Two Screaming Skulls

0:01Speaker 1:Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frey. And I'm Tracy V. Wilson. It's Halloween time, so we're continuing some of our Halloween-y topics. And this one, this one I suppose could be considered a sequel to the Ghosts of the British Isles episode we did last year. because we're going to talk about screaming skulls. And screaming skull lore is something that is unique to Britain, although specific skull lore varies. That's not to say that no other culture has ever thought a skull was haunted or had things. It's just there is a very specific flavor of it that is very British. And screaming skulls, by the way, don't necessarily scream. It's really just a loose term for a skull that people believe is haunted, possibly cursed.

0:57Speaker 1:maybe carries on some dismayed feelings of the deceased. So while haunted skull might be more accurate, that doesn't alliterate and thus not as catchy. In the 1895 book by T.F. Thistleton Dyer titled Strange Pages from Family Papers, which is a title I love, there is a mention of such skulls and their shared lore. The opening passage from the section of the book that's about screaming skulls reads, quote, There are told of certain houses in different parts of the country, many weird skull stories. The popular idea being that if any profane hand should be bold enough to remove or in any way tamper with such gruesome relics of the dead, misfortune will inevitably overtake the family. Hence, for years past, there have been carefully preserved in some of our country homes, numerous skulls, all kinds of romantic traditions accounting for their present isolated and unburied condition. So there are pretty commonly mentioned seven screaming skulls that are known of in Britain. There may be more, but those are like the ones that come up every time you look at any lore about it. We are not covering

2:09Speaker 1:all of them here. We're only covering two of them today. And the first of them is has roots in the English Civil War, and the second one is tied to colonialism in the Caribbean and the slave trade. Sort of. Maybe. You'll see. The English Civil War has come up a lot of times on the podcast, and this time it's the starting point for a Screaming Skull story. We don't really need to get into all the particulars of the English Civil War, but the very quick setup is that Charles I was at odds with Parliament, And this conflict was fueled by financial disagreements and taxation and religious tensions between Anglicans and Catholics and levels of control within the government.

2:54Speaker 1:The story goes that a man named Theophilus Brougham was a devoted royalist going into the English Civil War. But as the war played out... The way that prisoners were treated by the king's army really did not sit well with him. Seeing horrible behavior that was being carried out in the name of the king made Brougham reconsider whether his ideals truly aligned with the royalist cause anymore, and he ultimately switched sides to join the parliamentarians. The war ended, and Brougham started his next phase of life at Higher Chilton Farm in the village of Chilton Canelo in Somerset, England.

3:33Speaker 1:He lived there with his sister, but after the restoration of the monarchy, when Charles II ascended to the throne in 1660, Brougham, who had backed the parliamentarian roundheads, was considered a traitor to the throne. I will say, I don't know if his sister was married or not. She is always referenced, and the only time I've seen... her referenced as being someone's wife was in a very modern kind of splashy story. So I don't know if that was an assumption that she had a husband that was also involved, but he is not mentioned anywhere that I found.

4:11Speaker 1:As Brougham was reaching his relative old age in the 1660s, so he was born in 1601. He would have been getting into his late 60s. He worried that that in his death he could be made an example of. And his fear was that after he was buried, royalist agents would dig up his body, cut off his head, and put it on a pike for display as what happens to a traitor to the throne. And this was not a cockamamie idea that he made up in a fit of paranoia. This had happened to Oliver Cromwell, who had died in 1658 and then was exhumed for a posthumous execution for regicide in 1661-61. after the monarchy was restored.

4:51Speaker 1:And Cromwell's dead body was hanged at Tiburn in London and then beheaded, and his head was displayed on a pike at Westminster Hall. That was where Charles I had been tried by Parliament. Two of Cromwell's colleagues, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, had also been exhumed, hanged, and displayed, as Cromwell had. So this was not a fate that Theophilus Broome wanted for himself. So his solution... was that he asked his sister to cut off his head when he died and keep it in the house. And she agreed that she would honor his wishes. So Broome died in 1670, and his sister kept her word. His body was buried in a crypt at the church in Chilton Canelo, but his head, as requested, was kept in the house. Incidentally, Oliver Cromwell's head was still on display on the pike when this happened. It stayed at Westminster until it was stolen sometime in the mid-1680s. When Brougham's sister died, it seems without a next of kin, the property passed through a number of hands, and then over the centuries, a lot of stories have accumulated about Theophilus and his skull.

