The origins of the story

I'm always interested in looking into where tales of the paranormal get started.  We've seen a number of examples here at Skeptophilia, each with its own peculiar provenance.  There are ones that have the feel of Scary Tales Told Around A Campfire, and which probably have little connection to reality other than the setting, like the legend of 50 Berkeley Square and the famous tumbling coffins of Barbados.  Others come from works of fiction that were misinterpreted (or misrepresented) as fact, and afterward took on a life of their own, such as the tragic tale of Christopher Round.  There are stories for which the basic facts are clearly true, but which picked up paranormal overtones by virtue of being unexplained, such as the odd phenomenon of the Devonshire footprints.  Last, and most common, there are ones for which the main players are definitely real people with a decent amount of credibility, and who seem to have had no particular reason to lie other than perhaps relishing getting a chuckle from scaring the absolute shit out of their friends, such as the weirdly open-ended tale of Nurse Black (still my all-time favorite "true ghost story"), the story of the haunting of Hinton Ampner, Lord Dufferin's terrifying premonition, and the much-retold legend of the screaming skulls of Calgarth.

More interesting to me, though, are ones where the story itself has no obvious point of origin.  One of these for which I've spent an inordinate amount of time digging, and come up absolutely empty-handed, I know about because of the book Haunted Houses, by Bernhardt J. Hurwood, which I've owned (courtesy of the beloved Scholastic Book Club) since shortly after it was published in 1972.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Harald Hoyer from Schwerin, Germany, The Haunted House Das Geisterhaus (5360049608), CC BY-SA 2.0]

Hurwood gave the story the rather lurid name "The Mystery House of Horror," and it was one of a handful in the collection that completely freaked me out when I read it as a highly imaginative, impressionable twelve-year-old who was absolutely convinced that if I left even the slightest gap in the curtains of my bedroom at night, someone or *gulp* something would watch me through the window while I slept.  You'd think monsters would have better stuff to do at night than to squint at a sleeping kid, but you never know, with monsters.

Right?

Of course right.

In any case, "The Mystery House of Horror" is about a manor house in Kensington, England that had a sinister reputation.  No one, we're told, has any information about when it was built or by whom, which right away seems a little strange for a culture so absolutely obsessed with keeping track of the minute doings of the landed gentry.  All Hurwood tells us is that the unnamed original owner was a "man of ill repute" who hanged himself in the house rather than waiting for the law do it first, and after that, the house and the gardens that surrounded it were definitely a Very Bad Place.

It was rented for a time by a family with the last name of Trent, but that tenancy came to an abrupt end when something tried to smother Mrs. Trent in her sleep with a pillow.  Her husband leapt to her aid, and found himself in a wrestling match with something strong, slimy, invisible, and giving off a horrible stench.  For some reason, even after this incident they stayed on a few more weeks.  This is more than I'd have done -- if that happened to me, all you'd see is a comical, Looney Tunes-style blur as I ran away screaming, my feet not even touching the ground.  But during those weeks, Mr. and Mrs. Trent were plagued by something slamming doors, and occasionally violently shaking their beds at night.

Eventually, though, they had enough, and left.

The next tenant was a Mrs. Cattling, who moved in with eight small dogs, four dachshunds and four Pomeranians.  The dogs obviously hated the place right from the get-go (a common trope in paranormal stories is dogs being more sensitive to hauntings than humans are), and one night their fear was realized as something attacked them, killing one of the Pomeranians.  What happened next is, to me, the scariest part of the entire story:

She was about to pick up the limp little form when something made her whirl around.  To her horror she saw one of the pillows on the bed lift itself up and stand on end.  Frozen to the spot, she watched as it compressed itself into the shape of some hideously unfamiliar beast with a long muzzle, sharp teeth, and monstrously evil gleaming eyes.  For a moment she stared at it in morbidly rapt fascination, like a bird at a snake about to devour it.  Then, summoning all her strength, she rushed to the bed, seized the pillow and flung it to the floor, jumping on it with both feet and screaming, "You killed my dog!  You killed my dog!"

Quite the badass, that Mrs. Cattling.  The tale is reminiscent of the absolutely terrifying short story "O, Whistle and I'll Come for You, My Lad," by M. R. James, in which a malevolent and invisible spirit creates a body for itself out of whatever happens to be around -- a bedspread, curtains, clothing hanging on a line.  *shudder*

After Mrs. Cattling (and her surviving dogs) left, the house went through various other tenants, none of whom stayed long.  One saw a "gaunt, cadaverous figure" standing by the end of the bed.  Another saw a man in "peculiar old-fashioned dress" tinkering with the gas mantle.  She assumed her husband had called a repairman, but the husband hadn't done any such thing, and when the woman returned to the kitchen she found it filling up with a dangerous level of natural gas -- the result, we're led to believe, of one of the house's resident ghosts trying to do away with its living tenants.

