in stock, dispatched today More home accessories available from Bloomingville Enjoy a traditional concept with a contemporary twist with the Orinoco rocking chair from Bloomingville. Woven from rattan and featuring a fluid, curved shape, this natural coloured seat sits upon white metal rockers. Perfect for relaxing in your conservatory, mix and match with more chairs from the Rattan collection created by Bloomingville to complete the look in your interior. Free Standard Delivery to UK Addresses* UK Next Working Day delivery - £5.95 Nominated Day delivery - £5.95 Weekend delivery - £9.95 Find out more about UK delivery Find out more about returns These reviews are collected independently byCase File: Chair of Death Description: Located near Sandhutton in North Yorkshire, the Busby Stoop Inn is a public house with a tavern that is considered haunted. The activity seems confined to a reputed Chair of Death kept in storage. History: The 'Chair of Death' was the favorite chair of a striper named Thomas Busby, who was convicted in 1702 for the murder of his father-in-law, Daniel Auty, whom he supposedly strangled for sitting in his favourite chair after an argument about Thomas' wife, Auty's daughter Elizabeth.
On his way to the gallows in 1702, he asked to stop by the pub and put a curse on his chair, claiming that anyone who sat in it would be haunted and soon die. It remained in the pub for centuries, and people were dared to sit in it. During World War II, airmen from an nearby base made the pub a hot spot, and the chair became a "hot seat" and people noticed that the ones who sat in it would never come back from war. In 1967, two Royal air force pilots sat in it, and while driving back, they crashed into a tree and died. A few years later, two brick layers decided to try it, and that afternoon, the one who sat in it fell to his death. The cursed chair has apparently "killed" every person who sat in it, no matter what. Some instances include a roofer who sat in it died after the roof he was working on collapsed, and a cleaning woman stumbled into it while mopping, and was later killed by a brain tumor. Eventually, the pub owner moved it into the basement, hoping that nobody would sit in it.
However, one day a delivery man was in the basement and sat in it. An hour later, he crashed his truck and died. After that death, the landlord asked the local museum to take it. to ensure nobody sat in it again, they hung the chair five feet from the ground. It seemed, that because the museum had made it nearly impossible to be able to sit in it, its "killing" days were over. The museum is still open and functioning with the chair in place as of December 2014. It is said that for some time prior to death (time varies in all cases) the person who sat in the chair experiences haunting experiences, including extreme itching, paranoia, hearing things, confusion, items being moved and written warnings on mirrors and walls about the persons imminent death in addition to many other strange happenings. Background: In 1702, convicted murderer Thomas Busby was on his way to the gallows in Thirsk when he desired a drink of ale at his favorite pub in his favorite chair as his last request.
When he finished, he said "May sudden death come to anyone who dare sit in my chair." Extra Notes: The case first aired on the May 22, 1998 episode. Ad blocker interference detected! Wikia is a free-to-use site that makes money from advertising. We have a modified experience for viewers using ad blockers Wikia is not accessible if you’ve made further modifications. Remove the custom ad blocker rule(s) and the page will load as expected.Robin Herford was running the Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough when he realised he hadn't spent his entire grant. His boss, Alan Ayckbourn, was off on sabbatical, so Herford decided, what with Christmas coming up, to put on a ghost story that could be staged cheaply and quickly – not in the main theatre, but in the bar. He asked the venue's resident playwright Stephen Mallatratt to rustle one up, with the proviso that the set and costumes couldn't cost more than £1,000, adding that there was only enough money to pay four actors.
"He wasn't terribly impressed," remembers Herford, 25 years on. "But he came back a couple of days later and said, 'Have you read Susan Hill's book The Woman in Black?'" Hill's creepy novella had been published a few years earlier, in 1983. "I read it overnight and said, 'It's a fantastic story – but it's got a dozen characters.'" "I've got an idea about that," said Mallatratt. His masterstroke was to make The Woman in Black a play within a play, one that needs just two speaking actors, and a backstage crew of four. Elderly Arthur Kipps brings a ghost story to a young actor; it's the story of something that happened to Kipps 30 years earlier, and the actor turns it into a drama. The older actor plays around half a dozen characters, while the other takes the role of young Kipps, a solicitor in the remote town of Crythin Gifford, who has to visit a mysterious house in the marshes to tie up a dead woman's affairs – discovering all too late why the townsfolk shrink from the place.
