Tragic reason why £3m overgrown mansion was left abandoned

An abandoned mansion which went viral after YouTubers broke in is owned by a grieving and reclusive multi-millionaire, MailOnline can reveal. 

Dozens of urban explorers and ghost hunters posted videos inside the £3.3 million property after word spread the house and all its contents had been ‘frozen in time’ for a decade.

After influencers peddled unverified theories about the owner, it can be revealed the once-jet set executive, who we are not naming, lives a solitary existence in a multi-million pound mansion in London as he struggles to come to terms with a family death.

A neighbour told MailOnline: ‘He had a partner, she passed away. There was a child, but she is now gone. He doesn’t want anyone to understand what has happened to him.

‘He is a rich person, he never gets visitors. He is very intelligent and well educated but he sleeps until three in the afternoon, the blinds spend most of their time closed.

‘His house here is full of papers, letters, we believe he is in a deep depression, great sadness. In almost three years he has not had any person visit, we have barely seen him. If you don’t know him, he won’t open the door. He doesn’t care.’

When we visited the abandoned mansion an hour’s drive outside London, the driveway was totally overgrown and a vintage BMW 3 series was covered in vegetation.

The grand entrance at the top of the driveway is sealed with a chain lock and high brick walls make it impenetrable.

Neighbours claim YouTubers broke down a fence on a nearby footpath and trespassed across private land in order to access the mansion.

They alleged the content creators prized open a downstairs window to enter the home.  

One group allegedly ‘had their van towed’,  a neighbour said.

Videos of the property have been made by influencers including ‘The Bearded Explorer’, who, with 231,000 subscribers, boasts of exploring ‘anything abandoned & derelict across the world’. 

Once inside, the home has a frozen-in-time feel to it with its contents such as furniture, TVs, clothes and bed linen still in situ. 

There is food and wine still in the working fridge and YouTubers note how it is as if the owner ‘left in a rush’.

Some rooms such as the lounge, kitchen and dining room appear to be in surprisingly good and dust-free condition, albeit with the odd bit of ivy pushing through cracks in the windows, yet an upstairs bedroom has a caved-in ceiling and mould throughout.

The property’s interior is of late 2000s or early 2010s style and is packed with trinkets like oil samples and a BP-branded coat which evidence a successful career in deep sea oil prospecting.

There is also an impressive film poster collection including James Bond’s From Russia with Love starring Sean Connery and James Dean’s The Great Escape.

Some items offer a glimpse into the owner’s interests, including several 2007/08 Chelsea season tickets for the Harris Suite hospitality section when the club was managed by José Mourinho and later, Avram Grant.

There are also vintage Chelsea kits alongside Boston Red Sox baseball replica shirts in an upstairs bedroom.

The owner also owns an impressive war time memorabilia collection including a poem written by a WW2 RAF pilot while a didgeridoo is propped up against the fireplace.

Standouts in the home include a dust covered Jaguar XJ sports car in a garage. Strangely, its tires have not deflated. A door into the garage has had a hole cut out of it.

But shameless urban explorers, who partake in ‘Urbex’, have gone a step further by brazenly filming deeply personal items like compensation documents which reveal the owner’s name.

They even gawk at old family holiday snaps, school photos of young children and even a framed handwritten note from a child clearly learning to write.

With power still feeding the home, trespassers are able to turn on lights and even a kitchen radio which ghost hunters have used in lowlife videos to pretend the home is haunted.

One neighbour of the mansion, who said the home has been ransacked by burglars thanks to videos posted online, said they believe the home was abandoned in around 2013 but a calendar which features in one video dates to around 2015.

The neighbour said they do not know why the home was abandoned and noted how the alarm never goes off, but revealed: ‘He continues to pay his subs for the road, we have tried to contact him but he doesn’t reply.

‘Several people have tried to buy it from him and he’s just not been interested or responded in any way.

‘It’s not a cheap property, it will be worth something to him to sell it.

‘It’s huge, it goes from here all the way down to the main road. His is a nice house, he paid £2million for it in around 2011.

‘His email he doesn’t respond to, I’ve sent him registered post with a forward and it’s never come back. He just doesn’t seem to want to do anything about it.

‘When we moved in he had this other half with a daughter and then she left.’

Neighbours paint a picture of a successful and wealthy man who used to jet around the world to New York, Australia and the Far East on work. Hotel cards from across the world found in the abandoned property corroborate this.

The executive has held senior roles in London and Boston, USA, according to his LinkedIn, and neighbours say he ‘always travelling’ up until 2021 when his partner became ill with a terminal condition.

They say he plunged into a deep depression after her death in 2023, which he notes on his LinkedIn profile.

He is said to now rarely leave his house and has few visitors. Those that do knock on his property, his neighbours say, are not answered to.

His garden is overgrown and the home, is a mess, with letters in the hallway piled high.

Locals believe the owner will not have a clue what has happened to his  property.

Another said: ‘Shame on those who have exploited him. This will come back to bite them, I can assure you, he is not someone to mess with.’