6:03Speaker 1:The first tenants of the home who lived at Higher Chilton Farm after Brougham's sister were absolutely not interested in cohabitating with the skull, so they buried it, but immediately experienced strange noises and an unsettling feeling in the house. The skull was retrieved and those problems stopped. Then, believing that maybe the skull just needed a consecrated location for its final resting place, the head was buried in the churchyard. And according to legend, the man who was in the process of burying the skull was killed on the spot when a piece of slate from the church's roof suddenly broke off and fell directly onto him. The first time the Brougham story appeared in print was in 1791, in a three-volume publication titled The History and Antiquities of the County of Somerset, collected from authentic records and an actual survey made by the late Mr. Edmund Rack. adorned with a map of the county and engravings of Roman and other relics, town seals, baths, churches, and gentlemen's seats. This was written by the Reverend John Collinson. His description of Chilton Canelo is quite charming. Quote, the parish contains 28

7:19Speaker 1:houses and about 150 inhabitants. Most of the houses formed two straggling streets near the church building. The situation is low and woody, but the lands are strong clay, very good, and worth on an average from 30 to 50 shillings an acre. A small stream rising at Sanford Orcas runs under a stone bridge of one arch and turns a gristmill in this parish. And then at the end of his brief entry on Chilton Cantelo, Collinson gets to the skull, writing, quote,' At the north end of the transept is a stone with this inscription.' Here lie at the body of Theophilus Brougham of the Broughams of the House of Woodlows near Warwick Town in the County of Warwick, who deceased the 18th of August, 1670, age 69. A man just in the actions of his life, true to his friends, forgave those that wronged him and died in peace. So this writing then goes on to describe the decoration that's on the stone. Arms sable on a chevron argent, three sprigs of broom proper. And then it continues, quote, there is a tradition in the parish that the person here interred requested that his head might be taken off before his

8:33Speaker 1:burial and be preserved at the farmhouse near the church where a head chopped fallen enough is still shown, which the tenants of the house have often endeavored to commit to the bowels of the earth, but have been as often deterred by horrid noises, portentive of sad displeasure, and about 20 years since, which perhaps was the last attempt, The sexton, in digging the place for the skull's repository, broke his spade in two pieces and uttered a solemn asseveration never more to attempt an act so evidently repugnant to the quiet of Brougham's head. According to a 2022 article in the Somerset Live paper, during restoration work on the village church, Brougham's crypt was opened and the skull was missing. This would corroborate the story, and the St.

9:21Speaker 1:James Church at Chilton Cantaloupe did undergo restoration work in the 1820s, but Holly wasn't actually able to locate any reports from the time suggesting that the crypt had been opened and the remains examined. So maybe. We're going to talk about more stories of Theophilus Brougham's skull after we pause for a sponsor break. In 1985, parapsychologist Peter Underwood published a book titled Ghosts of Somerset that included several stories. about the skull. He published a lot of books, so this one is a little tricky to get a hold of, but I managed through a weird secondhand book dealer. One of these stories dates back to 1826 when the farmhouse was undergoing renovations. According to the story, two of the workmen took the skull from the cabinet where it was kept and drank beer out of it. But they put it back when they were done and nothing bad happened.

10:25Speaker 1:This is often pointed to as evidence that the skull just wanted to stay in the house. You didn't have to be super reverent with it. Then in 1977, two researchers from London visited the farm and they asked to see the skull. They were given permission to see and examine it, but as they did, they talked about not believing that the screaming skull story was legitimate, and maybe they even made jokes about it. They left the skull at the farm and they headed back to London, but during the drive home, one of them collided with a tree.