Even when it was unoccupied, strange things happened.  A pair of young lovers looking for a quiet place to have a nice snog found their way into the house's garden one evening, but before they could get down to the business at hand the young man noticed that despite the house being empty, there was an eerie golden light in one of the upstairs windows.  As they watched, it changed to a "ghastly bluish-green," and a "tomblike chill" descended over them.  But finally we have people showing some degree of common sense -- the couple hauled ass out of the place and vowed never to come near it again.

Understandably, the house got such a bad reputation that no one would rent it. "Some time between World War I and World War II," we're told, it was torn down, and "when the last scraps of debris were hauled away, the residents of the neighborhood breathed a collective sigh of relief."

So it's a very creepy story, and going back through it to write this post I had a couple of moments where I had an honest shiver.  (Fortunately, as I write this, it's a bright sunny morning, my dogs are all safely asleep on their own personal sofa, and there are no peculiar-looking repairmen working on the gas line.  The latter is largely because we don't have a gas line, but still.)

But where did the story come from?

I've done a significant amount of research trying to find anything but Hurwood's account, and had zero success.  You'd think that a house with this kind of story behind it would merit mention somewhere, but if there is, I haven't been able to find it.  All of the references I've come across ultimately lead back to Hurwood himself.

So as compelling as the story is, I think the answer is that it came from Hurwood's own imagination.

I kind of get the draw, you know?  As a novelist, I want my own imaginary creations to get as much notice as they can, and if I were writing a True Tales of the Supernatural sort of collection, it'd be mighty tempting to throw one of my own stories in there just for fun.  And I suspect that's what Hurwood did.  The Mystery House of Horror, I'm afraid, never existed.

I might be wrong, of course.  If one of my readers knows the provenance of this story (other than Hurwood's anthology), please let me know in the comments.  Maybe there was a haunted house in Kensington, and that'd be worth knowing about.

Although I'd be just as happy if invisible, slimy, smelly creatures didn't exist.  Even if all they did was watch me through gaps in the curtains at night.

****************************************

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late eighteenth century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttelton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition that appeared to him as a brown mist and that "generated a feeling of absolute terror."  He shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttelton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttelton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttelton.

Sad to say for aficionados of "true ghost stories," the likeliest explanation is that the entire thing was spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual reliability as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttelton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what's actually there.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

************************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun and amusing discussion of a very ominous topic; how the universe will end.

In The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking) astrophysicist Katie Mack takes us through all the known possibilities -- a "Big Crunch" (the Big Bang in reverse), the cheerfully-named "Heat Death" (the material of the universe spread out at uniform density and a uniform temperature of only a few degrees above absolute zero), the terrifying -- but fortunately extremely unlikely -- Vacuum Decay (where the universe tears itself apart from the inside out), and others even wilder.

The cool thing is that all of it is scientifically sound.  Mack is a brilliant theoretical astrophysicist, and her explanations take cutting-edge research and bring it to a level a layperson can understand.  And along the way, her humor shines through, bringing a touch of lightness and upbeat positivity to a subject that will take the reader to the edges of the known universe and the end of time.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness. Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.   Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Metro Centric, Sophie Snyder Berkeley Square, CC BY 2.0]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the top floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand.  The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth.  The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall.  He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" that tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.   It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction, Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

***************************

I am not someone who generally buys things impulsively after seeing online ads, so the targeted ad software that seems sometimes to be listening to our conversations is mostly lost on me.  But when I saw an ad for the new book by physicist James Trefil and astronomer Michael Summers, Imagined Life, it took me about five seconds to hit "purchase."

The book is about exobiology -- the possibility of life outside of Earth.  Trefil and Summers look at the conditions and events that led to life here on the home planet (after all, the only test case we have), then extrapolate to consider what life elsewhere might be like.  They look not only at "Goldilocks" worlds like our own -- so-called because they're "juuuuust right" in terms of temperature -- but ice worlds, gas giants, water worlds, and even "rogue planets" that are roaming around in the darkness of space without orbiting a star.  As far as the possible life forms, they imagine "life like us," "life not like us," and "life that's really not like us," always being careful to stay within the known laws of physics and chemistry to keep our imaginations in check and retain a touchstone for what's possible.

