Laura Wright 
Some haunted houses acquire their reputations because something terrible happened within them.
A murder.
A suicide.
A violent death.
A family tragedy remembered long after everyone involved has disappeared.
But occasionally, there is no explanation.
Around the turn of the twentieth century, a house known simply as Number 17 stood somewhere along Longcroft Road in England.
Its precise location has been lost.
Whether the building survives today is unknown.
Even the history of the people who lived there has largely disappeared.
What remained was a story about one particular room.
The drawing room.
And something inside it seemed determined to make its presence known.
Number 17, Longcroft Road
The surviving account identifies the building only as Number 17 on Longcroft Road.
Unfortunately, that isn’t enough to locate it with certainty.
The original story never clearly identified the town or community containing Longcroft Road. Later attempts to determine the location suggested an area associated with Chase Woods, but no definitive identification emerged.
Even when the story was preserved, much of the house’s history had apparently already been forgotten.
That makes Number 17 something of a ghost itself.
We have an address without a town.
A room without a floor plan.
A haunting without an identified ghost.
And a house that may no longer exist.
The Drawing Room
The center of the activity was an otherwise ordinary drawing room.
By the standards of the period, this should have been one of the more pleasant rooms in the house.
A drawing room was a social space. Family members gathered there. Visitors were entertained there. It was a place for conversation, reading, music, and relaxation.
At Number 17, however, the drawing room developed an atmosphere entirely its own.
When the activity began, the door handles started spinning.
Not merely rattling.
Spinning.
Someone approaching the door might see the handle moving repeatedly even though nobody stood on the other side.
And that was among the least peculiar things reported in the room.
Figures Walking Through Walls
Occupants reportedly saw phantom figures moving through the drawing room.
The apparitions did not behave as though they understood the architecture of the house as it existed.
They walked directly through walls.
That particular detail raises an intriguing possibility within the folklore of the haunting.
Perhaps the figures weren’t simply passing magically through solid surfaces.
Perhaps they were following an older route.
A doorway could once have existed where a wall later stood.
A corridor could have been removed.
The room might have been remodeled.
But there is no surviving information establishing that anything of the sort happened at Number 17.
All that remained was the observation that the figures appeared to travel according to a path that no longer corresponded with the house around them.
The Rustle of Silk
Sometimes nothing appeared at all.
Instead, people heard clothing.
A soft rustling moved through the drawing room.
Witnesses compared the sound to silken skirts and dresses from an earlier period.
There were no footsteps necessarily accompanying them.
No woman had to materialize.
Only the unmistakable sound of fabric moving as though an invisible person were crossing the room.
It is a remarkably quiet haunting compared with stories of screams and violent poltergeist activity.
Perhaps that is why it is effective.
Someone enters the drawing room.
Nothing is there.
Then silk rustles somewhere behind them.
Blue Fire in the Fireplace
The fireplace produced another strange phenomenon.
Its flames sometimes turned a deep blue.
There are perfectly natural circumstances in which flames can burn blue, depending upon fuel, temperature, and chemical composition.
But within the story of Number 17, the blue fire became associated with the other unusual phenomena occurring in the room.
The door handles moved.
Figures crossed through walls.
Invisible dresses rustled.
And the fireplace burned an unnatural-looking blue.
Yet despite having a working fireplace, the drawing room possessed another peculiarity.
It was always cold.
The Room That Wouldn’t Become Warm
No matter how much the occupants attempted to heat the drawing room, its temperature remained frigid.
A fire could be burning.
The rest of the house could be comfortable.
The drawing room remained cold.
Today, unexplained cold spots have become almost inseparable from popular ghost-hunting culture.
In the account of Number 17, however, the cold wasn’t merely a small patch of air encountered in one corner.
The entire room seemed resistant to warmth.
And there was something else peculiar about it.
Something that may have provided a perfectly ordinary explanation for at least part of the cold.
Sunlight apparently never entered the windows.
A Room Without Sunlight
Despite the drawing room’s prominence within the house, sunlight reportedly never entered it.
Why isn’t explained.
Perhaps the room faced the wrong direction.
Perhaps another building blocked the light.
Perhaps trees surrounded that side of the house.
Perhaps the architecture itself prevented direct sunlight from reaching the windows.
Or perhaps the claim became exaggerated as the haunting story developed.
Whatever the reason, the detail adds considerably to the atmosphere surrounding Number 17.
Day after day, the drawing room remained in shadow.
It was cold.
Its fire sometimes burned blue.
And occasionally people who weren’t there seemed to walk across it.
Who Was Haunting Number 17?
There was no obvious answer.
No murder was associated with the drawing room.
No occupant was known to have died there.
No great tragedy explained the apparitions.
There was only one death mentioned in connection with the property.
Years earlier, a butler had supposedly died by suicide.
By the time the haunting was recorded, even his name had been forgotten.
That might seem like an obvious explanation.
The problem was where he died.
The Forgotten Butler
According to the surviving story, the butler died in the basement.
Not the drawing room.
If his death had created the haunting, one might expect the basement to have developed a reputation of its own.
It didn’t.
No significant paranormal activity was reported there.
The basement where a man supposedly died remained quiet.
The drawing room where nobody was known to have died became the most disturbed part of the house.
That makes the forgotten butler an uncomfortable fit as an explanation.
Perhaps he had nothing whatsoever to do with the haunting.
A Haunting Without a Story
That is what separates Number 17 from many traditional haunted houses.
There is no neat origin.
Nobody says a woman was murdered beside the fireplace and therefore the sound of her silk dress can still be heard.
There is no story about someone dying in winter and therefore the room remains permanently cold.
No victim supposedly walked through an old doorway that was later sealed.
Those explanations would make excellent ghost stories.
But they aren’t present in the surviving account.
Instead, Number 17 gives us phenomena without a narrative.
And that may make the story more interesting.
What Happened to Number 17?
The eventual fate of the house is unknown.
The original account couldn’t establish whether Number 17 still existed, largely because the location of Longcroft Road itself wasn’t clearly identified.
Perhaps the house was demolished.
Perhaps Longcroft Road was renamed.
Perhaps Number 17 still stands behind a modern façade and nobody living there has any idea that a century ago people told stories about its drawing room.
Without a precise location, even that question becomes difficult to investigate.
And so the building disappears from history almost as completely as the people who supposedly haunted it.
The Drawing Room of Number 17
There are grander hauntings.
There are stories with murdered aristocrats, cursed families, headless riders, hidden bodies, and centuries of documented tragedy.
Number 17 offers almost none of that.
It gives us a room.
A door handle begins turning by itself.
A figure appears and walks toward a wall.
Instead of stopping, it passes through.
Somewhere nearby comes the faint rustle of a woman’s silk dress.
The fireplace suddenly burns blue.
And despite the flames, the room remains bitterly cold.
Nobody knows who the figures were.
Nobody knows why they appeared.
The one person known to have died unnaturally in the house apparently died somewhere else entirely.
Even the location of the house has been lost.
Perhaps that uncertainty is precisely why the story survives so well.
There is no tragedy to solve.
No restless spirit to identify.
No curse to break.
Just a room in an English house where, for reasons nobody could explain, the past occasionally seemed to walk through the walls.
About the Author
