Dunscar Farm

Dunscar Farm, near Castleton in Derbyshire’s Hope Valley, occupies an unusual place in the folklore of haunted England. Unlike many famous haunted houses, its reputation does not depend upon repeated sightings of a recognised ghost or a long catalogue of supernatural disturbances. Instead, Dunscar became associated with one of the stranger traditions of the Peak District: the belief that human remains could become permanently bound to a house or estate and that removing them might bring misfortune upon the living.

The story belongs to a much wider body of British folklore concerning so-called guardian or screaming skulls, human remains that supposedly resist burial and insist upon remaining within a particular building. Derbyshire possesses several traditions of this kind, and over the years details associated with different farms appear to have become confused with one another. Dunscar Farm has sometimes been identified as the farmhouse in a disturbing nineteenth-century story about two sisters, murder and human bones preserved in a cheese vat, although the earliest source does not actually name the property.

That uncertainty makes Dunscar more interesting rather than less so, because it demonstrates how supernatural traditions can migrate through a landscape until stories, buildings and memories become almost impossible to separate.

The Bones in the Staircase Window

One of the most important accounts was recorded by the Derbyshire folklorist Sidney Oldall Addy, who collected legends, customs and supernatural traditions throughout northern England during the late nineteenth century. Addy was particularly interested in beliefs surrounding unusual objects preserved within houses, including human bones and skulls that may originally have been retained as curiosities, protective objects or charms before elaborate ghost stories developed around them.

Bones mentioned by S. O. Addy may have had a like purpose, though explained by a ghost story. In Household Tales (1895), he writes:

There is an old farmhouse in the Peak Forest, in Derbyshire, at which, it is said, there once lived two sisters who loved the same man. To put an end to their rivalry one sister murdered the other, but the dying sister said that her bones would never rest in any grave. And so it happens that her bones are kept in a ‘cheese-fat’ [vat] in the farmhouse which stands in the staircase window. If the bones are removed from the vat trouble comes upon the house, strange noises are heard at night, the cattle die, or are seized with illness.

The story contains several elements characteristic of British supernatural folklore. Violent death prevents the victim from resting peacefully, while the murdered woman’s dying declaration establishes a supernatural claim upon the house itself. Her remains cannot simply be buried and forgotten because they have become part of the property’s spiritual order. As long as they remain in their appointed place, the household appears to be protected; once they are disturbed, disorder immediately follows.

The bones therefore occupy an ambiguous position. They belong to a murdered woman and are consequently associated with death and haunting, yet they also function as protective objects whose continued presence keeps worse misfortune away.

The Cheese Vat and the Household Guardian

The detail that the bones were kept in a “cheese-fat”, meaning a cheese vat or mould, is particularly striking. Rather than being hidden in a grave or concealed inside a wall, the remains were supposedly preserved openly within the farmhouse and placed in a staircase window. Such a position would have made them part of the daily life of the household, visible to inhabitants as they moved through the building and perhaps even visible from outside.

The placement also invites comparison with other protective objects traditionally positioned in windows. Glass witch balls, charms, horseshoes and other apotropaic objects were sometimes placed at entrances or openings because windows and doors were regarded as vulnerable boundaries through which harmful influences might enter. It is impossible to demonstrate that the Peak Forest bones originally served such a function, but Addy himself entertained the possibility that certain human remains preserved in Derbyshire houses may have begun as curiosities or evil-averting charms before later generations surrounded them with supernatural explanations.

If so, the murdered-sister legend may represent an attempt to explain an object whose original purpose had already been forgotten. People encountering human remains kept inexplicably within an old farmhouse naturally wanted to know why they were there. A story of murder, a dying curse and disastrous attempts at burial provided a powerful explanation while simultaneously warning future occupants never to remove them.

The Dunscar Tradition

Dunscar Farm later became associated with this tradition, particularly through twentieth-century accounts of Derbyshire hauntings. Yet the historical evidence requires caution. Addy did not identify the farmhouse in his 1895 story, and when he later wrote specifically about Dunscar he preserved a different tradition.

According to that account, Addy had heard that a human skull was kept on or near a windowsill at Dunscar Farm and that removing it would cause the crops to fail. Intrigued by the claim, he actually travelled to Dunscar and attempted to investigate it himself. He found no skull, and the tenant, who had lived at the farm for many years, told him that he had never heard of such a tradition.

This is an unusually valuable detail because it shows folklore being investigated almost as soon as it was recorded. Addy was not simply repeating every supernatural claim he encountered. He went to the alleged site, questioned the people living there and discovered that the story could not be confirmed.

The Dunscar skull therefore remains elusive. It may have disappeared before Addy arrived, the tradition may have belonged to earlier occupants, or the entire story may have been transferred from another farmhouse. Whatever its origin, the belief had circulated widely enough for Addy to hear about it, preserving Dunscar’s connection with Derbyshire’s extraordinary guardian-skull folklore.