11:01Speaker 1:After thinking he saw headlights coming directly at him, he survived but was badly injured. The other researcher suffered severe burns on his leg after accidentally dropping a match into the cuff of his pants. Yeah, they attributed this to the skull. Underwood also interviewed the couple that was living at High Chilton Farm at the time he was writing the book. That was a Mr. and Mrs. Curtin. And they seemed very comfortable with Theophilus' brome skull staying in the house. They told Underwood that they knew he wouldn't harm them as long as his head remained in the home and that they sort of viewed him as a guardian to the property. They did add, though, quote, he doesn't like being handled too much. If he objects, he soon lets us know. But as long as he is treated with respect, he never causes trouble. I don't mean to laugh at the dead, but it sounds like when you're talking about a difficult cat. Not everyone over the centuries has believed that Brougham was haunting the house. In a 1910 letter to the Taunton Courier, Bristol, and Exeter Journal, the contributor, who's not named in the publication, makes their case, quote,

12:13Speaker 1:The signature of Theophilus Brougham, now in the writer's hand, does not at all suggest he was the sort of man to make a silly fuss about the interment of his skull. The signature... is as clear as the day, October 4th, 1650, when it was written. Nearly every letter is written separately and as legibly as possible. The letter describes the document as being about an annuity to be paid to Theophilus Brougham by the Earl of Bristol and to Brougham's wife in the event of his death. Brougham had to prove he was still alive and had not sold the annuity. And then in this missive to the paper, after laying out these particulars, the writer concludes with, quote,' It seems from this that he had not himself taken any part against Parliament in the Civil War. A man named Theophilus with an annuity and a wife could have no excuse for making horrid noises because his skull was buried.' Yeah, and I will say that annuity was no joke. It was like 20 pounds a year, which in the 1650s was a lot of money. It was basically like saying, look, he was set. He didn't need to be fussy about his skull. Today, the Higher Farmhouse is a listed building

13:23Speaker 1:on the National Heritage List for England. The description of the house in the list entry describes its physical attributes, its architectural style, the times it has been renovated, and mentions that part of the building is still being used to make cider. Of Theophilus, it says, quote, In Hall, Brougham's Head, a skull recorded by Collinson, 1791, which has defied many attempts at burial. The 1897 book, The Haunted Homes and Family Traditions of Great Britain, starts its discussion of this next skull this way, quote, There is a certain old farmstead known as Bediscombe or Bediscombe House in a parish of the same name. about six miles from Bridport in Dorsetshire, this ancient dwelling, which is still inhabited, is celebrated for the so-called Screaming Skull that it contains.

14:17Speaker 1:While the haunted skull story associated with Bediscombe had appeared in print for more than two decades at that point, this appears to be the earliest appearance of the lore that is most associated with it That being the story that it was the skull of a Black person who was either enslaved or who worked as some sort of house servant at the manor. We will be digging into that shortly. The 1891 book, Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset, says this of the Bediscombe skull. Quote, the superstition attaching to the above skull has from time to time excited considerable interest amongst folklorists and others. and has drawn forth various comments in the press and otherwise from those who have had the opportunity of investigating its supposed origin.

15:06Speaker 1:The story of the skull has a lot of missing information. The main version of it goes like this. There was a plantation owner in Dorset named Azariah Penny, and he somehow acquired an enslaved man whose name remains unknown. Penny, according to some people, was himself involved in the slave trade, although that seems like it might be a conflation of different details. We'll talk more about that in a bit. There is also a murder component to this story, although some versions cast the enslaved man as the victim, while others name him as the perpetrator. In the version where he was the murderer, he was put to death for the crime. So both versions indicate that this man died in Dorset. Another variation indicates that this person was not enslaved when he died, but had been earlier in his life, and upon being freed, he became a house servant to the Penny family. In a lot of versions of this story, he is described as a, quote, loyal servant. And in line with other Screaming Skull stories, this person did not end up being laid to rest where he desired. He wanted, according to the lore, to be returned to the West

