Thomas Busby was arrested in 1702 and sentenced to hang for killing his father-in-law Daniel Auty in North Yorkshire, United Kingdom. The two men had been working together making fake coins and doing other illegal things when they had a fight about their criminal business that turned deadly. After Busby was executed, his body was hung up in chains at the Sandhutton crossroads to scare other criminals.
There was an oak chair at the Busby Stoop Inn where Busby liked to sit. The story goes that when Busby was being taken to be hanged, he stopped at the pub and put a curse on his favorite chair. He said that anyone who sat in his chair would be haunted and would die soon after. The inn later became known as the Busby Stoop Inn, with “stoop” being the name for the post where his body was displayed.
From that day on, people said that anyone who sat in the chair would be haunted and die, as per Fandom. Over the years, strange deaths seemed to follow the chair. In 1894, a chimney sweep sat in the chair and the next morning he was found dead, hanging near the same post where Busby’s body had been. During World War II, Canadian pilots from a nearby air base would visit the pub, and people said that the ones who sat in the chair never came back from their missions over Europe.
So, what’s the truth behind this deadly chair?
In 1978, after hearing about so many deaths connected to people sitting in the chair, the pub owner gave it to Thirsk Museum. The museum hung the chair from the ceiling so nobody could sit on it and risk the curse. It still hangs there today where people can look at it but cannot touch it. The Busby Stoop Chair is not the only cursed object that museums and collectors have removed from public access.
#Yorkshire's Busby Stoop Inn stood at a crossroads where hangings took place. When the landlord found himself facing the noose, he sat in his favourite chair & enjoyed a last pint before cursing the seat. Legend says anyone foolish enough to sit on it soon dies. #FolkloreThursday pic.twitter.com/qPfo73e447
— David Castleton (Author) (@david_castleton) September 27, 2018
But then something interesting came up when people started looking into the chair’s real history. A furniture expert checked out the chair and found that it had machine-turned spindles, but chairs from the 1700s were made using a pole lathe. Because of this, he figured out the chair was actually made in 1840, which was 138 years after Busby died. This means the chair hanging in the museum today could not be the same one that Thomas Busby cursed back in 1702.
Busby's stoop chair??? pic.twitter.com/SXvF5lbmfC
— Alextmnt brainworms (@bxizhus) July 8, 2020
Even though this proof shows the chair probably was not Busby’s original chair, the museum still keeps it hanging from the ceiling just to be safe. All the deaths that people talk about happened after 1840, so they could still be linked to this chair even if it was not the first one. Nobody really knows if the curse somehow moved to a new chair or if all these deaths were just bad luck and nothing more. Stories of cursed objects claiming lives have appeared throughout history, and many follow the same pattern of unexplained deaths.
The Busby's stoop chair is an allegedly haunted chair that was cursed by the murderer Thomas Busby before his execution in 1702. So many deaths were attributed to people sitting in the chair, that the landlord donated it to the Thirsk Museum #FolkloreThursday pic.twitter.com/Iz2nohYDNX
— Catherine Gogerty (@catherine_hann) September 27, 2018
The story has become pretty well known over time. The chair showed up in an episode of the TV show Unsolved Mysteries, and a similar story about a cursed chair was on Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. It was also mentioned in the anime Hetalia: Axis Powers. People are still interested in the Busby Stoop Chair and other haunted objects like it.
