Documented Deaths Caused By A Ghost

One famous paranormal murder was Sir Robert Warboys in 1840’s.

Location: 50 Berkeley Square is a reportedly haunted townhouse at Berkeley Square in Mayfair, a district in the City of Westminster, on the West End of London. In the 1900s it became known as “The Most Haunted House in London.”

Paranormal Murders:
In 1840, the 20-year-old dandy and notorious rake Sir Robert Warboys heard the eerie rumors about the Berkeley Square Thing in a Holborn tavern one night, and laughingly dismissed the tales as ‘unadulterated poppycock’.

Sir Robert’s friends disagreed with him and dared him to spend a night in the haunted second-floor room in Berkeley Square.

Warboys raised his flagon of ale in the air and announced: ‘I wholeheartedly accept your preposterous harebrained challenge!’

That same night, Sir Robert visited the haunted premises to arrange an all-night vigil with the landlord. The landlord tried to talk Sir Robert out of the dare, but the young man refused to listen and demanded to be put up for the night in the haunted room. The landlord finally gave into Sir Robert’s demands, but stipulated two conditions; if the young man saw anything ‘unearthly’ he was to pull a cord that would ring a bell in the landlord’s room below. Secondly, Sir Robert would have to be armed with a pistol throughout the vigil. The young libertine thought the conditions were absurd but agreed to them just to get the landlord out of his hair.

The landlord handed Warboys a pistol and left as a clock in the room chimed the hour of midnight. Sir Robert sat at a table in the candlelit room and waited for the ‘Thing’ to put in an appearance.
Forty-five minutes after midnight, the landlord was startled out of his sleep by the violent jangling of the bell. A single gunshot in the room above echoed through the house. 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.

Three years after Warboys’ death, Edward Blunden and Robert Martin, two sailors from Portsmouth, wandered into Berkeley Square in a drunken state and noticed the ‘To Let’ sign at number 50. They had squandered most of their wages on drink and couldn’t afford lodgings, so they broke into number 50. Finding the lower floors too damp, the sailors staggered upstairs and finally settled down on the floor of the infamous room.

It proved to be a serious mistake. Blunden told his friend he felt nervous in the room and felt a ‘presence’, but Martin told his shipmate he’d been at sea too long, and was soon snoring.
A little over an hour later, the door of the room burst open, and the enormous shadowy figure of a man floated towards the sailors. Martin woke up and found himself unable to move. He was paralyzed with fear. Blunden tried to get to his feet, but the entity seized him by the throat with its cold, misty-looking hands and started to choke him.

Martin suddenly gained enough courage to enable him to spring to his feet. He tried to confront the apparition, but was so horrified by its deformed face and body, he found himself fleeing from the house. He encountered a policeman in the square outside and told him of the vapoury assailant that was throttling his friend. He found a policeman and returned to the house just in time to see Blunden jumping out the window, screaming in horror. His body landed on a spiked railing at the front of the house. He was impaled on the spikes and died instantly. Police searched the house but found nothing.