THE TOWER HOUSE

The Tower House dates from 1877 and stands on Melbury Road in the Holland Park district of Kensington and Chelsea, London. It was built by William Burges, a well-known Victorian architect, as a home for himself. It has had many famous owners down the years. In the 1920’s the house had belonged to Colonel T. H. Minshall, DSO, a well known newspaper and magazine magnate, and also the father of Merlin Minshall, the man Ian Fleming modelled his James Bond character after.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s the house belonged to the Irish actor and hell-raiser, Richard Harris. He had always been possessed with the belief that he was meant to own The Tower House, since he had awakened on the lawn there one morning when he was 24 years of age; no doubt after a hard night on the sauce. Strange as it may seem he came to purchase the place a decade and a half later.

Harris claimed that the building was haunted by the spirit of a small child. Before purchasing the house he had employed a professional burglar to break in to his home to see how “burglar-proof” it was. On entering the empty mansion the burglar was startled to hear the sound of a child crying in one of the upstairs rooms. After locating the room he was about to enter when the crying ceased.

The actor became obsessed by what the burglar had told him and carried out some research of his own. This led him to believe that a small child had been buried somewhere in the tower. Harris subsequently formed a relationship with the ghostly child and would frequently reprimand it for often awakening him in the middle of the night. In response to Harris’s angry outbursts the ghostly child would scamper about the stairs of the tower slamming doors. This became particularly irritating when Harris was trying to learn his lines for the film Cromwell and in an angry outburst cried out, “If you don’t shut up I’ll get a priest in to exorcise you!” This seemed to quell the spectral brat for a time. But it wasn’t until Harris built a nursery at the top of the stairs to the tower, and filled it with toys and games, that the child’s noisy antics calmed down. 

As the present owner of the Tower House is Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin fame, the noisy child may have to compete with some of Jimmy’s ear-splitting guitar solos.