It's brilliant reading, designed for anyone with an interest in science, science fiction, or simply looking up at the night sky with astonishment.  It doesn't require any particular background in science, so don't worry about getting lost in the technical details.  Their lucid and entertaining prose will keep you reading -- and puzzling over what strange creatures might be out there looking at us from their own home worlds and wondering if there's any life down there on that little green-and-blue planet orbiting the Sun.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The imaginary restaurant

A friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia responded to yesterday's post, about a high school biology teacher who decided to name a chemical reaction after himself with the result that it became semi-official on the internet, with an email that said, "I'd love to talk to you more about this phenomenon.  How 'bout we meet at The Shed at Dulwich for lunch tomorrow?"

Which was a little puzzling, until I clicked the link he sent, which was about how a non-existent restaurant became an internet phenomenon.

It started earlier this year when a freelance writer with the unlikely name of "Oobah Butler" decided to create a TripAdvisor page for a fake restaurant, and gave the address as the location of a garden shed next to his house in the town of Dulwich, England, which is a suburb of London.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Once the page was created, Butler and a few friends lauded The Shed at Dulwich in gushing tones.  They got a burner cellphone to be the restaurant's phone number.  They created a fake menu, each dish based upon a human emotion (my favorite one was "Lust:  Rabbit kidneys on toast seasoned with saffron and an oyster bisque.  Served with a side of pomegranate soufflé.")  They created photographs of entrées out of non-food items such as bleach tablets and shaving cream, which included the following:

Which, honestly, looks a lot like stuff I've eaten at upscale restaurants, although I assume it wouldn't taste like it.

The reviews kept pouring in.  "The best shed-based experience in London!" one of them said, which you would think would have tipped people off.

But no. The positive reviews, combined with the menu and photographs, made The Shed at Dulwich rocket upwards in TripAdvisor.  (Another said, "Spent a weekend in London and heard through the grapevine that this place is a must-visit.  After a few mildly frustrating phone calls I was in.")

The phone began ringing off the hook.  Butler told the callers, "Sorry, we're booked up."  He was sent free samples by restaurant supply companies.  The Dulwich governing council called Butler about relocating the restaurant to a more business-friendly property.  People contacted him looking for employment.

At this point page for The Shed was receiving 89,000 hits a day.  It rose to #1 in the TripAdvisor restaurant category for the Greater London area.

Have I made it clear enough that this place doesn't actually exist?

This is like the Swanson conversion from yesterday's post, only more so.  Like a thousand times more so.  Of course, eventually Butler was found out, and he 'fessed up, and the page was taken down.  But not before he was receiving hundreds of calls daily, from all over the world, asking for reservations -- some of them for months in advance.

So if you needed further indication that you should view anything online with a good dose of skepticism and critical thinking, this is it.  A guy and a few friends, armed with nothing more than a burner cellphone, some photographs of household items dolled up to look like food, and a good imagination, punked TripAdvisor and thousands of eager foodies.  I don't know what would possess someone to do this, other than a warped sense of humor and way too much free time, but it does illustrate the human capacity for hoaxing.

You can't even trust webpages for highly-rated restaurants.  You see why I'm dubious about online claims for ghosts, UFOs, and Bigfoot?

The legend of 50 Berkeley Square

Sometimes, with folk tales, you can pinpoint exactly when a legend entered the public awareness.  Someone writes and publishes a story in one of those "True Weird Tales" books or magazines; a report of a haunting makes the local news or newspaper; or, more recently, someone makes a claim in a blog, on Twitter, or on Facebook.

Such, for example, is the famous story of the tumbling coffins of Barbados, about which there seems to be zero hard documentary evidence -- but which first appeared (as a true tale) in James Alexander's Transatlantic Sketches, and which has been a standard in the ghost story repertoire ever since.  Likewise, the story of Lord Dufferin and the doomed elevator operator has a very certain provenance -- Lord Dufferin himself, who enjoyed nothing more than terrifying the absolute shit out of his house guests by telling the story over glasses of cognac late at night.

One of the scariest ghost stories, though, seems to have been built by accretion, and has no certain date of origin.  It's the tale of the "most haunted house in London" -- Number 50 Berkeley Square.

[image courtesy of photographer Sophie Ryder and the Wikimedia Commons]

The house itself is a four-story structure, built in the late 18th century, that looks innocent enough from the outside.  Until 1827 it was the home of British Prime Minister George Canning, which certainly gives it some historical gravitas right from the outset.  But gradually the ownership descended down the socioeconomic scale, and in the late 1800s it had fallen into disrepair.

