“One fine afternoon a party of three adventurous spirits started off, hoping to discover the skull and investigate its history.  This much we knew, that the skull would only scream when it was buried, and so we hoped to get leave to inter it in the churchyard.  The village of Bettiscombe was at length reached, and we found our way to the old farmhouse, which stood at the end of the village by itself.  It had evidently been a manor house, and a very handsome one, too.  We were admitted into a fine paved hall, and attempted to break the ice by asking for milk.  We then endeavoured to draw the good woman of the house into conversation by admiring the place, and asking in a guarded manner respecting the famous skull.  On this subject she was most reserved.  She had only lately had the farmhouse, and had been obliged to take possession of the skull also; but she did not wish us to suppose that she knew much about it; it was a veritable ’skeleton in the closet’ to her.  After exercising great diplomacy, we persuaded her to allow us a sight of it.  We tramped up the fine old staircase till we reached the top of the house, when, opening a cupboard door, she showed us a steep, winding staircase, leading to the roof, and from one of the steps the skull sat grinning at us.  We took it in our hands and examined it carefully; it was very old and weather-beaten, and certainly human.  The lower jaw was missing, the forehead very low and badly proportioned.  One of our party, who was a medical student, examined it long and gravely, and then, after first telling the good woman that he was a doctor, pronounced it to be, in his opinion, the skull of a negro.  After this oracular utterance, she resolved to make a clean breast of all she knew, which, however, did not amount to much.  The skull, we were informed, was that of a negro servant, who had lived in the service of a Roman Catholic priest.  Some difference arose between them; but whether the priest murdered the servant, in order to conceal some crimes known to the negro, or whether the negro, in a fit of passion, killed his master, did not clearly appear.

However, the negro had declared before his death that his spirit would not rest unless his body was taken to his native land and buried there.  This was not done, he being buried in the churchyard of Bettiscombe.  Then the haunting began; fearful screams proceeded from the grave, the doors and windows of the house rattled and creaked, strange sounds were heard all over the house; in short, there was no rest for the inmates until the body was dug up.  At different periods attempts were made to bury the body, but similar disturbances always recurred.  In process of time the skeleton disappeared, ’all save the skull,’ and its reputation as ‘the screaming skull’ remains unimpaired.”