The Woman in Black sold out the first night it was staged, on 12 December 1987, and ran successfully for three weeks. A year later, it moved to the Lyric Hammersmith and finally to the West End, where it has played at the Fortune theatre since 1989. It is now one of the longest-running plays in British theatrical history, currently celebrating its silver anniversary with a parallel national tour. Its popularity has been further boosted by this year's film adaptation, which starred Daniel Radcliffe. Sadly, Mallatratt did not get to see it, having died in 2004. Term times are particularly busy: The Woman in Black is popular with school groups, since it's part of the curriculum. On the night I attend, the Fortune is full of screaming 14-year-olds, but the play is easily capable of terrifying older viewers, too. Ken Drury, who plays Arthur Kipps in the West End production, relishes the recent memory of a man who gasped "Fuck's sake!" as a mysteriously locked door, central to the plot, swung open.
So what makes The Woman in Black so frightening? "The whole theatre is the set," explains Herford. "If I'm watching something scary on the telly or at the cinema, you know it's just an image on a flat screen, and you can shut your eyes." From the beginning of the show, however, characters start appearing at the back of the auditorium, leaving the audience constantly feeling something could creep up on them. "I try to preserve a sense of discomfort," adds Herford. "There's no music playing, and I try to keep the air conditioning cooler than might be comfortable. The audience is slightly keyed-up." One of the most unnerving moments comes when Kipps returns to the nursery that lies behind the door and discovers an empty rocking chair – still in motion. "It's the little things that get you," says Susan Hill. "Less is always more." And, like most of the other effects, it is simply done. "It's fishing wire," says Jon Huyton, the company manager, revealing one of the secrets of a spartan set that amounts to little more than a door, some gauze, a flight of steps, a few pieces of nursery furniture – and, of course, plenty of dry ice.
Sound effects are another crucial ingredient: trains, winds, tolling bells, and bloodcurdling cries all conspire to send the audience's imagination into overdrive. "We've had screams go off in the wrong place," says Huyton. "That's one to test the boys on stage, because everyone in the audience reacts." Although the play has remained essentially unchanged since its debut, it is regularly refreshed: each cast lasts for around nine months in the West End. "Each time I do it," says Herford, "I think, 'This really is a very good play.' And that's quite rare. It's a joy to direct each time, because you can let the new cast have their heads a bit." Deputy electrician Stephen Derham, who has seen casts come and go, says that one set of actors got through the play in an hour and 45 minutes, while the next cast stretched it to almost two and a half hours. Yet both, he says, "scared the living bejaysus out of the audience – and that's the main thing". Although everyone involved in The Woman in Black believes it will run and run, it has a long way to go before it catches up with Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, which has been in the West End for 60 years.
Herford admits he has a vested interest in keeping the play fresh: like Hill, he earns a royalty. "It hasn't made me very rich because it's a very small theatre and it's not a big percentage. But it took my son to Oxford, and it has given me a measure of security few freelance directors can enjoy. We've certainly made the government a phenomenal amount through VAT on tickets, far more than the subsidy Scarborough received." Hill adds: "It's not squillions, but it's a nice pension." What of the woman in black herself? Well – and the spoiler-wary should stop reading this now – as title roles go, it is certainly one of the West End's strangest. There are no lines, and dance experience is preferred. "You almost want them to float," says Huyton. "We've just had someone performing it for nine months and she said at the end, 'I will come back, but I've got to do some speaking for a while.'" Referred to as "the vision" by cast and crew, the woman is on stage for mere minutes yet manages to cause mayhem throughout the auditorium.