The Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor

and the ubiquitous nature of entities

The skull of Bettiscombe Manor

As a child, I became very interested in ghosts. Not spooky campfire ghost stories; documented accounts from ostensibly sincere individuals. I read some of the Goosebumps books and found them enjoyable in a deeply forgettable sort of way, but I was only really interested in the actual evidence. I read and re-read various Usborne picture books on ghosts that my mother kept from her time working with the publishing company. Pictures like this one, taken in Yorkshire's Newby Church in 1963, fascinated and unsettled me:

Conversely, my brother thought that one was hokey and cliched, and was far more disturbed by this one, to such an extent that he told me he would skip over the page when reading the book to avoid seeing it:

Taken by Mabel Chinnery in 1959. Note the slight overlap of the scarf with the edge of the car window.

My tastes were often less subtle than my brother's, though, which is why I got into heavy-metal when I was a little older. Doesn't get much more metal than a creepy-looking phantom monk in a plague mask haunting a Gothic church.

Except, perhaps, the story of the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor, a story that I obviously told often enough to fellow attendees of our weekly home-schoolers' meet-up that I distinctly remember one boy, an American by the name of Michael, saying “ you're not going to tell us about the screaming skull again, are you?”, at which point I probably said “oh no, this one is even better!” and quickly switched to some other tale memorised from the Usborne Illustrated Book of Ghost Stories.

Anyway, the legend goes that, within a niche in the chimney of a 17^th century manor house at Bettiscombe, Dorset, home to the aristocratic Pinney family, there lies a human skull. If this skull is removed, ‘it is said to scream and cause agricultural disaster if taken out of the house and also causes the death, within a year, of the person who commits the deed.’

Probably best to keep it there, to be on the safe side. A further elaboration of the legend goes that the skull belonged to an enslaved black male transported by one Azaiah Pinney from the Caribbean to Dorset. The man had requested that his remains be returned to his Caribbean homeland, but the Pinney family failed to honour his wishes, which resulted in the curse of the skull. Is there any truth behind this?

Not a chance. Archaeologists examining the skull found a far older story: the skull belonged to a white female who lived between three and four thousand years ago. Perhaps these archaeologists should volunteer their services to the Museum of London? It could prevent an awful lot of confusion.¹

The implications of this are interesting, especially in light of the fact that ancient Britons saw the human head as being charged with spiritual power. This is reflected in the Welsh legend of Bran the Blessed, a gigantic god-king who orders that his head be buried underneath the White Mount – now the site of the Tower of London – so that he might protect the island from invasion. Incidentally, bran means 'raven', so the legend of the ravens of the Tower of London might be very old indeed, perhaps even predating the building itself.

Something similar might lurk in the background of the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor. John Michael Greer's The Ceremony of the Grail proposes that the myth of the Holy Grail contains a garbled memories of a technique by which the 'etheric' body – that is to say, that field of subtle life-force which is fully recognised as objectively real by pretty much every single human culture except ours – could ostensibly be preserved beyond the death of the physical body, allowing someone to become a kind of tutelary spirit for their tribe and homeland.

Whatever the truth behind this intriguing speculation, it seems plausible to me that the legend of the Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe contain an echo of ancient British beliefs concerning the protective spiritual power contained in the human head, a power that could be maintained after death by keeping the skull in a particular location. The skull of Bettiscombe, incidentally, is far from the only example of this bizarre phenomenon; other screaming skulls have been recorded at Calgarth Hall, Cumbria, and Warbleton Priory, Sussex, to name just two.

Modern Western scholars like to pour cold water on the possibility of pagan beliefs lasting into the modern era, and with relatively good reason, as romantic folklorists sometimes have a tendency to let their imaginations run away with them. However, the presence of a Bronze Age skull, with creepy paranomal phenomena attached, in a stately-home of a wealthy English family does rather suggest that some things may have lingered from the mists of prehistory.

Weirdly enough, I have a family connection to Bettiscombe Manor, via my great-grandfather J.B. Priestley. Priestley's third wife, the archaeologist and writer Jacquetta Hawkes, stayed at the house during the Second World War, whereupon she reportedly fell in love with Betty Pinney. Betty of Bettiscombe Manor apparently swung that way just enough to play hot and cold with poor Jacquetta, but ultimately no affairs ensued.

In any case, the story of the Screaming Skull may at the very least serve as a haunting metaphor for our own situation. Having disregarded the existence of all that is outside the philosophical paradigm of scientism, we idly throw away what remains of our ancestors; where we pay any attention to them at all, it is to use them as weapons in an ideological conflict of irredeemable pettiness. Having thrown out the skull, and laid waste to the land on which we depend, the calamities are already upon us. Is it any surprise that 2021, the inauspicious year in which the poisoned nano-sludge began to be administered to billions of people worldwide, brought us the ominous disappearance of one of the Tower's ravens? I suspect that won't be the last we hear from that particular prophecy.

However, weird tales such as these should not tempt us into a sensationalistic frenzy, as so much paranormal media is designed to do. If we abandon rationalism, and accept the possibility that the world is filled with invisible forces and intelligences entirely outside of our control, do we run around peeing our pants, like the ghost-hunters in South Park? Or do we just accept it as another fact of existence, and get on with our lives? In a similar way, the fact that we are surrounded by invisible bacteria and viruses should not, as it did for many otherwise intelligent people in 2020, cause a complete neurotic meltdown in which we bathe ourselves in harsh chemical sanitizers and view the whole of physical reality itself as a teeming pit of malevolent organisms waiting to infect us. A few simple rules of hygiene, a bit of common-sense, and a healthy lifestyle will, in most cases, suffice to protect us from most pathogens.

In terms of non-corporeal entities, a few guidelines would include:

• Be circumspect about your drug/alcohol intake. Psychoactives of any kind can, and will, disrupt the psychic equivalent of the immune system. Psychedelics, in particular, can do a lot of damage in this regard. I've been around that scene for many years, and I've met a fair few people who appear to have picked up a few hitch-hikers on their trips, if you know what I mean.

• Wash with cold water. You don't need to go all Wim Hof. Even lukewarm water is better than nothing. In the Western esoteric tradition, cold water heals and strengthens the etheric body, which will help to prevent any noxious entities from finding a foothold in your system. If you need a thorough scrub-down, try a hoodoo bath.

• Prayer is good. Qigong and certain types of yoga can be helpful. Taking up kundalini yoga probably isn't a good idea.

• Banishing rituals are also recommended, although do some research on which ones are compatible with your other practices (Taoist internal alchemy doesn't play well with Western systems, for instance). JMG's Magic Mondays are a good resource for this.

• Finally, pretty much anything that is good for your physical immune system and emotional well-being will be good for your psychic immune system. According to some testimonies that I find quite plausible, there are entities that feed quite happily on our addictions and negative emotions. They're not the kind of entities you want around.

I'll finish by recommending that you listen to two podcasts. The first, Jasun Horsley's conversation with Are Thoresen:

Jobcast # 7: Into the Elemental (with Are Thoresen)

The second, my chat with Kimberley Steele from late 2022:

With all of that, you should be fit to deal with most of life’s creepy-crawlies, visible or not.

1. Last year, the Museum of London curator Rebecca Redfern published some flabbergastingly idiotic ‘research’ about medieval black Londoners disproportionately suffering from the bubonic plague. It goes without saying that it is very, very unlikely that there was a significant black population anywhere in Britain during the 14th century. Tom Rowsell of Survive the Jive has a good video dissecting this latest bout of pseudohistorical fuckery.