If ever you venture to the Thirsk Museum, located in North Yorkshire England, You’ll see an old wooden chair made of oak, hanging on one of the walls. The chair looks harmless and quite ordinary. However, There’s a good reason it’s hanging there instead of where chairs are usually are placed. The chair is supposedly cursed by a man called Thomas Busby. Whomever sits in the chair will suffer a horrible fate.
The cursed began 1702. With Thomas Busby who brutally murdered his father-in-law Daniel Auty, in a moment of drunken madness. Daniel Auty frequently committed crimes to aid his family’s survival. The crimes included counterfeiting currency throughout the city and theft of jewelry. Danial’s daughter Elizabeth Auty Married local man Thomas Busby, after fallen madly in love with him. Thomas became Danial,s partner in crime along with Elizabeth. One day Thomas and Danial had some sort of altercation regarding the distribution of rations. The pair didn’t come and agreement and decided to go home and talk when things had calmed down between them, but the very next night Danial visited the inn where Thomas and Elizabeth lived. There are different speculations as to why Danial visited that night. Thomas had been to a party and returned home drunk to see Danial sitting in his favourite chair, this enraged Thomas because emotions where still running high from the previous night, Thomas started a fight with Danial. Elisabeth could only watch in horror as she was powerless to intervene. Danial realised that Thomas was drunk and decided to go home, well, this decision enraged Thomas even more because he felt nothing had been resolved. Thomas grabbed a hammer and followed Danial to his home. When Thomas arrived at Danial’s house, he bludgeoned Danial to death with the hammer. Thomas Busby was charged with murder and sentenced to death by hanging. Before his execution, Thomas requested a little time to say his last wish. He went to his inn and sat in his favourite chair and pronounced a curse “Whomever sits in this chair from this day forward will die a horrible death” Thomas Busby was executed next to the inn. His wife Elisabeth and the innkeeper of the Inn used Thomas’s story to draw in curious customers. According residence testimonies, the chair was indeed cursed and anyone who sits in it will die.World War II soldiers who had sat on the chair, never returned from battle.The stories of people who died after sitting in the cursed chair are numerous and the eerie details of their deaths vary from accidents to suicides. In1894, a chimney sweep decided to sit in busby’s chair after he had been drinking in the inn’s bar. He was found dead the next day, hanging from the front post of the inn.
An apprentice worker at the Inn challenged some of his coworkers to sit in the cursed chair. One of his friends accepted the challenge and sat on the chair. That afternoon he was found dead not far from the inn due to a mysterious accident.
Two young airmen who were relaxing and drinking at the inn.They were intrigued by Busby’s curse and reluctantly both took turns to sit in the chair. They both died in a car accident on their way back to base.
In the 1970s, Tony Earnshaw who then owned the inn after it was past down from generation to generation, was annoyed at feeling uneasy about the curse, he moved the chair to basement of the inn to avoid customers sitting on it. However, shortly afterwards there was a delivery driver who was delivering supplies to the inn basement. The driver didn’t know about the curse. He sat on Busby’s chair to rest. He died in a car accident less than a few hours later.
After that unfortunate incident, Tony Earnshaw donated the chair to a local museum and requested that it be placed in a place where people couldn’t sit on it. The Thirsk museum took the chair and put it in a hanging position so that no one else could sit on it. They printed the story of the of the curse and hung it on the chair along with the warning “Do not touch”… Just incase.
