The Chair No One Is Allowed To Sit In

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. And it hangs, today, on a wall in a Yorkshire museum, five feet off the ground, because of what people believe happens to anyone who sits in it. The story begins with a real crime. Thomas Busby was a Yorkshire man of unsavoury reputation — a drinker, a rogue, and, with his father-in-law Daniel Awety (sometimes written Auty), a coiner, a forger of counterfeit money. The two fell out, as thieves do, over the dishonest business that bound them. The quarrel turned deadly, and Busby killed Awety. He was arrested, tried, and in 1702 he was hanged for the murder near Sandhutton, close to the inn he drank in. His gibbeted body — hanged in chains as a public warning — was displayed at a crossroads that became known by his name, the “Busby Stoop,” a stoop being a post or marker. In time the roadside inn there took the same name: the Busby Stoop Inn. It is worth pausing on what Busby actually swung for, because it coloured his legend from the start. Coining — clipping, counterfeiting and forging the King’s money — was treated in that era as one of the gravest crimes on the books, close kin to treason, because it struck at the crown’s own coinage, and it carried the ultimate penalty. And Busby’s punishment did not end at his neck. His body was gibbeted: tarred, bound into an iron cage and hung in chains at the roadside crossroads to rot in the open air, month after month, as a warning to anyone tempted to the same trade. That slowly decaying corpse at the “Busby Stoop” was a fixture of the road for all who passed, and it is easy to see how a hanged coiner, left creaking in his cage above a crossroads, might over the generations curdle into a story about a curse and a chair. The gibbet was real, public and horrible. The cursed seat grew up in its shadow. And this is where documented history hands over to legend. The tale told for generations afterwards is that Busby had a favourite chair in that inn, the seat he always drank in, and that he was fiercely possessive of it. As the constables hauled him out to hang, he is said to have cursed it aloud — swearing that sudden and violent death would come to anyone who dared sit where he had sat. From then on, the chair sat in the inn like a loaded trap.

The Horror

The roll of the dead attributed to the chair, real or imagined, grew over the centuries into one of the most lurid legends in Britain. During the Second World War, the Busby Stoop Inn stood near an airfield, RAF Skipton-on-Swale, home to Canadian bomber crews, and the young airmen are said to have drunk there before missions. The legend holds that those who sat in Busby’s chair were the ones who did not come back — that the men who dared the cursed seat flew out over occupied Europe and were never seen again, while their mates who avoided it survived. In the decades that followed, the stories kept coming: two young airmen or servicemen killed in a car crash after sitting in it; a pair of hitchhikers or workmen, one of whom took the seat and died soon after in a road accident; a roofer or builder who sat down for a drink and fell to his death from a roof hours later; a cleaner who stumbled against it and later fell ill. Every dare seemed to end in a coffin. Whether any of these deaths can truly be traced to a chair is another matter entirely — they are anecdotes, local retellings, unverifiable and impossible to prove. But the sheer weight of them, piling up around a single piece of pub furniture, was enough that by the late 1970s the chair had become a thing people were genuinely afraid of, and the landlord had had enough of drinkers goading each other into sitting in it.

The Modern Relic

In 1978 the landlord of the Busby Stoop Inn gave the chair away — to the Thirsk Museum in the nearby market town of Thirsk, North Yorkshire — reportedly on the condition that no one should ever be allowed to sit in it again. And the museum honoured that condition in the most striking way possible: rather than set the chair on the floor where a visitor might, out of bravado or forgetfulness, lower themselves into it, they mounted it high up on the wall, several feet off the ground, out of everyone’s reach. It hangs there still. You can walk into Thirsk Museum today and look up at the Busby Stoop Chair — an ordinary, worn wooden armchair suspended above head height like a dangerous animal that has to be kept off the ground. And here the legend meets an awkward, delicious fact. When experts examined the chair, a furniture historian pointed out that it is built with machine-turned spindles — a manufacturing method that did not exist in Busby’s time. The chair appears to date from around 1840, well over a century after Thomas Busby was hanged in 1702. Which means the chair on the wall, whatever has died around it, almost certainly never held Thomas Busby at all. So take your pick. Either it is a harmless Victorian armchair wrapped in two centuries of coincidence and tall tales — or the curse simply moved into whichever chair sat in Busby’s place. Either way, no one is willing to sit down and find out, and the museum keeps it nailed to the wall. Visitors still gather beneath it and crane their necks, and every so often someone jokes about lifting it down for a sit — and then, invariably, thinks better of it. Go and look. Just don’t ask if you can try it.

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