In early February 1825, the Milnes household in Earl Street, Westminster, reportedly experienced a prolonged outbreak of bell-ringing that nobody present could explain. The surviving account describes several domestic bells sounding violently, inspection of the concealed wires and people stationed with lights in the rooms. It also describes a servant becoming seriously unwell as the ringing ended.
The principal source is a letter by M. Milnes, printed by Edward Moor in Bealings Bells in 1841. Her letter is dated 17 May 1834, approximately nine years after the event. Moor places his own interview around that date. Those distinctions matter: this is a retrospective household account, followed by the collector’s comments, rather than a log written while the bells were sounding.
A Westminster household, remembered from Islington
Moor learned of the Earl Street story while collecting accounts comparable with the disturbances at his own Suffolk home. He went to the Westminster house but discovered that the family had moved to Islington. He then visited their new home, introduced himself and described his own experiences. Mrs Milnes responded with an account that impressed him sufficiently for him to request it in writing.
During that conversation her husband returned. Moor says that the subject was discussed again and that Mr Milnes repeated substantially the same story. This is useful information about how Moor obtained his material, but the husband’s contribution survives through Moor’s description. It is not a separate signed deposition, and the printed letter is the wife’s narrative.
Mrs Milnes explains that her husband had been busy and that she undertook the written account herself. She also remarks on the difficulty of turning something she found simple to recount aloud into a formal history. The letter’s relatively brief form should therefore be retained as a limitation, rather than filled out with imagined conversations or a more elaborate investigation.
The order of the ringing
Mrs Milnes says that she returned from a walk at about half past four in the afternoon and found the family already disturbed. The first bell reported to have sounded was the nursery bell, whose pull was at the bottom of the house. She specifically describes it as unconnected with the other bells. It rang repeatedly before the others joined in.
The dining-room bell followed, then the drawing-room bell, with the disturbance extending through the house. Sometimes the bells reportedly sounded together; at other times they sounded individually. She characterises the ringing as consistently violent. Her language conveys the household’s impression of a coordinated uproar, but does not establish an intelligent agent behind it.
The account gives a duration of two and a half hours. It does not provide a full sequence of timed observations. Because the disturbance had already begun when Mrs Milnes arrived home, her arrival time should not be turned into an exact starting time or used to calculate a precise finish. Nor does the letter supply an exact day within early February.
Looking at the wires and watching the rooms
Alarmed by what she found, Mrs Milnes sent for her husband from the wharf. The letter does not identify his work there, so that detail cannot safely be enlarged into a particular occupation. On arriving, he arranged for the coverings that concealed the bell wires to be removed.
This is an easily distorted part of the story. Removing the wire casings exposed the mechanism; the letter does not say that the wires were cut or that the bells were detached. Other cases in Moor’s collection do describe cut wires, but importing that action into the Milnes account would change the evidence.
When exposing the wires failed to reveal a cause, Mr Milnes stationed a person with a light in each room. He himself held a candle beneath the row of bells below. Mrs Milnes says that these arrangements produced no explanation. The letter does not give a plan of the house, identify every watcher or describe the complete routing and condition of each wire.
The result is a reported search that failed to detect a cause, rather than a demonstrated exclusion of every mechanical possibility. The distinction preserves both parts of the source: the family made practical attempts to investigate, and the information now available is too limited to reconstruct or repeat those attempts.
The servant’s illness and the end of the ringing
Mrs Milnes also describes one servant as especially frightened. According to the letter, the servant became acutely unwell at the last peal and subsequently remained incapacitated for a considerable time. The letter associates the onset of that illness with the moment the bells stopped.
This is a historical description without clinical records. It cannot establish a diagnosis, possession, an electrical injury or deliberate bell-ringing by the servant. The reported timing is part of the account, but simultaneous events do not by themselves identify the cause of either. The letter offers no confession or witnessed act showing that the servant operated the bells.
What Moor added afterwards
After printing the letter, Moor says that the spoken account had included a further detail about the servant’s hair spreading widely around her head. That detail is absent from Mrs Milnes’s written narrative. Moor thought it might bear on an electrical explanation and speculated about an unusual presence or absence of electrical matter.
His own qualifications are revealing. He cannot remember whether Mr Milnes mentioned the detail, and he wonders whether his reaction during the interview caused Mrs Milnes to omit it from her letter. This is the compiler reflecting on a remembered conversation, not an electrical measurement or an experiment performed at the house.
The electrical suggestion therefore belongs to the history of interpretation. It did not demonstrate a mechanism connecting the servant, the bell system and the ringing. Equally, the household’s inability to find a cause does not turn Moor’s paranormal interests into confirmation of a haunting.
Assessment and location
The case is classified as insufficient evidence. The surviving letter records a striking household experience and specific attempts at inspection, but the retrospective timing, missing mechanical details and absence of a demonstrated cause prevent a firmer conclusion. Moor’s later electrical theory remains an untested proposal.
The map uses an approximate Westminster district reference at Parliament Square, based on the geographical information attached to the contextual photograph. It does not locate the former Earl Street house, identify a present residence or attribute the disturbance to Parliament, Westminster Abbey or another public landmark. Historic house numbers and the family’s later residential address are omitted. No public access to the incident property has been established.
The original letter and Moor’s comments can be read in Edward Moor, Bealings Bells (1841), pages 59–63. The incident belongs to 1825; 1834 is the letter and interview year, and 1841 the book’s publication year. Sources checked 13 November 2026.