Haunted Houses in 1900 London

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We need not go into the country and look for ghosts in old Baronial Halls and Moated Granges.

There were plenty of houses in London haunted by the enduring recollection of tragedies enacted in them.

Take No. 45, Berkeley Square, where Lord Clive committed suicide; or No. 50, where surely some awful deed must have been perpetrated to justify its unenviable notoriety, for it was said to contain a room to enter which was fatal to both body and mind.

There was St. James' Palace, of all places but one the most ghostly in London; and that one is the Tower with its Green, - no sadder spot on earth, - where Anne Boleyn is said to appear.

But deadly crimes, committed or contemplated, had left their mark upon very many outwardly commonplace or decorous houses throughout London, of which I will give some instances.

Huddled up in a corner of the top room of a handsome house in Gledhow Crescent, near the Boltons, S.W., the potman of a public-house opposite was, many years ago, done to death.

In a melancholy Chelsea Square (Paulton's), some years before 1900 a clergyman named Huelin was murdered, and his body packed up in a chest and left in the hall for conveyance by the carrier.

The same day, the murderer went on to Wellington Square, Chelsea, perhaps a slightly more gloomy locality, and killed Mr. Huelin's housekeeper, who had charge of this, the unfortunate gentleman's other property.

The villain was caught, and paid the penalty of his double crime.

It was near the stage-door of the Adelphi Theatre, in Maiden Lane, that poor William Terriss, the actor, was done to death by a madman.

Would any one, walking through aristocratic Belgrave Square, imagine as he glanced at the spacious areas, that in the cellar of one of these, a dead body was once discovered, and never even identified?

In patrician Harley Street, there was found in a cellar while being cleaned out, the hanging corpse of a woman doubled up and steeped in chloride of lime.

She had no doubt been murdered, though no ray of light was ever shed upon the mystery.

In an empty house facing West Ham Park, the body of a strangled child was found in an attic cupboard, but the crime was never traced.

Cannon Street had many plain business-like ware-houses, and walking past one of them on the south side, who would suppose it had been the scene of a crime?

Yet, some years before, the housekeeper was found murdered just inside the hall, and a relation suspected of the crime only saved himself at the last moment by proving an alibi - a most remarkable record in criminal records, and still known as the Cannon Street mystery, for mystery it remains to this day.

Cullum Street was a very ordinary and very narrow passage between Fenchurch Street and Lime Street, wherein was a certain chemist's shop, whose proprietor, in the late eighteen hundreds, retiring to his back-parlour, one morning swallowed enough prussic acid to kill an elephant, and was found as dead as the proverbial door-nail.

At Kidbrook Park Road, Blackheath, in a snug detached villa, tree and shrub-surrounded, a Mrs. Tyler met with a cruel and murderous death; and at North Finchley, outside his own residence, West Cottage, the head man of the Express Dairy Company was shot dead; by whom, no one knows.

In Great Coram Street, Harriet Buswell, ex-member of the Alhambra corps de ballet, was found murdered in bed in a second-floor back-room - a most sensational case, but the perpetrator of the crime was never brought to justice.

In Bute Crescent, Euston Road, in a comfortable three-storied house, a poor old widow was found on the kitchen floor lying in a pool of blood, murdered.

This crime, too, was never brought home to any one.

Euston Square was the scene of a remarkable case.

In the cellar of one of the houses, the remains of a woman with a rope tied round the neck, were discovered wrapped up in cloth, and proved to be those of an eccentric lady of property who had been missing some time.

Hannah Dobbs, a servant who had waited upon the unfortunate woman until her disappearance, was arrested on suspicion, but acquitted; and the Euston Square mystery remains one to this day.

In a shop in Bartholomew Road, Kentish Town, the proprietress, Mrs. Samuel, was found murdered with her head fractured; robbery being the motive, as an iron safe containing a considerable sum of money had been abstracted.

This crime also remains a mystery.

So too does that of Martin, the night watchman at Nicol's Cafe Royal, which premises run back into Glass House Street, where, one morning in December, 1894, the first comers to the cafe found the poor man sitting at his accustomed place on a settee, to all appearances asleep, but with a bullet through his head.

In Whitechapel we get into the region of great crimes.

No. 31, Turner Street, off Commercial Road, will be always associated with the double murder of the Jew Levi and his housekeeper, by a man who essayed to escape by the roof of the adjoining house, and after an exciting chase was captured, and, in due course, hanged.

In Whitechapel Road, near the Pavilion Theatre, is a shop of prosaic and commonplace appearance, which many years ago (it was then a brushmaker's) was the scene of a terrible deed committed in the back premises by Wainwright, the proprietor, the evidence of whose guilt long lay hidden beneath the flooring, saturated with chloride of lime.

The corpse was that of Harriet Lane, with whom he had lived, and having become tired of, had murdered.

Two skeletons, with skulls broken in, were recently discovered near the same spot, and it is possible they were other victims of Wainwright, who appears to have possessed all the unscrupulousness of the notorious Deeming.

Going west, from the far east of London: Bridgewater House, St. James', an historic mansion associated with all that is pleasant and artistic, was in the early part of this year the scene of a tragedy below-stairs, when a maidservant was shot dead in one of the pantries by a footman, who immediately afterwards took his own life.

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