Paranormal record / 1900
West Kensington. August 1900. A street of late-Victorian villas. Word spread that a house in Edith Villas had a ghost, and that the spectre had shown itself at one particular window. One evening some fifteen hundred people gathered near the house. They stood in the street and watched that window. Some believed. Others suspected a practical joke. Several windows were broken, "presumably with view to attracting the interesting occupant". Soon it took a strong force of police to keep the crowd on the move. Then, as quickly as it had come, the scare died down. Nobody ever explained it.
Edith Villas sat on the West Kensington estate in west London, historically part of the parish of Fulham. The estate was built speculatively by William Henry Gibbs and John P. Flew from 1876 onwards. The street had one famous earlier family. The Yeats family, including the young W.B. Yeats, lived at 14 Edith Villas from late 1874. Nothing links them, or that house, to what happened in 1900.