James Wentworth Day’s experience in a seemingly cursed London townhouse reveals a chilling true-life tale of hauntings and relentless misfortune, writes JOHN WEST
James Wentworth Day was a prominent 20th-century writer and broadcaster, the author of numerous books and articles on subjects ranging from the history of East Anglia to biographies of Sir Malcolm Campbell and the Queen Mother’s family.
He also produced several studies of the paranormal and is still fondly remembered by researchers today as one of the first modern ghost hunters.
In the mid-1930s, Day took a lease on 2 King Street in central London — a pleasant, dignified house dating back to the reign of Charles II. The rent was surprisingly modest: just £225 a year, rates included.
In later years, Day would wonder whether the owners, the Crown, had knowingly let him a curse rather than a bargain.
His flat occupied the third and fourth floors and comprised a sitting and dining room, three bedrooms, a dressing room, kitchen and bathroom.
At the time, Day was editor of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News and invited his assistant editor, Lieutenant-Commander Peter Kemp RN, to share the accommodation, as the place seemed too large for one man. Kemp agreed, taking the upper floor for himself.
Sense of dread at 2 King Street
On the day they moved in, Day was alone in his bedroom while Kemp unpacked upstairs. Suddenly, he was overcome by a sense of dread and became acutely aware of something staring at him from the fireplace in the left-hand corner of the room.
Kemp was dismissive when told of this, brushing it off as “rot”, but Day remained unconvinced. To him, the house possessed an intangible presence — something hostile, something ill-disposed towards both occupants.
Misfortune soon followed.
Within a fortnight, Day was forced to move out temporarily due to a domestic tragedy.
When he returned some months later, his life unravelled further. He lost his job. Kemp abruptly announced he was leaving to live in the country.
Day then contacted an old Cambridge friend, Gordon Dickson, who agreed to move in and share the costs. Before long, Dickson too sensed the house’s malevolent atmosphere and left.
Shortly afterwards, he was killed in a car accident.
Day later married, but the marriage failed. The downward spiral continued.
His father-in-law committed suicide, his beloved Scots housekeeper left, and he was burgled, losing several valuable heirlooms.
Day also noted that businesses operating on the ground floor of the building repeatedly failed, their owners forced to move on.
Eventually, Day found himself alone in a house he had come to loathe.
Seeking company, he invited two young friends to stay — his goddaughter and godson, children of an Irish estate-owning friend.
One Saturday night, Day returned from a shooting trip when he heard a scream from upstairs.
‘Who’s there? Oh! My God! Who’s there?’ cried the goddaughter.
‘It’s me — Uncle James. What’s the matter?’ he called back.
‘Please come up quickly! I’m so frightened!’
Day rushed upstairs and found the girl badly shaken. Once she had calmed down, she explained what she had seen.
Returning home unexpectedly, she had entered the sitting room and glanced through the half-open door of Day’s bedroom.
In the left-hand corner sat a man bound hand and foot to a chair. His eyes bulged grotesquely from their sockets, his tongue protruded from his mouth. He had been strangled.
A search of the room revealed nothing to explain the vision.
The following day, the girl’s mother and aunt were told what had happened. The mother was adamant that there was something evil in the house and urged Day to leave at once.
He did.
Later, Day learned that subsequent tenants also suffered misfortune. One, a former officer, died in debt after his business collapsed.
Eventually, an art dealer took the lease, installing his sister in the house and filling it with valuable paintings and furniture.
Some time later, Day was walking through St James’s with a Canadian officer who belonged to his club when they encountered an elderly acquaintance — a former butler to Lord Derby, a man proud of his knowledge of the area.
The unluckiest house in St James
As they passed No. 2 King Street, the old man pointed at the house with his cane.
‘That, gentlemen, is the unluckiest house in St James’s. Everyone who has lived there has suffered — bankruptcy, accidents, fatal crashes, or sheer misery.’
When Day asked why, the man recounted a dark history.
In 1810, the Duke of Cumberland, son of George III, was widely believed to have murdered his manservant, Sellis, in St James’s Palace. It was said the Duke had seduced Sellis’s daughter, who became pregnant and took her own life.
When Sellis discovered the truth, a violent struggle ensued in his bedroom, ending with his death.
The Duke claimed Sellis had attacked him and then fled to his own room, where he cut his throat. Few believed this, particularly as the razor was found on the far side of the room — far beyond where it could reasonably have landed.
Nevertheless, the authorities declined to challenge the Duke’s account, and the matter was quietly dropped.
Unfortunately for Cumberland, a valet had seen him fleeing Sellis’s room that night. Learning of this, the Duke had the man assigned to a German officer living at No. 2 King Street.
There, the valet was tied to a chair and garrotted.
‘They say his ghost still appears — eyes staring, tongue hanging out,’ the old man concluded. ‘His curse is on that house, gentlemen.’
Day then confessed that he himself had once lived there.
The old man looked at him sharply.
‘You got out just in time, sir.’
As for the house today, it did not survive the Second World War.
A German bomb struck 2 King Street, killing the art dealer’s sister instantly and reducing the building and its treasures to rubble.
There is a grim irony in the thought that it took Adolf Hitler and the weapons of war to finally lay the curse of King Street to rest.