At some point during that interval, it got the reputation for being haunted.  Apparently, it's the upper floor that is said to be the worst; some say it's occupied by the spirit of a young woman who committed suicide by throwing herself from one of the upper windows, others that it's haunted by the ghost of a young man whose family had locked him in the attic by himself, feeding him through a slot in the door until he went mad and finally died.  Whatever the truth of the non-paranormal aspects -- the suicide of the young woman, or the madness and death of the unfortunate young man -- it's clear that neighbors viewed the house askance during the last two decades of the 19th century.  And that's when the legends really took off.

The earliest definite account of haunting comes from George, Baron Lyttleton, who spent the night in the attic in 1872 after being dared to do so by a friend.  He saw (he said) an apparition, that appeared to him as a brown mist, and that terrified him -- he shot at it, to no apparent effect, and the next morning found the shotgun shell but no other trace of what he'd fired at.  Lyttleton himself committed suicide four years later by throwing himself down the stairs of his London home -- some say, because he never recovered from the fright he'd received that night.

In 1879, Mayfair ran a story about the place, recounting the then-deceased Baron Lyttleton's encounter, and also describing the experience of a maid who'd been sent up to the attic to clean it, and had gone mad.  She died shortly afterward in an asylum, prompting another skeptic, one Sir Robert Warboys -- a "notorious rake, libertine, and scoffer" -- to spend the night, saying that he could handle anything that cared to show up.  The owner of the house elected to stay downstairs, but they rigged up a bell so that Warboys could summon help if anything happened.  Around midnight, the owner was awakened by the bell ringing furiously, followed by the sound of a pistol shot.  According to one account:

The landlord raced upstairs and found Sir Robert sitting on the floor in the corner of the room with a smoking pistol in his hand. The young man had evidently died from traumatic shock, for his eyes were bulged, and his lips were curled from his clenched teeth. The landlord followed the line of sight from the dead man's terrible gaze and traced it to a single bullet hole in the opposite wall. He quickly deduced that Warboys had fired at the 'Thing', to no avail.

The house was (according to the legend) left unoccupied thereafter, because no one could be found who was willing to rent it.  This is why it was empty when two sailors on shore leave from Portsmouth Harbor, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, decided to stay there one foggy night when they could find no rooms to rent.  They were awakened in the wee hours by a misty "something" which tried to strangle Martin -- beside himself with fright, he fled, thinking his buddy was right behind him.  He wasn't.  When he went back into the house the following morning, accompanied by police, he found the unfortunate Blunden -- with his neck broken.

What's interesting about all of this is that after the Mayfair story, the whole thing kind of died down.  It's still called "the most haunted house in London," and figures prominently on London ghost tours, but it was purchased in 1937 by Maggs Brothers Antiquarian Book Dealers, and has shown no sign since that time of any paranormal occurrences.  And it's been pointed out that the story The Haunted and the Haunters by Edward Bulwer-Lytton -- published in 1859, right around the time the rumors of the haunting started -- bears an uncanny resemblance to the tale of 50 Berkeley Square, especially the account of the unstable Baron Lyttleton.

In my opinion, the entire thing seems to be spun from whole cloth.  There's no evidence that any of the paranormal stuff ever happened.  In fact, "Sir Robert Warboys" doesn't seem to exist except in connection to the haunted attic; if there is a mention of him anywhere except in accounts of his death at the hands of the misty "Thing," I haven't been able to find it.  As far as "two sailors from Portsmouth," that has about as much factual accuracy as "I heard the story from my aunt who said her best friend in high school's mother's second cousin saw it with her very own eyes."  And Lyttleton, as I've said, doesn't seem like he was exactly the most mentally stable of individuals to start with.

But I have to admit, it's a hell of a scary tale.  Part of what makes it as terrifying as it is is the fact that you never see the phantom's face.  As Stephen King points out, in his outstanding analysis of horror fiction Danse Macabre, there are times when not seeing what's behind the door is way worse than opening the door and finding out what it actually is.  So even though I'm not buying that the place is haunted, it does make for a great story -- and 50 Berkeley Square will definitely be on my itinerary when I have an opportunity to visit London.

The First Church of Atheism

Some of you may have heard of the recent weird twist that has occurred in the world of non-theists -- the founding of an "atheist church."

Lest you think that I'm just being funny or hyperbolic, let me say up front that I'm not the one who is calling it that, although its founders have been studiously avoiding the term.  London atheists Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans purchased a deconsecrated church this January and have turned it into a spot for what they are calling the "Sunday Assembly," which they describe thusly:

Life can be tough... It is. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, we have moments of weakness or life just isn't fair.  We want The Sunday Assembly to be a house of love and compassion, where, no matter what your situation, you are welcomed, accepted and loved.

