Page:Lancashire Legends, Traditions, Pageants, Sports, Etc., with an Appendix Containing a Rare Tract.djvu/111

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been kept at Wardley ever since, and many superstitious notions are entertained concerning it, not worth repeating." After the Downeses ceased to reside there, Wardley Hall was occupied for a time by Lord Barrymore. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Barritt, the Manchester antiquary, visited the Hall, where he says there is "a human skull, which, time out of mind, hath had a superstitious veneration paid to it, by [the occupiers of the hall] not permitting it to be removed from its situation, which is on the topmost step of a staircase. There is a tradition that, if removed, or ill-used, some uncommon noise and disturbance always follows, to the terror of the whole house; yet I cannot persuade myself this is always the case. But some few years ago, I and three of my acquaintances went to view this surprising piece of household furniture, and found it as above mentioned, and bleached white with the weather, that beats in upon it from a four-square window in the hall, which the tenants never permit to be glazed or filled up, thus to oblige the skull, which, they say, is unruly and disturbed at the hole not being always open. However, one of us, who was last in company with the skull, removed it from its place into a dark part of the room, and there left it, and returned home; but the night but one following, such a storm arose about the house, of wind and lightning, as tore down some trees, and unthatched outhousing. We hearing of this, my father went over in a few days after to see his mother, who lived near the Hall, and was witness to the wreck the storm had made. Yet all this might have happened had the skull never been removed; but withal it keeps alive the credibility of the tradition (or the credulity of its believers). But what I can learn of the above affair