Boo! Haunted hotel
Born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton in Jersey, music hall singer and stage actress Lillie Langtry lived at 21 Pont Street – in part of what is now The Cadogan hotel – between 1892 and 1897. Famous for her “relationships” with the nobility, Lillie was variously associated with the Earl of Shrewsbury, Prince Louis of Battenberg and the Prince of Wales, who went on to become King Edward VII.
Scholars believe that the fictitious Irene Adler (“that woman”) in the Sherlock Holmes story A Scandal in Bohemia was based on Lillie Langtry. She was certainly amazing. She became an American citizen in 1897, divorced her husband and bought a winery in Lake County, California that produced red wine. She sold it in 1906, but it is still known as the Langtry Estate. Lillie died in Monaco in 1929 and is buried in Jersey, but if you’re in the Cadogan Hotel on Christmas Day you might just catch a glimpse of her, or – as some report – sense her presence. She is also said to appear when the hotel is nearly empty, which is rarely these days.
By George!
Novelist George Eliot – real name Mary Anne Evans – married John Cross, 20 years her junior, in 1880 and after an eventful honeymoon in Venice the couple moved into 6 Cheyne Walk. Eliot lived there for just 19 days, dying from a throat infection and kidney disease. She is buried in Highgate Cemetry close to Karl Marx’s memorial.
One of the leading English novelists of the 19th century, Eliot wrote many books including The Mill on the Floss, Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda. She also led a rather less than orthodox life,
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Scared yet? You will be when you use our guide to all that is ghostly, ghoulish and grisly in Chelsea – a Halloween walkabout for would-be ghostbusters
captured a few years ago in a “salt and spice” biography by Brenda Maddox. Just before Eliot died, another novelist
– Katherine Macquoid – woke to see the figure of George Eliot standing between her bed and the wall. The figure spoke, delivering a message. In the morning, all that Macquoid could remember were the words “sixty three”, or “sixty one” according to some accounts. Eliot would have been 61 when she died.
Spirit mixer The Cheyne Walk Brasserie is in a former Victorian pub known as The King’s Head & Eight Bells. As recently as 1999, it was said to have been haunted by an unseen entity that became especially active whenever a new female member of staff joined. Former landlady Sue Collie said she often used to come down in the morning to find that glasses had been rearranged and objects such at the till keys had been moved about. In 1997, just before Christmas, a new barmaid started work at the pub and the “ghost” reacted by constantly switching off the central heating.
Bear behind
Throughout the 19th and into the early years of the 20th century, there were regular reports of a ghostly bear haunting the gardens behind Cheyne Walk. Two theories emerged. One was that it was the spirit of a bear baited to death on the site in the 16th century. The other was that it is the ghost of an especially mangy black bear kept by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the garden of his house at 16 Cheyne Walk. Rossetti’s menagerie also included peacocks, raccoons, kangaroos, armadillos, marmots, a brahmin bull and a wombat.
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