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The Skull of Tunstead Farm

Tunstead Farm in the village of Tunstead Milton, near Chapel-en-le-Frith in Derbyshire, has for many centuries been called ‘Dickie’s Farm’. Though the owners of the farm for some two centuries are descendants of the Dixon family, the farmhouse has been ruled by ‘Dickie’, whose skull has been a resident there since the early eighteenth century, when their ancestor, Ned Dixon, returned from the wars. He was murdered in an upstairs bedroom and legend has it that his skull has been permanently kept in the room.

Another conflicting legend says that it is the skull of a woman; she also haunts the house, though who she is has never been known. The fact that the hauntings of the farm and its lands have always been attributed to ‘Dickie’ makes it seem more probable that the skull belonged to a male. It is almost impossible to identify since it is in three damaged parts, and there was a time when the wife of one of the tenants used to charge visitors tuppence for seeing it, an uninviting olive green object, spotted brown-and-white. Where there are numerous references to ‘Dickie’s’ haunt ings there is only one of the unknown lady. According to Alfred Fryer, who visited the farm in the early part of the nineteenth century, the resident farmer was a Mr Lomax. He told him he had seen the lady ghost, never seen the male ghost, but had heard it countless times. It was only then that Fryer told him about ‘Dickie’, and Ned Dixon’s murder. Mr Lomax told him how one night when he was sitting in his chair by the kitchen fire, a baby sleeping in a cradle beside his chair, he suddenly became aware of something strange in the room and turning round towards the open door he was amazed to see the figure of a woman coming slowly down the stairs and into the kitchen. Unable to move he watched her pass between him and the fire, turn and pause for a moment by the cradle, then bend over it.

For a moment he could only think that perhaps his wife had engaged a new servant, and told her not to wake the child, as he would be taking the cradle upstairs very shortly. As he began to speak the figure vanished. Very shortly after his daughter suddenly died. He told Alfred Fryer that he had never seen a ghost before, but that when he questioned the farm staff they told him they had often seen ‘Dickie’, as he was called even then, which seems to decide that it was a male ghost. How then could Mr Lomax have seen a woman? Clearly by its name it was recognized as a man. The most extraordinary thing about ‘Dickie’ was his undisputed possession of the farm in every way. It had apparently previously bitterly resented being moved any where else; former tenants had been haunted by its con stant presence in the house, even more so when they dis covered about the murder in the bedroom, and had moved it elsewhere. As so often happens in the history of ghost skulls, once removed the noise and disturbance created in the house was so terrifying that those who had removed it would bring it back for peace and quiet.

‘Dickie’ had other strong objections, though these were beneficial to the farmer. If any stranger entered any of the buildings or even the land, ‘Dickie’ would warn the farmer by furious knockings on the walls and loud noises every where. Since the farm was in a very lonely part of the country this was splendid security. It was not so good though when haymaking began and the farmer was obliged to recruit new hands to help him manage the heavy work. ‘Dickie’ would then go quite berserk, once so terri fying two newly employed farm labourers that they fled back to wherever they had come from, unable to sleep any longer in the outbuildings to which they had been assigned. They were replaced by three Irishmen who were put in a different part of the same outbuildings. They, too, bitterly complained that after a hard day’s work in the fields they were unable to sleep. When asked why by the farmer, they told him that all through the night, in the hayloft above them, were the continuous noises of someone whetting scythes and the clattering of forks and hay-making tools being thrown about all over the floor. They got out several times in the night to try and stop the noise, but all the tools were as carefully stacked as they had placed them before going to bed. Immediately they went back to sleep the incessant racket began all over again.

They too left the next day. By that time rumours of the haunted farm were circu lating. Now, however, ‘Dickie’ suddenly took a new and very valuable turn in his ghostly activities. Mr Lomax told Fryer that he had become a kind of watch-dog. It was first noticed when a series of deliberate and continuous noise of thuds, first loud then light and again loud, in an unvarying pattern, turned out to be a warning, for it was closely followed by a death in the family. There were other deli berate signals which were invaluable, given by knocks and raps, especially during the lambing season, or when cows were calving and needed help, sheep with footrot, horses breaking a leg, foxes endangering the chicken and even domestic cats acquiring the mange were all under the watchful care of ‘Dickie’, The signals never failed and Lomax could put no value on the skull as a guardian of security. One day the warning thuds and raps began much louder than ever before and Lomax found, to his horror, that ‘Dickie’ himself had been stolen. The house was full of noise. How Lomax discovered where it had gone is a mystery, but it was traced to a house in Disley, Cheshire, which became so full of noises day and night, that the robbers were only too glad to get rid of it. They secretly returned it to its home, where once again there was peace and happiness for Lomax and the skull.

The next antics of ‘Dickie’ gave joy to the whole of Derby shire. One day, unannounced and unwelcome, engineers from the London and North Western Railway came to in vestigate the land for construction of a bridge for the London-to-Manchester line, across fields and farmlands in the nearby Goyt valley where Tunstead Farm was situated. ‘Dickie’ was incensed, resenting such an invasion as never before. All the efforts of the engineers to secure foun dations for the erection of a bridge were repeatedly baulked. This failure was ascribed by the railway authori ties to the local sand and bogs, but the Derbyshire people were certain ‘Dickie’ was at work. As failure after failure prevented their work, the construction engineers moved to another farm on a site near Buxton, where one of the newly built tunnels collapsed, for which ‘Dickie’ also received applause and credit.

It is said that one other tenant was misguided and un grateful enough to decide that ‘Dickie’ should be buried in consecrated ground at ‘Chapel’, but such was the uproar by the locals that ‘Dickie’ was brought back in a basket to his home. He was reported by one writer as follows: ‘among his qualifications other than that of mischief, is his immunity from decay and the fact that no dust accumulated on him’, which after three centuries of his existence is hard to believe. Apart from his exhumation from the churchyard ‘Dickie’ was removed from the farm on two other occasions, both of them most humiliating to him, as he soon showed. The second time he was thrown into the nearby Comb’s Re servoir and caused panic by poisoning all the fish; he had hastily to be carried once more to his home. The third time was even more insulting and irreverent to ‘Dickie’, for when the farmhouse was being rebuilt he was thrown out into a manure heap.

The workmen then found they were persistently hindered in all their tasks. Each morning, they found all the previous day’s work wrecked. Angry and frustrated not only by this constant interference, but by strange and threatening noises from somewhere, they traced the noises to the manure heap where they dis covered the skull. They took it back to the house, when peace was at once restored. As late as 1938, a descendant of the original Dixon family in whose hands the farmhouse and lands were still owned and managed, told someone that when anything was likely to go wrong ‘Dickie’ would warn him first by various and insistent thuds and knocks on the walls, signals which never failed. He regarded ‘Dickie’ more as a guardian spirit of his house and family than as a terror. What more can one expect of a ghost? Now, fifty years later, the author has been informed by a resident that rumours have been spreading that once again ‘Dickie’ has been thrown out, though no one knows where. There are also plans to build log-cabins around the reser voir where long ago his skull poisoned the fish, and fierce local objections are being raised. Perhaps ‘Dickie’ will yet again emerge from wherever he has been hidden and settle the matter of the erection of the log-cabins as he did about the railway-bridge long ago, thus bringing peace to all concerned who care so much for his welfare and believe in his own peculiar methods of resurrection. | British | Dorset | Fawkhans Green | Rotherham | Somerset | Wardley Hall | Yorkshire |