Browsholme Hall has been the seat of the Parker family since the sixteenth century, and since the 1850s it has also kept, somewhere within its walls, a human skull whose presence has grown into a classic piece of English screaming-skull folklore, a genre of story found attached to old houses across the country wherever a skull has, for whatever original reason, ended up kept rather than buried. According to the tale as it is told at Browsholme, the skull was once removed from the hall as nothing more than a lighthearted prank, the kind of dare a bored houseguest or family member might have made on impulse.
The consequences, according to the story, were anything but lighthearted. Spontaneous fires reportedly broke out around the property, and a string of deaths struck the family in quick succession, misfortunes that those living through them came to blame directly on the skull's absence from its accustomed place within the hall.
The skull, understandably, was swiftly returned, and the family and staff have reportedly taken great care never to repeat the experiment since, treating its continued presence as a kind of standing agreement with whatever misfortune its removal once unleashed. This follows a well-established English folklore pattern found at several other houses across the country, in which an object, once installed and accepted into a household, becomes considered simply too dangerous to remove ever again, its safe presence in the house mattering more than any curiosity about what it actually is or where it originally came from.
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