The Busby Stoop Chair: The Death Seat Hung on a Museum Wall

You reach for the last free stool at the bar, the old wooden one in the corner, and the landlord catches your wrist before you sit. Not that one, he says, and he is not joking. The regulars go quiet. That chair, they will tell you, has killed people, and the safest thing anyone ever did with it was bolt it to a wall five feet off the ground where nobody can be tempted.

The Busby Stoop Chair belongs to the village of Kirby Wiske near Thirsk in North Yorkshire, and to a pub, the Busby Stoop Inn, named for the man at the center of the tale. Thomas Busby was a real local figure, a counterfeiter and drinker, hanged in 1702 for the murder of his father-in-law, Daniel Awety, after a quarrel that legend says began over Busby's favorite chair. According to the story, as he was led to the gallows he cursed the seat, swearing that anyone who dared sit in it would meet a sudden death.

A curse with a body count

For most of its history this was ordinary pub folklore, the kind every old inn keeps. The chair's dark reputation is said to have hardened during the twentieth century, and especially around the Second World War, when airmen from nearby bases drank at the Busby Stoop. The tale holds that men who sat in the chair on a dare failed to come back from missions, and that over the decades a string of drivers, workers, and drinkers who used the seat died soon after in crashes and accidents. None of these deaths is documented as caused by the chair; they are gathered by the story, after the fact, from the ordinary run of misfortune in a rural community.

By 1978 the landlord, tired of the deaths people kept attributing to it, is said to have handed the chair to the Thirsk Museum with one condition: that it never be sat in again. The museum hung it high on a wall, where it remains, out of reach of the curious and the reckless.

What is really holding it up

The tidy explanation writes itself. An old chair, a genuine hanging in 1702, a memorable curse, and a pub with every reason to keep the legend polished for the trade. Human memory does the assembling: any regular of an old inn will die eventually, and if you only tally the ones who sat in the notorious seat, you manufacture a pattern from noise. Confirmation bias needs no ghost. Whether the surviving chair is even the original one Busby owned is itself uncertain, three centuries being hard on furniture.

Still, the specifics have a chill the debunking does not fully warm. The named airmen who did not return. The landlord frightened enough of an object to give it away and demand it never be used. A museum that finds it simpler to keep a wooden chair bolted overhead than to risk a visitor's dare. Nothing supernatural is proven. The precautions are oddly real.

Readers have filed their own cases of cursed objects and unlucky heirlooms below and vote them True, Fake, or Not sure. Admire the chair on its wall, keep your seat, and add your verdict.