Two Screaming Skulls

The English Civil War has come up a lot of times on the podcast, and this time it's the starting point for a screaming skull story.

We don't really need to get into all the particulars of the English Civil War, but the very quick setup is that Charles I was at odds with Parliament, and this conflict was fueled by financial disagreements and taxation, and religious tensions between Anglicans and Catholics, and levels of control within the government.

The story goes that a man named Theophilus Brome was a devoted royalist going into the English Civil War, but as the war played out, the way that prisoners were treated by the king's army really did not sit well with him.

Uh, seeing horrible behavior that was being carried out in the name of the king made Brome reconsider whether his ideals truly aligned with the royalist cause anymore, and he ultimately switched sides to join the Parliamentarians.

The war ended, and Brome started his next phase of life at Higher Chilton Farm in the village of Chilton Cantelo in Somerset, England.

He lived there with his sister, but after the restoration of the monarchy, when Charles II ascended to the throne in 1660, Brome, who had backed the Parliamentarian Roundheads, was considered a traitor to the throne.

I will say, I don't know if his sister was married or not.

She is always referenced, and the only time I've seen her referenced as being someone's wife was in a very modern-

Hmm

... kind of splashy story.

So I don't know if that was an assumption that she had a husband that was also involved, but he is not mentioned anywhere that I found.

Uh, as Brome was reaching his relative old age in the 1660s, so he was born in 1601, he would've been getting into his late 60s, he worried that in his death he could be made an example of, and his fear was that after he was buried, royalist agents would dig up his body, cut off his head, and put it on a pike for display as what happens to a traitor to the throne.

And this was not a cockamamie idea that he made up in a fit of paranoia.

This had happened to Oliver Cromwell, who had died in 1658, and then was exhumed for a posthumous execution for regicide in 1661 after the monarchy was restored.

And Cromwell's dead body was hanged at Tyburn in London and then beheaded, and his head was displayed on a pike at Westminster Hall.

That was where Charles I had been tried by Parliament.

Two of Cromwell's colleagues, Henry Ireton and John Bradshaw, had also been exhumed, hanged, and displayed as Cromwell had.

Uh, so this was not a fate that Theophilus Brome wanted for himself.

So his solution was that he asked his sister to cut off his head when he died and keep it in the house, and she agreed that she would honor his wishes.

So Brome died in 1670, and his sister kept her word.

His body was buried in a crypt at the church in Chilton Cantelo, but his head, as requested, was kept in the house.

Incidentally, Oliver Cromwell's head was still on display on the pike when this happened.

It stayed at Westminster until it was stolen sometime in the mid-1680s.

When Brome's sister died, it seems without a next of kin, the property passed through a number of hands, and then over the centuries, a lot of stories have accumulated about Theophilus and his skull.

The first tenants of the home who lived at Higher Chilton Farm after Brome's sister were absolutely not interested in cohabitating with a skull, so they buried it, but immediately experienced strange noises and an unsettling feeling in the house.