Little by little a sliver of dim, grayish light crept
across the wooden floor. Too terrified to move, Blunden managed to wake
his accomplice. The two men sat up as they heard a strange, moist,
scraping sound slowly approach them. Later, Martin claimed that it
sounded as if something were dragging itself across the floor.
Suddenly,
the terrified men leapt to their feet and came face to face with the
abhorrent visage of what could only describe as a hideous monstrosity.
The creature undulated between the sailors and what was their only hope
for escape; the open door. Then, just as the trembling Blunden began to
reach toward the rifle, which was still wedged in the window frame, the
creature suddenly lunged forward, wrapping itself around the young
sailor’s throat.
Seizing the opportunity, the panic stricken Martin ran from the
house, screaming for help. Soon enough he stumbled upon a patrolling
police officer. Although skeptical of the young sailor’s frenzied tale
(and no doubt attributing it to the almost overwhelming stench of
alcohol which permeated his uniform) the officer dutifully followed
Martin back to Berkeley Square.
According
to the account, Martin and the officer ran up the stairs, but found no
sign of Blunden in the room. Martin reclaimed his rifle as the two men
continued to search the house. Their efforts seemed to prove fruitless
however, until the men entered the basement and were greeted to a
ghastly image that would haunt them for the remainder of their lives…
Lying at the base of the stairs in Berkeley Square’s moist, rock
walled cellar was Blunden’s dismembered corpse. His body lay in a
mangled heap, with his head wrenched viciously to the side. The officer
reported that the young man’s eyes (much like those of Sir Robert
Warboys) were wide with unimaginable horror.
This appalling tale, like so many legends of this ilk, has also been
recounted with a decidedly more phantasmal twist. The most notable
variation in this retelling is the description of the “Thing” as a
shadowy man-like figure with a deformed face and body that burst in on
the sailors and proceeded to strangle Blunden with “cold, misty looking
hands.”
Yet another discrepancy has Blunden perishing not in the basement,
but being hurled from the window and impaled on a spike on the wrought
iron fence that surrounded Berkeley Square. It’s these incongruities
that have led many investigators to file this case under the
“paranormal” banner, assuming that it is just another ghost story, but
there is intriguing (though admittedly scant) evidence to suggested that
this may be a genuine, albeit exceedingly bizarre, corporeal entity.
While
these shocking encounters leave more questions as to the “Thing’s”
identity than answers, there are other alleged eyewitness accounts,
which can help us to paint a more complete picture of this creature.
Some have described as an amorphous being, formless and slimy, which
emits a “gruesome sloppy noise” when it moves; while others insist it is
a dark, shapeless, spectral form, which was described as a “collection
of shadows,” that attacks its victims with clawed feet and razor sharp,
bird-like talons. Though accounts conflict regarding the actual shape
and size of the beast, at least one eyewitness has included tentacles in
his description of the creature, likening the fiend to a small,
viciously deformed octopus, which pulls itself across the floor, leaving
a viscous trail in its wake.
This description has led some researchers to speculate that the Thing may actually be some kind of mutated
FRESHWATER OCTOPI
or an unknown, amphibious, marine animal that managed to migrate from
the Thames into London’s vast subterranean sewer system, where it was
able to infiltrate the Berkeley Square home via the plumbing. It can
also be speculated that this beast was looking to feed on the ample rat
population that dwelt in the house, when it accidentally stumbled across
the more “substantial” prey of the drunken sailors.
In the 1920s, eminent psychic investigator Harry Price revealed a
plethora of data regarding earlier encounters with the “Thing.” While
pouring over scads of newspaper articles, he came across a story from
1790 that claimed 50 Berkeley Square once housed the headquarters for a
crew of counterfeiters. Price speculated (rather dubiously) that the
counterfeiters — in a plot lifted right from Scooby-Doo — had concocted
the spooky tale to frighten off curious onlookers and provide a
“spectral” cover for the noisy processes that accompanied their illicit
nocturnal activities.
Price also managed to turn up another 1840 account of bizarre noises
(including bells, loud footsteps and heavy dragging sounds) emanating
from the house that were so rambunctious a cadre of courageous neighbors
felt obliged to search the abode, to no avail. He also came across an
1870 article published in the magazine “Notes and Queries,” by W. E.
Howlett, which stated:
“The mystery of Berkeley Square still remains a mystery. The story
of the haunted house in Mayfair can be recapitulated in a few words; the
house contains at least one room of which the atmosphere is
supernaturally fatal to body and mind. 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 number 50
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, madness, or both as a 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. It is uninhabited save by an
elderly man and his wife who act as caretakers; but even these have no
access to the room. This is kept locked, the key being in the hands of a
mysterious and seemingly nameless person who comes to the house once
every six months, locks up the elderly couple in the basement, and then
unlocks the room and occupies himself in it for hours.”
Price also noted that while 50 Berkeley Square was located on a piece
real-estate wedged in one of London’s most enviable districts, it had
remained vacant for inexplicably long stretches of time. His personal
conclusion of the whole affair was that “a particularly nasty
poltergeist had been active at number 50 in the 1840s, but doubted that
the ‘thing’ was still at large”.
Since 1853, the ground floor of the house on Berkeley Square has played host to an antique bookshop known as
Maggs Brothers.
Although there have been no reported sightings of the creature in the
20th century, it has been noted that employees of the bookshop are not
allowed to go up to the top floor. They say a police notice hangs on the
wall inside the house that was put up in the 1950s. It states that the
top floor of the house is not to be used, even for storage… No one is
exactly sure why.
Although in a case like this it is difficult to separate truth from
legend, one likely reason that there have been no recent encounters with
this beast is the fact that (if this creature indeed has oceanic roots)
it has, in all likelihood, returned to the fathomless depths of the
sea, or — more chillingly — it and its offspring may still be lurking in
the labyrinth of centuries old tunnels, which weave their way beneath
Great Briton’s capitol city, feeding on rats, waiting to crawl back up
from the sewer to claim more human victims.
source : http://www.americanmonsters.com/site/2010/01/nameless-thing-of-berkeley-square-england/
The
early risers were the first to find them, strange hoof-shaped prints in
straight lines, passing over rooftops, through walls and covering huge
areas of land. A set of the prints were even supposed to have bridged a
two mile span of the river Exe, continuing on the other side as if the
creature had walked over the water.
