Blooms Town House Hotel 

7 Montague Square, London, WC1B 5BP (Russell Square Underground Station)

Blooms Hotel is an elegant town house, part of an 18th Century Terrace, just round the corner from the world famous British Museum. The bedrooms are furnished in the Regency Style and there is a lovely garden terrace and a library for the use of guests. The hotel is approached up a few stairs onto a chequerboard black and white marble porch between stately iron railings. You get the impression you are arriving somewhere rather classy, and the interior decoration bears this out. 

A frequent visitor to the Blooms Hotel is an American businesswoman called Sara Reed. On one of her early visits she stayed in Room 1 and as soon as she entered the room she became aware of a presence. She could not see it, but strongly sensed that there was a man sitting in the chair in the room. She felt that he was a thinker and that he was sitting there musing on something or other. She mentioned it to the manager at that time and he confirmed that there was talk of a ghost in the hotel. However, Room 1 is quite new and is part of an extension added to the hotel where the old garden used to be. Sara got the impression that the ghost was somehow sitting in the sunshine, perhaps enjoying a break from a stint in the nearby British Library Reading Room, that famous place frequented by such historical figures as George Bernard Shaw and Karl Marx. The ghost is completely harmless, not overly friendly, actually more or less oblivious to what’s going on around him. Still she doesn’t like leaving anything on the chair, which one again is quite modern, because it’s his chair. 

Sara got in touch with a clairvoyant, Paul Hughes who came with her to the hotel. When I spoke to Paul he said that when he walked into the hotel’s bar, he got the feeling of claustrophobia – the place was crowded with spirits. Paul’s theory is that because the building adjoins the British Museum, it almost acts as an exit point for all the spirits of the people and artefacts, Egyptian, Greek, Assyrian, that fill the Museum next door. Perhaps because of its proximity to the British Museum and the obvious attraction of that place to would be students of religion and magic, this part of Bloomsbury does have some interesting shops. The most long standing of them is the Atlantis Bookshop on Museum Street founded in 1922 which is supposed to have its own ghost.