There are numerous legends about skulls, which, if removed from the homes where they once lived, would wail, shriek, knock over chairs with poltergeist energy, and somehow spoil the crops in people's gardens. If these "haunted" skulls are allowed to remain in the house, they keep quiet and the crops flourish.
Apparently, in the old days, more than a few people had the foresight to get their hands on a skull while the getting was good, possibly realizing that the time would come when the human skeleton would be harder to come by, what with sanitation laws and other government red tape.
Almost all screaming skulls are in England, whre they reside in manors and estates with names like the Screaming Skull of Wardley Hall, near Manchester , England . Some say this is none other than the skull of Father Ambrose Barlow, killed in 1641 for following the wrong religion. The protestant Church of England had warned all the Catholics to leave the country. With a defiant gesture that may or may not have been the sign of the cross, Barlow said he was too sick to travel and stayed in England , practicing his Catholic sacraments, until soldiers arrested him. They hung the priest by the neck until dead and then pulled his body apart by horses. At least, I think he was dead before they quartered him. The authorities put his head on display as a warning to others. Somebody snagged the skull, probably under cover of the night. People walked by one morning and noticed it was gone. Maybe another Catholic secretly took the grisly thing down off the post to give the dead Father Barlow some dignity. Maybe some young urchins took it for laughs, giddy on ale, tossed it back and forth. Somehow, it ended up at Wardley Hall, passed down from generation to generation.
About a hundred years later, a servant at Wardley Hall found the skull and threw it out. That night, a raging thunderstorm terrified the owner of the Hall. He said he could hear the screaming of Father Barlow's spirit entwined inside the howling wind. He could discern croaking growls of outrage and resentment embedded within peals of thunder. He was convinced that the skull was raining doom upon the house. Dining room furniture scuttled around roughly, scarring the wooden floor. The next day, to stop the pandemonium, he found the skull and brought it back inside, where it resides peacefully at Wardley Hall to this day.
Then, there is the Screaming Skull of Burton Agnes Hall in Yorkshire , England . In the 1599, Sir Henry Griffith was building a splendid mansion. Or, perhaps carpenters were building the mansion for him.
So, with Burton Agnes Hall under construction, one of Sir Griffith's three daughters, Anne, went for a walk. The legend says someone attacked her in a park. I don't know if the motive was robbery, rape, or outright Jack-the-Ripper-style devilry, but she was found dying from a serious knife wound.
Perhaps delirious from fever, Anne made her sisters promise that if she died, they would bring her head back into the house so she could see the finished interior. Her sisters agreed. A short time later, Anne passed away.
Whether or not Anne's sisters believed in life after death, we do not know. I like to think that their exploit hinged in part on rebellion against their father.
I can hear Sir Griffith now.
"Young ladies, I absolutely forbid you to desecrate your poor sister in such a manner! She was delirious, and I'll hear no more about it!"
Teenagers have not changed that much in all these centuries. A girl could become quite bored in a big English manor at night without telephones or internet.
They hold a sance in the den, lit by a single candle, while Sir Griffith snores upstairs after a gin nightcap. More specifically, they are having a scrying session.
A bowl, made of dark blue stained glass, sits full of water on the white tablecloth between the two girls. One sister holds a wand made from the branch of a laurel tree. She dips the resin-coated tip of the wand into the water and then rubs it slowly around the rim of the bowl. The effect is similar to the musical tones produced by rubbing your finger around the rim of a crystal glass filled with water.
"Will I ever marry?" asks the other sister.
Ripples form on the surface of the water, generated from the droning vibrations of wand upon glass. Both girls lean in close to watch the ripple form into shapes and letters.
I'm not saying drugs were involved, but the mandrake root had a reputation in those days as an aphrodisiac. The mandrake root, like Belladonna, contains a poison that can cause hallucinations, but it can also cause death, so even practitioners of witchcraft no longer recommend it, except, perhaps, to murder an enemy.
England declared witchcraft illegal in 1563, but in 1584, a Justice of the Peace from Kent, England named Reginald Scot suggested that the authorities were overzealous in their harassment of old haggish women and strange men who lived alone with cats. He wrote a treatise explaining that most witchcraft was fake and not to be taken so seriously. Real life always falls somewhere in between two extremes, and one can imagine mischievous parlor games involving sances and divination behind closed doors. I may have embellished the original story, but something has to explain why two girls would retrieve the head of their deceased sister.
The official story is that they heard bloodcurdling moans, apparently from the vicinity of Anne's tomb, which did not stop until they exhumed the body. To their shock and bafflement, the head had separated itself from the body and shed most of its skin. That was their story, but my theory is, they cut off Anne's head and didn't want to admit it to their father. It was bad enough just bringing the skull into the Manor.
"What happened to her skin and eyeballs, for God's sake?"
"Daddy, 'tis surely the climate! You know how swift the dank soil and conquering worm doth ravage!"
"Enough, daughters, enough! I'll hear no more about it!"
Years passed at Burton Agnes Hall, and whenever someone tried to throw the skull away, the horses in the barns had nervous breakdowns and pictures jumped off the walls.
Finally, because no one wanted to look at the skull grinning smugly inside the mansion, but couldn't stand listening to it bitch and rattle when evicted, they sealed it behind a secret panel in the wall. You might find the skull if you went around knocking on the walls, listening for a hollow sound, but the present-day inhabitants of Burton Agnes Hall will not allow it.
These are only two of the many screaming skull legends. There are books and web sites that discuss them all. Supernatural scholar Olsen Archer theorizes that most of these stories come from Europe because the United States is a such a relatively new country. He claims to have discovered at least two screaming skull incidents in the United States, which he is currently investigating.
Bill Ectric likes to erase the line between science and mysticism. He is the author of Tamper, a coming-of-age novel about a young man obsessed by unexplained mysteries.
On the web, Bill’s work has appeared on SearchWarp, Literary Kicks, Dogmatika, MysteryIsland, The Beat, Syntax of Things, Empty Mirror Books, and Lit Up Magazine.
He lives with his wife in Jacksonville, Florida. By day, when not writing, Bill mows the lawn and complains about the heat. By night, he sneaks around in the back yard, convinced that the garden gnomes are “up to something.”
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