The Chamber Of Horrors Bet That Led To One Woman's Chilling Story

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Would you dare spend a night in London's Chamber of Horrors?

Back in the late 1910s/early 1920s, a young Lady Eleanor Smith was bet £100 that she couldn't, and took up the wager, along with friend and fellow Bright Young Thing, Zita Jungman.

As Smith recalled to the Sunday Express in 1925, the next night, the two of them hid in the original Old Bailey dock in Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors until 10pm, when a night watchman came in, took a cursory look around, then plunged the room into darkness. An hour later, Smith and Jungman decided it was safe to surface: "The flashlight illuminated waxen faces in a particularly weird and ghostly manner," remembered Smith, "I have a nasty memory, even now of two long-dead criminals, I think Burke and Hare... their appearance was particularly hideous."

Somewhat skewing the concept of spending 'a night' down in the "gloomy and depressing surroundings", the two young women decided that as midnight came and went, it was time to make an honourable escape, at which point they ascended to the great hall: "There was something awe-inspiring about the dignified effigies of kings and statesmen posed so majestically in the darkness," Smith recalled.

Then: footsteps echoes from the other end of the long hall. The became louder, closer. "We were badly frightened," wrote Smith, "they continued to approach heralded by a glare of light..."

They had, of course, been caught: a burly night watchman now stood before the interlopers: "Our only comfort lay in the fact that he was about as frightened as we were... 'How did you get in?' he asked with appalling severity," wrote Smith. In the end, Smith and Jungman managed to talk their way out of the situation (you can imagine Smith played the "Do you know who I am?" card, her father being the Earl of Birkenhead), and were let out of a side door.

It's unclear exactly when this whole episode unfolded, but Smith's reminisces were printed in April 1925, shortly after Madame Tussauds went up in flames, all but gutting the attraction and nightmarishly disfiguring a good deal of its waxworks.

This conflagration — along with Lady Eleanor Smith's after dark encounter — inspired Smith's short story, Mrs. Raeburn's Waxwork, which was published in 1931 in the collection Satan's Circus. It tells the tale of an out of work actor who takes a job at a waxwork emporium, and soon becomes obsessed with the figure of a convicted poisoner ("Was it his imagination, or did her lips really curve, was there an answering twinkle in her eye?" to the point of insanity, at which point he decides Mrs Raeburn's effigy must be melted. Naturally, he takes down the whole emporium with it: "That night the inhabitants of the city were surprised to perceive a crimson flush sweeping the sky above the rooftops of the distant street... The wind was strong that night and licked the flames easily, strengthening them until the efforts of the men armed with hose-pipes became pathetic in their futility."