Most cursed objects are small — a ring, a doll, a jewel. This one is a plain wooden armchair, an ordinary stoop or captain’s chair of the kind that once stood by the fire in a hundred country pubs. It hangs today in a Yorkshire museum, deliberately out of reach, because of what people believe happens to anyone who sits in it. Almost nothing about that belief can be verified. The crime underneath it, on the other hand, appears to be real.
Thomas Busby and Daniel Awety, whose name is also written Auty, are reported to have run a counterfeiting operation together near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, and Awety is described in every account as Busby’s father-in-law. In 1702 the two men quarrelled and Busby killed him. Busby was tried at York Assizes and hanged that year for the murder. The murder is not simply pub talk: one enthusiast account, thin on sourcing but specific, points to a nineteenth-century printed history that records Awety’s death in 1702 and to the Kirby Wiske parish register recording his burial on 7 June that year. That is the documented spine of the story, and it is worth being precise about it, because the crime was murder. Counterfeiting the King’s coin was indeed treated as close kin to treason in that era, but coining is not what put the rope round Busby’s neck.
What happened to his body afterwards is the part that shaped the legend. Busby was gibbeted — his corpse bound in irons and hung at the crossroads near Sandhutton to rot in the open as a public warning. The spot took his name, a stoop in Yorkshire usage being a post or roadside marker, and the inn that stood at the junction eventually became the Busby Stoop Inn. A decaying man in a cage above a crossroads was a fixture of that road for anyone who passed it. Whatever grew up in its shadow later, the gibbet was real, public and horrible.
Here documented history hands over to legend. The story goes that Busby had a favourite chair in the inn, that he was fiercely possessive of it, and that he cursed it aloud — swearing sudden death on anyone who sat where he had sat. Even the retellings cannot agree on when he said it. In one version he shouts it as the constables drag him out to the gibbet; in another he is drunk in the chair when they arrest him and curses it on the spot. No contemporary record of the curse has been produced by any account read here, and the chair itself appears to enter print only in the middle of the twentieth century. The nineteenth-century sources that later writers lean on are topographical histories concerned with the murder and the gibbet, not with a haunted seat.
The Horror
The roll of the dead attributed to the chair is the heart of the legend, and not one death in it can be documented. The claims run roughly like this. A chimney sweep found hanged by the gibbet post in 1894. Canadian aircrew from the wartime airfield at Skipton-on-Swale, a few miles off, said to have drunk at the inn before operations, with the men who took Busby’s chair the ones who never came back from Germany. Two airmen killed when their car hit a tree in the late 1960s. A cleaner who developed a brain tumour. Cyclists, motorcyclists, a hitchhiker, a man who died of a heart attack, a builder who fell from a roof hours after sitting down for a drink, a brewery delivery man who crashed minutes after taking the seat in the cellar. One retelling puts the total above sixty.
None of it stands up. No names, no inquests, no newspaper reports, no service records have been produced for any of these deaths in the accounts that circulate them; they are anecdotes passed hand to hand, each version acquiring a fresh detail. The pattern is the giveaway — a death only counts towards the tally if someone remembers, afterwards, that the dead man had sat in the chair, and nobody keeps a list of the drinkers who sat in it and lived. Even the oldest and most concrete-sounding case cuts against the curse rather than for it: the 1894 sweep, in the one telling that follows it up, was not killed by any chair at all but tied to a fence and robbed, the crime confessed by a drinking companion on his deathbed twenty years later. That account is itself unverified, which is rather the point. What survives is a story shaped like evidence, with nothing inside it.
What is verifiable is that the story worked. By the late 1970s drinkers were goading each other into the seat and the landlord, named in one account as Tony Earnshaw, had had enough of it. It is also worth noting what the legend did for the inn. A pub at a lonely crossroads with a hanged murderer’s name over the door and a chair that kills people is a pub people drive out to, and no account read here can show the curse existing before the landlords who profited by telling it.
The Modern Relic
The chair was moved to the cellar and then, in 1978, given to Thirsk Museum in the nearby market town — reportedly on the condition that nobody should ever sit in it again. The museum has kept that condition in the most theatrical way available. The chair is suspended out of reach above head height, so that no visitor can lower themselves into it out of bravado or forgetfulness, and so that it need not be taken down even for cleaning. Accounts differ on the mechanics, some describing it hung from the ceiling and others mounted high on a wall, but the effect is the same: an ordinary worn armchair held above the heads of the public like something that has to be kept off the ground. It is still there, still listed among the museum’s two headline exhibits. The Busby Stoop Inn itself is gone, closed since 2013 and now an Indian restaurant at the A61 and A167 crossroads.
And then there is the awkward fact underneath the whole display. When a furniture historian examined the chair — named in one account as Dr Adam Bowett — the spindles turned out to be machine-turned, which a chair of Busby’s day would not have been; eighteenth-century chair spindles were cut on a pole lathe. The assessment put the chair at 1840 at the earliest, possibly as late as 1900, well over a century after Thomas Busby was hanged. Whatever has died around it, the chair on the museum wall almost certainly never held him.
So take your pick, and be honest about which you are picking. Either it is a Victorian pub armchair wrapped in a hundred years of tall tales, coincidence and good business sense — which is what the record supports — or the curse simply moved into whichever chair stood in Busby’s place, which the record cannot support at all. Either way the museum keeps it up there out of reach, and nobody has volunteered to settle the question by sitting down.