Which sounds like at least they have the right approach.  They have said that if they are successful -- which, thus far, they are, showing a 3000% growth rate in just under ten months -- they will open other Sunday Assemblies elsewhere in England.  Their stated goal is to create "a godless assembly in every town, village, and city that wants one."

As Harry Cheadle of Vice put it:

Since I'm an atheist, I'll base this claim on data: Studies have shown that those who go to church are happier, more optimistic, and healthier than others; attending religious services helps kids fight depression and by some (admittedly biased) accounts makes people more charitable.  Obviously most atheists won't have a very good time gathering at a church or synagogue or temple where everyone is devoted to praising and beseeching an imaginary being, but if you believe these studies, they could do with attending something like church.

Ian Dodd, cofounder of a similar assembly in Los Angeles, said wryly, "The church model has worked really well for a couple of thousand years.  What we're trying to do is hold on to the bath water while throwing out the baby Jesus."

The friend who sent me the news story about this movement ended his email with, "See you there next Sunday?"  My response -- after thanking him for the lead -- was "not very likely, sorry."  Which got me thinking why it was that I didn't find this idea immediately attractive.

You'd think I would, wouldn't you?  Getting together with a community of like-minded individuals, supporting each other in difficult times, discussing the ramifications of our beliefs (and lack thereof), and so on -- it all should be quite a draw for an "out" atheist like me.  And yet I can say with some assurance that if such a "congregation" started in my home town, I probably wouldn't attend.

Part of it is personal.  I am actually a very shy individual.  I'm intensely uncomfortable in large social groups.  At parties I'm much more likely to be the guy standing in the corner silently sipping a glass of scotch and watching the goings-on than I am the person at the center of attention.

Which is probably part of why I'm a writer, although it does make me wonder sometimes how I ended up in the teaching profession.

But it's more than that, and I think that the additional reasons are going to make it very unlikely that the Sunday Assemblies will succeed in the long-term.  And it has to do with what brings churchgoers together in the first place.

Churches cohere as institutions, I think, because of a commonality of belief and the shared acceptance of a set of core values.  Now, there can be disagreement about the details, and sometimes even serious argument; but there is a set of unquestioned assumptions at the basis of belief, and those are generally universal to all members.

It's hard to see how disbelief could provide the same kind of philosophical and social glue.  There are, after all, a great many more versions and gradations of disbelief than there are of belief.  If you think that Jesus rose from the dead to save us from original sin -- well, you can differ in the interpretation of what exactly that means, but the basic concept is the same for everyone.

But why do people disbelieve in that claim?  I know people who reject the central tenet of Christianity because (1) they don't like a lot of the Christians they know, and don't want to be associated with Christianity because of it; (2) they would rather there not be an all-knowing, all-seeing deity watching them and judging their actions; (3) they figure that if they believed, they'd be compelled to go to church, and like to have their Sundays free; and (4) they just don't give a damn about the whole argument, and prefer not to think about it at all.  All of the above consider themselves atheists -- and, frankly, I doubt they'd have much to say to one another about it.

As for me, of course, my objections to the core beliefs of religion come from a different source still -- the lack of evidence for religious belief.

So it's hard to see how you could base a "church" (or whatever you want to call it) around not believing in something.  It'd be a little like having a bunch of guys who get together every week so they can eat pizza and not watch football.

So my suspicion is that the whole thing will be short-lived, because groups need a common purpose to survive, not just a shared lack of identification.  There's only one common purpose I can think of that an atheist gathering could have that would induce them to hang together -- the purpose of proselytization.  Spreading the good word that there's no Good Word.  Sending out missionaries to induce religious people to deconvert.

And once again -- I have no interest whatsoever in this.  To me, belief (or disbelief) is an intensely personal decision.  I am, obviously, up front about my own atheism, and have no problem with describing how I arrived where I am philosophically.  On the other hand, by doing so I am honestly not trying to talk anyone into, or out of, anything.  Proselytization implies an unequal power structure -- "I know what is correct, and I will instruct you about it if you will just open your mind and listen."  There's an undercurrent of condescension there that I find repellent.  So I'd be happy to discuss what I think, with anyone who isn't inclined to pull out a machete when they find out I'm an atheist -- but I'm just really not into persuasion.

So I think I'll be staying home next Sunday.  Happy for you if you like this sort of thing, but not my cup of tea.