In July 1974, “Mama” Cass Elliot of the Mamas and the Papas died of a heart attack in a London apartment owned by singer Harry Nilsson. Four years later, almost to the month, the Who’s drummer Keith Moon died in that same apartment, in the very same bedroom, at the exact same age Elliot had been when she passed.
Elliot had been staying at Nilsson’s flat at 9 Curzon Place in Mayfair while performing a celebrated two-week solo run at the London Palladium, a run she considered one of her proudest achievements. On July 29, 1974, she was found dead in the bedroom, and rumors spread quickly that she had choked to death on a ham sandwich found near her bed. An autopsy later revealed the truth: Elliot had died of sudden heart failure, likely worsened by years of extreme yo-yo dieting that had placed enormous strain on her heart. The sandwich, untouched, had nothing to do with her death at all.
Nilsson, devastated by losing his friend in his own home, continued lending the flat out to other musicians passing through London. In 1978, the Who’s notoriously wild drummer Keith Moon, who had occasionally stored some of his own belongings in the apartment’s closets over the years, was staying there with his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. On the night of September 6, 1978, the couple attended a screening of “The Buddy Holly Story” as guests of Paul McCartney. Moon, restless throughout the film, reportedly wanted to leave before it had even finished.
Back at the apartment, Moon woke the next morning and asked Walter-Lax to cook him a meal. After eating and watching television, he took 32 tablets of clomethiazole, a powerful sedative prescribed to help manage his alcohol withdrawal, far exceeding the small daily dose his doctor had warned him not to surpass. He fell asleep and never woke up. He was 32 years old, the same age Elliot had been at her death four years earlier, in the same bedroom, reportedly even in the same bed.
In an unsettling footnote to the story, Moon’s personal assistant, Dougal Butler, had once gone to the apartment to retrieve some of Moon’s stored clothing while Elliot was staying there, and recalled glimpsing what he assumed was Elliot sleeping in the bedroom, unaware at the time that she was very likely already dead. Nilsson, shaken by losing a second close friend in the same room of his own home, sold the flat shortly after Moon’s death and relocated permanently to Los Angeles, reportedly unable to shake the sense that the apartment had become cursed. The buyer was, fittingly, Moon’s own Who bandmate Pete Townshend, who took ownership of a property that had, in the space of just four years, claimed two of rock and pop’s most beloved performers under eerily parallel circumstances neither man could have predicted when they first borrowed the keys from their old friend Harry Nilsson.