The Problem of Tunstead Farm

The mystery becomes more complicated because another Derbyshire farmhouse possessed a much better documented tradition involving precisely the kind of supernatural remains described by Addy. At Tunstead Farm, near Chapel-en-le-Frith, a human skull traditionally known as Dicky of Tunstead was preserved for generations and repeatedly described by nineteenth-century visitors.

The Tunstead tradition also involved two women connected with an inheritance, the murder of one of them and a declaration that the victim’s remains must never leave the property. Attempts to remove or bury the skull supposedly produced violent disturbances until it was returned to the farmhouse.

The similarities with Addy’s anonymous 1895 story are therefore substantial. Both traditions revolve around female rivalry or murder, human remains preserved inside a farmhouse, a supernatural insistence that those remains remain on the property and misfortune whenever they are disturbed.

For this reason, later folklore researchers have suggested that the story of the bones in the cheese vat probably belongs more naturally to the Tunstead tradition than to Dunscar. The identification of Addy’s unnamed farmhouse with Dunscar should consequently not be treated as certain.

What seems to have happened is that two related Derbyshire traditions became entangled. Dunscar had its own story concerning a protective skull whose removal supposedly harmed the crops, while Tunstead possessed the better documented legend of a murdered woman whose remains had to remain permanently within the farmhouse. As the stories were repeated through books about ghosts and local folklore, features from one tradition may gradually have been attached to the other.

Guardian Skulls and the Restless Dead

The traditions of Dunscar and Tunstead belong to a remarkable class of British supernatural belief in which human skulls or bones act almost as guardians of particular houses. These remains are sometimes called screaming skulls because legends frequently claim that they protest when removed, producing strange noises, poltergeist-like disturbances or other manifestations until they are restored.

Yet the skull itself is not necessarily evil. In many stories it behaves more like an ancestral or territorial spirit whose relationship with the house depends upon an unspoken agreement. If the remains are treated properly and left where tradition demands, the household prospers. When later inhabitants attempt to bury them, destroy them or remove them from the property, the agreement is broken and supernatural retaliation follows.

At Dunscar the alleged consequence was agricultural failure, while in Addy’s murdered-sister story the punishment extended to mysterious noises and the sickness or death of livestock. Such details reveal how intimately supernatural belief was connected with everyday rural survival. A haunted house was frightening, but the death of cattle or the failure of crops threatened the livelihood of an entire family. The presence of the bones therefore became something that could not safely be dismissed as mere superstition.

The belief that a spirit might attach itself permanently to its physical remains also reflects an older conception of the relationship between the body and the dead. Within such traditions, burial does not automatically release the spirit and death does not completely sever a person’s connection with a particular place. The bones themselves may retain power, identity and agency.

Folklore Attached to a Landscape

Dunscar Farm stands within a Peak District landscape extraordinarily rich in supernatural tradition. The limestone valleys and isolated farms around Castleton, Hope and the surrounding villages have produced stories of boggarts, ghosts, magical practitioners, prophetic spirits and strange objects preserved inside ancient houses.

Such traditions were rarely isolated from everyday life. They belonged to named fields, recognised pools, particular windows and buildings known personally to the people telling the stories. The supernatural was therefore woven into the physical landscape rather than confined to distant mythology.

The Dunscar tradition also demonstrates how difficult it can be to reconstruct the history of folklore. A story recorded in one generation may lose its precise location in the next. Another nearby tradition can then attract the wandering story because its themes appear similar. Once repeated in books, the new identification begins to look authoritative, even though the earliest evidence never supported it.

The responsible conclusion is therefore that Dunscar Farm genuinely possessed a nineteenth-century tradition concerning a supernatural or protective human skull, but the famous story of the murdered sister whose bones were kept in a cheese vat cannot securely be assigned to Dunscar. That story was recorded by Addy without naming the farmhouse and appears to have much stronger connections with the guardian-skull tradition of Tunstead Farm.

Far from diminishing the mystery, the uncertainty reveals something important about folklore itself. The supernatural object may disappear, the witnesses may die and the original explanation may be forgotten, yet the story continues moving through the landscape, attaching itself to another house and acquiring new details with every generation.

Somewhere within those changing traditions lies the memory of an old Derbyshire farmhouse where human remains were believed to protect the living, and where disturbing the dead could bring disaster through the door.

Go Deeper into the World Behind the Haunting

If you read about Dunscar Farm only as another entertaining ghost story, you are missing the most important part. Behind the legend lies an older magical worldview in which human bones could carry power, spirits could become attached to houses, the dead could guard the living and disturbing a supernatural covenant could bring ruin upon an entire household. These beliefs lead directly into necromancy, ancestral magic, protective charms, spirit work, witchcraft and the forgotten traditions that survived beneath respectable religion for centuries.

Stop settling for diluted paranormal entertainment. Join the Occult World Mystery School and start studying the occult traditions that actually created legends like the guardian skulls of Derbyshire. There are thousands of spirits, gods, demons, magical systems, grimoires and forgotten traditions waiting beyond it. If you are serious about understanding the hidden world, then stop standing outside reading stories about people who encountered it. Enter the Occult World Mystery School, claim access to the deeper material and learn what lies behind the hauntings, the rituals and the spirits for yourself.