History of Kilburn and West Hampstead

This story originally appeared on the West Hampstead Life website several years ago, but we have been asked to re-publish it. Ghost stories associated with Kilburn and West Hampstead are rare and the phenomenon short-lived. We have found a couple of hoaxes, a poltergeist and an innocuous clergyman.  One man thought otherwise: ‘Kilburn is the most haunted district in London’ declared the Irish writer Elliott O’Donnell. He specialised in the paranormal, and today his books are generally regarded as fiction rather than fact.  In his 1920 book ‘More Haunted Houses of London’, O’Donnell included ‘A haunting in a Kilburn Studio.’ The narrator talks about the importance of ‘atmosphere’, concluding that there were many reports of hauntings in low-lying districts: ‘When we come to London, there is Kilburn. There is no air there, the soil is clay, and the atmosphere is crammed as full as it can hold with stale thoughts – some of them deuced bad ones. ’    After a ...