Chapter 8: Skullduggery – It’s all in the Head

Every country worth the name has at least one murky mystery concerning skulls. The South American region of the Americas is brimming with perplexing crystal skulls, believed to have been used as fancy paperweights by Inca accountants; in Iceland’s Parliament House, the flesh-denuded brain casings of every prime minister to have sat on the Snowy Throne since 936AD are kept in an airing cupboard; in Iran, the Ultimate Mullah consults the preserved bony headpiece of a long-gone mystic on peculiar matters of state, such as electrical wiring legislation and pharmacy opening hours; in Zimbabwe…oh, that’ll do. You get the idea.

Anyhow, somewhere in Leicestershire exists St Plunking’s Hall, a stately manor surrounded by charming gardens and a little brook full of darting water-wet fishes. Though today “Probably stuffed with illegal immigrants” (Daily Mail, 1997-2025), once upon a time the building was home to two sisters, Agnes and Helga. 

The imposing home was left to the siblings after their parents decided to retire to Bangkok and explore themselves. One day, while they were playing snooker in the belfry, Agnes said to Helga, “If and when I die, I want my body buried in the house, you hear?”. Helga grimaced lightly as she lined up a double on the black and nodded some kind of half-arsed assent – for Agnes was famous in the district for making idiotic demands; for instance, all the cows within three miles of the sisters’ estate had to wear porcelain sunhats with ear sockets.

Two months later, Agnes sadly passed into death when a nearby rearing cow’s badly-fitted china hat was sent fizzing through the air, the bovine-launched ballistic striking the poor woman and killing her entirely. Come the funeral, Helga and her confidants decided against burying Agnes in the house, which was a ridiculous idea (how do you bury someone in a house?), and instead buried her in the ground at a local church, which had been specialising in that kind of thing for millennia. But that proved to be a biggish mistake.

Soon enough, St Plunking’s was plagued by nightly shrieks and screams, curses and coughs. The nocturnal horrors drove the establishment’s servants out into the countryside, the staff preferring to live amongst the pigs and starlings than under the same roof as a raucous spirit. Bereft of an underclass to do everything for her, Helga was forced to run her own baths, dry herself after getting out the bath, put on her own pyjamas and blow out the candle before she went to sleep. Hopelessly unequipped to perform these simple tasks after a lifetime of uninterrupted ease, the haughty heiress wept glumly about how wretched her life had become.

At some point it apparently occurred to her that the devilish disturbances probably had some connection to her recently departed sister. In genuine despair and exhausted by having to walk up and down the stairs with no one to carry her, Helga employed some worthless vagabonds to disinter Agnes and have her bought back to the house. However, the cretinous ne’er-do-wells bungled the operation and returned to the hall with only poor Agnes’ head, along with some pitiful explanation about what had happened during the botched exhumation. The suffering Helga opted to make the best of a bad thing and had a handy handyman place the bonce behind some panelling in the vestibule. It worked! The abysmal wailing ceased and peace blossomed in St Plunking’s Hall. Helga’s spooked staff slowly drifted back to the house and she lived out the rest of her bone idle life in the slothful bliss to which she had become accustomed. Eventually, as is so often the way with living things, Helga herself expired. 

The hall was sold to a French industrialist, Jacques-Jaqcue Cliche, who moved in with his family of cats. As in common with the French, the creative continental was anxious to renovate the building – during the course of which Agnes’ head was revealed behind the panels. M. Cliche didn’t like that kind of thing so ordered his workmen to dispose of it. Guess what? The following night the hall was riven with the most dreadful ghostly wailings a frenchman ever heard. Conscious of having displeased the dead, Cliche ordered that the skull be retrieved and placed back in the panelling. That settled things in the house but not in M. Cliche’s soul. He sold up and moved back to Paris, where he died at some point, somehow. The hall then changed hands more often than a dog barks for its breakfast. It was the same old story: new owners learnt of the skull. New owners located the skull and flung it out. New owners were terrified by nightly aural atrocities. New owners had the skull put back. New owners left. 

And what of today – today being the most up-to-date timeframe we have: what of the hall today? No one seems to know. Leicester’s Centre for Haunted Premises claims it’s lost all records of the property, and the local police don’t give a monkey’s. It really is a quite outrageous state of affairs. Ghost TV interviewed every single person living in the Leicester area in a quest to locate the building but managed to lose all the paperwork. 

Speaking to Hogroast Weekly in 2020, Canadian clinically psycho-therapist Jordan Peterson, who was then in a semi-fugue state due a strict diet of mint sauce and cooking sherry, said: “Leave it to the Left to ruin everything. I can’t say where St Plunking’s Hall is – but I smell Marxism lurking in there somewhere. Now, excuse me, I must tidy my room.”