Burton Agnes Hall is an Elizabethan manor house near Driffield, built between 1601 and 1610 for Sir Henry Griffith, a substantial building project that took nearly a decade to complete. It was shortly before the house was finished that one of Griffith's daughters, Anne, is said to have set out on a short trip to St Quintin's at Harpham, an ordinary journey that turned catastrophic when, approaching St John's Well along the way, she was attacked by a group of robbers who beat her severely and stole what she carried. She was found still alive on the road but badly hurt, carried back to Burton Agnes, and died within a few days of the attack.
As she lay dying, Anne is said to have made an extraordinary request of her sisters: that her head be removed after death and kept permanently inside the house she loved so much, with a warning attached that if her wish went unheeded, she would return to make Burton Agnes uninhabitable for anyone who lived there. Her sisters, understandably reluctant to carry out such a request, buried her whole instead. Within days, the house was engulfed by precisely the disturbances Anne had promised: doors slamming shut on their own, screams echoing through empty rooms, and objects thrown across the floor by nothing anyone present could see or explain.
Eventually, faced with disturbances that showed no sign of stopping, the family exhumed her body to carry out her original wish after all, and made a discovery that the story treats as proof of just how urgent her demand had truly been: her head had already separated entirely from the rest of her skeleton, and the skull itself had been stripped completely clean of flesh, far faster and more thoroughly than ordinary decomposition should have allowed. Once the skull was finally brought into the house as she had asked, the disturbances stopped for good. The Boynton family, who later owned the hall, had a niche specially built into one of its walls to hold the skull permanently, and tradition holds that it remains there to this day, bricked up behind panelling in one of the bedrooms. Burton Agnes stands as one of the best-known screaming skull legends anywhere in England, and unusually for a story of this age, it still names the person, the place of the attack, and the approximate year with real consistency across different retellings, giving it a degree of narrative stability that most stories this old have long since lost.
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