16:22Speaker 1:Indies where he was born and lived before his time in England, specifically the island of Nevis. But instead, he was buried in the churchyard at Bediscombe. From the time this unnamed person was buried, the story goes that the house and the community became riddled with a series of disturbances of a ghostly nature. These have been described as screams coming from the grave itself, windows in the house at Bediscombe rattling, doors making noises and shaking in their frames, and other strange noises in the house like creaking and thumping. Finally, the inhabitants of the home exhumed the body and these strange disturbances stopped. After a while, he was buried again, but the problem popped back up. And then this cycle of burial, haunting, exhumation, peace for a little while, then somebody buries it, and it all starts over, and so on and so on began. And over time, according to various owners of the house, the main part of the skeleton was lost, but the skull remained, and that was apparently enough to continue the haunting. Eventually, the skull was moved to the attic of the house, and this ended

17:32Speaker 1:the paranormal activity, and from that point on, any subsequent owners had to take the skull along with the property. So that's the very basic, often-repeated story of the Bediscombe Screaming Skull. So to look at it a little more closely, let's unpack the Pennys, because elements of their family story seem to have informed the skull lore, but in a way that really seems to tangle fact and fiction. Azariah Penny was born in 1661, and when he was 23, he participated in the Monmouth Rebellion, That was a rebellion led by James Scott, who was the Duke of Monmouth and also Charles II's illegitimate son. Charles did not have a legitimate heir, and his brother James, the Duke of York, was next in line for the throne. But the Duke of York was Catholic, so when Charles II died in 1685, it set off a conflict. There is more to this whole event, but the short version is that the Duke of Monmouth attempted a rebellion to seize power. and Azariah Penny was part of it. After the rebellion, which was a pretty sloppy affair that was suppressed, Monmouth was put to death, and 600 of his followers faced their accusations

18:48Speaker 1:in a series of trials known as the Bloody Assizes. Azariah Penny, like the rest of them, was tried for high treason. He was found guilty, and he was sentenced to death. But his family managed to leverage their connections and standing to have that sentence commuted. Instead of execution, Azariah was sent to Nevis as an indentured servant to work on a sugar plantation. But he also did not serve out his 10-year indenture because that indenture was purchased by his family. A little bit of, like, wealth-making loopholes.

19:21Speaker 1:So he really didn't face any long-term consequences for treason aside from being shipped to the Caribbean. But that forced travel seems to have worked out for him because once he was free, he started his own plantation on Nevis. and made a fortune. Azariah returned to England around 1700, leaving family members to run the plantation. And he died in London circa 1720. I saw one that said he died in 1719, so somewhere around there. In records from 1765, three enslaved people are listed in the plantation book for the Penny Nevis property. They're named Bediscombe, Bridport, and Weymouth after the family properties back in England. Some accounts say that these were births, but others list these as purchases.

20:09Speaker 1:This has got some theories attached to it, and we're going to talk through those. There were members of the Penny family on Nevis until 1830, and at that point, the family holdings in the Caribbean were liquidated and the remaining Pennys returned to England. Azariah or one of his sons built Bediscombe Manor in Dorset sometime around 1700. His son, John Frederick Penny, owned the Nevis estate until his death in 1762. At that point, according to property records, it passed to John Penny, who was perhaps his son or another relative. That person had been living in England, but went to Nevis in 1764. So it kind of seems like the story that has been ascribed to the Screaming Skull of Beddiskum is really a pastiche of family history that plays pretty fast and loose with the timeline. In 1842, Anna Maria Penny went through all of the family records, going back 200 years, to compile a comprehensive family history.

21:12Speaker 1:And she didn't live at Bediscombe, but her grandfather did, and she visited in 1847. And at that time, she met with a farmer's wife in the village who knew the whole story about the skull. And that woman told Anna that as long as the skull stayed in the house and not in the ground, the house would not be haunted. And Anna Maria collected this information for family records, but none of it was published until the 1870s. And then it kind of took on a life of its own.

21:40Speaker 1:We will talk about how the Bediscombe Skull story got even more embellishment starting in the late 19th century. But first, we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. The Bediscombe Skull That 1895 book, Strange Pages from Family Papers, that we mentioned at the very top of the show, includes a narrative that was relayed to the author by a Miss Garnett, who in 1883 went with her father, Dr. Richard Garnett, and a family friend to visit Bediscombe in the hopes of learning more about the skull. And her story begins with, quote, one fine afternoon, a party of three adventurous spirits started off, hoping to discover the skull and investigate its history. This much we knew, that the skull would only scream when it was buried, and so we hoped to get leave to inter it in the churchyard.

