The Busby Stoop Chair sits behind a rope barrier in a North Yorkshire museum , and it has been there since 1978. Nobody is allowed to sit in it. Not visitors. Not staff. Not even maintenance workers. The chair hangs from the ceiling, just to be safe. This isn’t a quirky museum policy. It’s a desperate precaution born from decades of mysterious deaths. The story behind this cursed seat begins with a murderer, a dying curse, and a body left swinging at a crossroads. It ends with a body count that nobody can fully explain.
The Busby Stoop Chair and the Curse That Started It All
Thomas Busby was not a good man. He was a counterfeiter, a criminal, and ultimately a killer. In 1702, he murdered his own father-in-law, Daniel Auty, in North Yorkshire, England. The two men had been running an illegal coin-forging operation together. They argued. Busby snapped. Auty ended up dead.
Busby was arrested, tried, and sentenced to hang. But before he met his end, he reportedly cursed his favorite oak chair. Some versions of the story say he cursed it on the walk to the gallows. Others say he was drunk in the chair when constables came to arrest him. Either way, his words were chilling. He swore that anyone who dared sit in his chair would die.
After his execution, Busby’s body was gibbeted , displayed in an iron cage , at Sandhutton crossroads, right beside a local inn. That inn eventually renamed itself the Busby Stoop Inn, after the gibbet post. For years, locals whispered that Busby’s ghost haunted the crossroads. Travelers reported strange feelings near the site. Some refused to pass it after dark.
The chair remained inside the inn. And people kept sitting in it.
Gibbeting was a brutal public punishment meant to terrify communities into obedience. In Busby’s case, it may have done the opposite , turning him into a legend.
Deaths Linked to the Busby Stoop Chair
For more strange history, see: Kechibi: Japan’s Vengeful Ghost Lights That Hunt the Living
The curse stories really took off during World War II. Canadian airmen were stationed at a nearby RAF base at Skipton-on-Swale. They would visit the Busby Stoop Inn to drink and unwind. Many of them dared each other to sit in the infamous chair. According to local accounts, those who sat in it never came back from their bombing missions over Europe.
Nobody kept official records linking the chair to specific deaths. That’s important to note. But the stories spread fast. The chair became a dare. A test of bravery. And the deaths kept coming.
By the 1970s, the tales had grown even darker. Several fatal accidents were reportedly connected to people who had recently sat in the chair. A roofer sat in it, then fell to his death. Two Royal Air Force pilots sat in it on a dare , and died in a crash shortly after. A delivery man sat in it and drove his truck into a tree on the way home. A hitchhiker who sat in the chair was found dead the next morning.
Were these coincidences? Probably. But the pattern was impossible to ignore for the locals who witnessed it. By 1978, the pub’s landlord had seen enough. He donated the chair to Thirsk Museum. He didn’t want it destroyed , he was afraid of what that might unleash. Instead, he asked the museum to hang it from the ceiling so no one could ever sit in it again.
The museum obliged. And the chair has dangled there ever since, like a warning.
The Busby Stoop Chair’s Dark Secret: It Might Be a Fake
Here’s where the story gets even stranger. A furniture historian examined the chair carefully. What he found raised serious questions. The chair has machine-turned spindles. But machine-turning wasn’t used in the 18th century. Craftsmen of that era used a pole lathe , a completely different technique.
The historian dated the chair to approximately 1840. That’s 138 years after Thomas Busby’s execution. So the chair sitting in Thirsk Museum almost certainly isn’t the chair Busby cursed. It might not even be the chair from the inn’s early days.
Does that mean the curse is fake? Not necessarily , at least not according to believers. Some argue that the curse attached itself to whatever chair occupied Busby’s spot in the inn. Others think the original chair was replaced and the curse transferred. Skeptics, of course, say the whole thing is folklore built on coincidence and pub legend.
Thirsk Museum still displays the chair today. It remains one of the most visited objects in the collection. People travel from across the world to stand near it. Very few have ever tried to sit in it.
A Curse That Refuses to Die
The chair’s legend has spread far beyond North Yorkshire. The Japanese webcomic Hetalia: Axis Powers featured “Busby’s Chair” as an artifact that drags anyone who sits in it straight to hell. The American television program Unsolved Mysteries covered the story. A similar cursed chair tale appeared in Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction.
Pop culture has kept the legend alive for new generations. And the Busby Stoop Inn , which still stands at the crossroads where Busby once swung in his gibbet cage , continues to draw curious visitors. The roundabout at the A61 and A167 junction sits on the exact spot where the execution took place. Locals still report uneasy feelings there at night.
What are we supposed to make of all this? The chair is probably not the original. The deaths are probably coincidences. Busby’s ghost almost certainly doesn’t haunt a roundabout in North Yorkshire.
But the fear is real. The museum hangs the chair from the ceiling because people genuinely refuse to sit in it. Staff won’t go near it alone. The rope barrier isn’t decorative , it’s a boundary that nobody wants to cross.
The Busby Stoop Chair may be the world’s most effective curse. Not because it kills people. But because, more than three centuries after a drunk murderer spat out his dying words, people are still too terrified to test it. That kind of power doesn’t come from an oak chair. It comes from something much older and much harder to explain.
Some doors are better left unopened. Some chairs are better left empty.
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