"I don't know where the skull is," said Mr. Marcus Wickham-Boynton. "It's true my mother liked to think she had seen ghosts, but my father never saw or heard anything, and I've never seen or heard anything.
"My grandfather, Sir Henry, is supposed to have bricked up the skull somewhere in the house, over 60 years ago, but where it is I haven't a clue. Nor has anybody else. In fact there's no record or real evidence that the skull ever existed at all."
So far as I have been able to discover, the last real link with the skull of Burton Agnes Hall, near Driffield, was a bricklayer's labourer, who died some years ago. He worked for the bricklayer who did the actual bricking-up job inside the hall for Sir Henry. The labourer wasn't allowed inside the hall on that occasion, and his story was that not even Sir Henry knew the place where the skull was bricked-up, but only the bricklayer.
Burton Agnes is regularly open to the public, and to see the portraits alone is worth the price of admission. One group is of the three Griffith sisters, in 17th-century ruffs and farthingales, who built the hall in the reign of Elizabeth I. From left to right they are Margaret, Frances and Catherine (otherwise Anne). Anne is almost entirely in black. Whether black was her habitual garb, or whether the group was done after her death, I don't know. She stands slightly hunched, with long arms dangling, and an expression of peculiar intensity. Hers was the skull of Burton Agnes Hall in life.
These wealthy sisters were coheiresses of the estate in Elizabeth's time. They decided that the old hall, dating back many centuries, was out of date, and they replaced it with a magnificent mansion designed (it is said) by Inigo Jones and decorated in part by Rubens. Anne was wrapped up in the new house. It was never out of her thoughts, and even when it was finished she was always devising little additional touches. She seemed to live for the house. You can believe this when you see her portrait. There is something intense and possessive about her. Perhaps she put her soul into this monument of grandeur, which is an unwise thing to do.
In those days Yorkshire was infested by ancesteros of our modern tramps, known as Wold Rangers - mendicants who had formerly been fed and roughly lodged at the gates of the monasteries, but who had in the years succeeding the dissolution of the religious houses grown desperate. One day when Anne was out with no better company than a pet dog she was approached by two of them. She gave them money, but they wanted a ring from her finger, which she defended. Whereupon she was knocked senseless with a cudgel. She was found and carried home but died after five days. In her last conscious intervals she besought her sisters to sever her head from her body and preserve it within the walls of the mansion she had loved.
This was not done. She was buried in the family vault. Disturbances arose in the house. There were mysterious thumps and crashes. Doors slammed unaccountably. The house resounded with weird and inexplicable noises, and the corridors echoed at night with groans. The two sisters reopened Anne's coffin. There is a ghastly story that the head had by some mysterious agency been severed and was already a grinning skull, although the rest of the corpse was as yet untouched by decay. Anyway, when the skull was installed in the Hall, no more supernatural manifestations occurred.
Or not for a long time. When time had elapsed for the ancient tale to become discredited, a maidservant one day threw the skull out upon a passing farm-cart. The horse was literally struck rigid. All the whipping in the world would not move it, until the terror-struck maid disclosed what she had done, and the skull was taken inside again.
When the Boynton family succeeded to the estate they had the skull buried in the garden, but there was no luck about the house until it was restored to the house. "Owd Nance," as the countryfolk styled her, had vindicated her wishes again.
There are people at Burton Agnes today who will tell you confidently where the skull was bricked up by the late Sir Henry's bricklayer, but unfortunately none of them tells you the same thing. Some say it was in the upper wall of the large hall of the house. Others say it was behind the fireplace of the Ghost Room.
The Ghost Room is behind a door in a corner of the first landing as you go up the main staircase. It is not normally open to visitors, but they are very obliging at Burton Agnes, and will allow you to see it on request. There is a four-poster bed with a canopy, and if you examine the doors carefullly you detect 17th Century iron hinges beneath the modern paintwork. Carpet and coverlet and hangings are all in shades of green, which may account for the faintly chilly atmosphere. This, they say, is the room where Anne died, and this, they say, is a room where modern guests sleep uneasily. A guest who, knowing nothing of the ghost story, occupied the room for the races said he wouldn't sleep there again for the winner of the St. Leger. Those who know the story shun the room, although it is one of the best bedrooms in the house.
One prospective guest insisted that he should sleep there. If there was any ghost he wanted to see it. But the night before he was due he rang up and cancelled his visit - no doubt for reasons entirely unconnected with the ghost. Mrs. Cicely Wickham-Boynton (mother of Mr. Marcus), who died in 1947, firmly believed that the ghost of Anne was there to be seen. One night a guest sitting next to Mrs Cicely at dinner was surprised by a woman in an unusual dress standing a little behind the two chairs. She took her for a maid, but when she looked again the figure had gone. "Where did you get that beautiful old dress for the maid?" the guest asked Mrs Cicely. "Oh," said Mrs Cicely, "that's not one of the maids. It's an old friend of ours."
From the Yorkshire Evening Post, Saturday 17th October 1953.
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