22:38Speaker 1:Miss Garnett describes the trio simply going to the house and asking its then-owner, a woman who had recently acquired the farmhouse, for a glass of milk, and then trying to subtly work in questions about the skull again. The woman told them the skull was there, but that she didn't know much about it, except that she, quote, had been obliged to take possession of the skull also when she bought the property. And the Garnetts and their friend convinced this woman to let them see the skull. They did see it in the Holmes attic. The account then states, quote, we tramped up the fine old staircase till we reached the top of the house. When opening a cupboard door, She showed us a steep, winding staircase leading to the roof, and from one of the steps, the skull sat grinning at us. We took it in our hands and examined it carefully. It was very old and weather-beaten and certainly human.

23:34Speaker 1:The lower jaw was missing, the forehead very low and badly proportioned. One of our party, who was a medical student, examined it long and gravely, and then after first telling the good woman that he was a doctor, pronounced it to be, in his opinion, the skull of a Negro. So, once this medical student identified the skull as having belonged to a Black person, the farmhouse owner told them the whole story of the skull as she knew it. That's where the uncertain story of the murder was apparently introduced.

24:06Speaker 1:This woman told the three visitors that, yes, the skull had belonged to a Black servant, quote, who had lived in the service of a Roman Catholic priest. Some differences arose between them, but whether the priest murdered the servant in order to conceal some crimes known to the Negro or whether the Negro, in a fit of passion, killed his master did not clearly appear. Yeah, you'll notice none of that involves the pennies. Not in any way. Some other person who is priest. Research into the Penny family and their connection to this skull was done in the early 1900s by a judge named John Simmons Udall. He described sort of stumbling across the Penny's name in Nevis this way, quote, in my capacity of chief judicial officer of the colony, it is my duty to go on circuit from time to time to the principal presidencies constituting the Leeward Islands, and last February brought me to the island of Nevis. One day, on passing through a sugar plantation, I by chance inquired of its name, and was informed that it was called Penny's, and further inquiry elicited the fact that until about a century ago, it belonged to

25:16Speaker 1:a family of that name. The story of the Bediscombe skull at once flashed across my memory, and I thought, how strange, and with all interesting, it would be if I had come across the actual home or source of the legend. Because up to this time, though the story had been told in print for several decades, no one ever had any kind of information to pinpoint when the alleged burial and haunting had begun. Judge Udall went on to explain that a couple of days later, he saw a memorial inscription in a church for John Penny, which stated that he was the only son and heir to Azariah Penny. The family crest was the same as the Penny family of Dorset, Udall also connected several other instances of Penny's on the island back to Azariah, including one that said his cousin, John Frederick Penny, inherited the house on Nevis, after which it passed to John's nephew, John Praetor, who changed his last name to Penny when he assumed the ownership of the house. Udall weighed the likelihood that there could be two Azariah pennies from Bediskam who both participated in the Monmouth Rebellion and were sentenced to death

26:30Speaker 1:and then shipped to Nevis. He came to the conclusion that the odds of that were quite long. But then he wonders in the writing if Azariah or one of his descendants brought the skull home from Nevis. So the skull... not a living person who came to work on the property. And if this was a descendant, he kind of wonders if this could be the skull of the enslaved man named Bediscombe, who he believed must have been dead at that point based on just the timeline. Additionally, Udall pointed out that Bediscombe, the person, does not appear in the plantation book in the early 1800s, so he says that's evidence that he must have died already. And he published this work, first as a paper, in 1904. So Udall had pieced together the family lore and had used his time in Nevis to examine available records there. He was the one who discovered the record of the enslaved person named Bediskum and put forth the theory that the skull could possibly be that person's. But that was an awful lot of speculation. Still, it was more than anyone had in hand before that regarding the skull and its possible provenance,

