Gents Mag 1849 part 2 p.142

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	Gentleman's Magazine 1849 part 2 p.142 fair means to obtain the possession. The owners however not being willing to part with it, he determined in an evil hour to have it at any cost, and awful was the price he paid. The old people, as the story runs, were in the habit of going every day to the hall to share in the viands that fell from the lord's table, for he was a bountiful man to the poor, and it happened once when they went that a pie was given them into which had been put some articles of plate. After their return home the valuables were missed, and their cottage being searched the things were found upon them. the result was as the author of the mischief had plotted, they were accused of theft, tried, and sentenced to be hanged, and their prosecutor got their inheritance. The story goes on to relate that on their way to execution, after denouncing in the words of the 109th Psalm the conduct of evil doers like Philipson, they pronounced a curse upon the owners of Calgarth, which the gossips of the neighbourhood say has ever since cast its blight upon the ownership of the estate, and that, notwithstanding whatever authentic records may prove to the contrary, the traditionary malediction has been regularly fulfilled down to the present time. After the death of his victims, Philipson was sadly tormented, for, as if to perpetuate the remembrance of such injustice, and as a momento to their innocence, their skulls came and took up a position in the window of one of the rooms, from whence they could not by any means be effectually removed; the common belief being that they were for that end indestructible, and it was stoutly asserted that to what place soever they were taken, they invariably reappeared in their old station; they were buried, burnt, powdered, dispersed to the winds, and upon the lake several times, but all to no effect as to their removal or destruction. In 1775, when Mr. West visited the Hall, they still remained in the place where they were said to have lain as long as could be remembered, and it was then thought an impeachment of the taste and curiosity of the inhabitants of the surrounding country, if they could not say they had seen the skulls of Calgarth. "Some person, however," says Clarke, has lately carried one to London, and, as it has not found its way back again, I shall say nothing more on so very trivial a subject." "As far as can be learned," adds another informant, "the story is simply this. In former times, when the Roman Catholic clergy were compelled to seek safety in retirement from the persecution of the Reformers, one of them retreated to Calgarth, where he occiupied one of the rooms as a cell, and the skulls were brought to him thither as objects for reflective contemplation." A different account, though still lame and unsatisfactory, has it that there formerly lived in the house one of those famous wise women, who, as may be collected from passing remarks in the early English chroniclers, were once among the lower class of our country people consulted as the general medical advisers, but who in too many instances professed to cure by the more questionable agency of those charms and spells of which the adjacent vale of Troutbeck yet vaunts its professors. This person had two skeletons by her for purposes connected with her profession, and the skulls, happening to meet with better preservation than the rest of the bones, they became in time accidentally invested with their singular reputation. Such is the essence of this goblin story, which Mr. Green in the "Tourist's New Guide," published in 1819, has totally dissipated by informing us that "time has proved more than a match for the invisible agent that sought to perpetuate these monuments of wrong, that one of the skulls has turned to dust, and the other was fast mouldering away;" and now even that one has also - gone with the old belief and dream That round it hung. The fame of these redoubtable relics is, however, as living as ever, for the respectable tenants of the house, who even in these days, when the spread of knowledge had almost banished from the glens and recesses of the North the dreams of superstition, had not been able to shake off entirely the secret influence of the old credulity, maintained with a slight love of the marvellous, that though the skulls have disappeared they believe them, invisible indeed to mortal eyes, to
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