27:48Speaker 1:and the story quickly became cemented in local lore and took on additional embellishments in various retellings. In 1934, Bediscombe was visited by five men from Australia who were all brothers. At that time, the home was inhabited by Michael Penny, and the brothers informed him that their father had worked on the farm when he was young and that at one point he had thrown the skull into a pond. He or somebody else must have retrieved it at some point, Another account was shared with the owners by the sons of a former tenant. A few years after that, they said that when they were tiny and lived on the farm there, they had hidden the skull in a haystack and then moved it to the stables. That night, the china in the house started to shake and the boys brought the skull back in. Those are fun stories that would seem to corroborate all of this haunting stuff, but the claims themselves cannot really be corroborated. Yeah, like saying, oh, we used to live here and this kooky stuff happened is fun. But like, there's no evidence of that kooky stuff. Ah, but wait. In the 1960s, the skull was examined by

28:59Speaker 1:Gilbert Causey of the Royal College of Surgeons. And his findings, published in the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, kind of destroyed the entire Bediscombe skull story. Because in Causey's estimation, this was not the skull of a man who had died in the 18th century. It was dated as being much older, perhaps thousands of years old. And it was also determined to be a woman's skull, most likely European, who had been between 25 and 30 when she died. So now that would mean there is another nameless person attached to the skull. But honestly, we know as much or more about her than the mystery enslaved person who may or may not have ever existed.

29:40Speaker 1:at Bediscombe Manor. Yeah, and so if his assertion is correct in this paper, that would mean this person has absolutely nothing to do with Nevis. Because if it's a woman whose skull is thousands of years old, she would have died in Dorset. In that general area, at least. Yes. Yes. And remember, Udall is the one who is like, I bet they brought that skull back from Nevis. And he just kind of was putting pieces of a puzzle together that were basically white blanks that he was drawing on.

30:15Speaker 1:In 1999, a man named Christopher Marsden Smedley, a descendant of Azariah Penny, appeared on the BBC series Untold Britain's Slave Trade, which examined the role that slavery played in establishing many of the economic successes of Britain. Marsden Smedley emphasized on that program that while the Penny family did definitely have enslaved people on their plantation, they were not a part of the slave trade as a business. Yeah. They were not out there actually, uh, dealing in, uh, human bodies for their own personal gain. Today, the Bediscombe skull is kept in an inset wall cabinet in the Bediscombe farmhouse. It is unfortunately not open to the public, but perhaps if you go ask for a glass of milk, it'll be an entree into a conversation. Um, Those are two screaming skulls. That means we have plenty more to talk about in the future. Yeah. I don't have any plans to do it this Halloween season, but one never knows what could come up later on. Do you have some listener mail for us? I do. I do. This one is from our listener, Shauna, who just made me laugh and laugh. Shauna writes, Hello, ladies. I could not

31:31Speaker 1:believe when y'all mentioned Baby Alive in a recent behind-the-scenes episode. I'm listening September 20th. I'm a bit behind and it happens to be my birthday. Well, we're a bit behind in wishing you happy birthday. I hope it was wonderful. As soon as you mentioned it, I called my mother because she got me a baby alive for my eighth birthday. I hadn't thought of that thing in years. My recollection was that I took it everywhere and kept diapers in my backpack. Her recollection is that it was super gross and she kind of hated how much I loved it.

32:00Speaker 1:I think that was probably a pretty common feeling among parents whose children had baby alive. Shauna writes, thank you for this hilarious and delightful memory. Well, delightful for me. I think my mom wishes I hadn't reminded her. And thank you for being my favorite podcast. I'm so grateful for the work y'all do. All the best, Shauna. Shauna, I love this. I love that I was not the only person who was like, baby alive and got really excited. Because listen. The toys of my youth are still very delightful to me. My husband and I collect toys. We have a lot of them in the house. So I'm always delighted to hear that other people have fun memories kicked off by my blathering about the toy world. If you would like to write to us, talk about your toys, because I'm here for that for sure. You can do that at historypodcast at iheartradio.com. If you would like to look at the show notes for this episode or any of our episodes, you can find those at missedinhistory.com. Just click in the episode link and you will find all of the resources we used in putting these together. If you would like to subscribe to the podcast, that is

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