The Screaming Skull is a monologue, written in 1908 by the Italian-American writer and historian Francis Marion Crawford. On the surface it's a hammy story of a worldly old sea captain who has inherited the house of a doctor friend, whose wife predeceased him in mysterious circumstances. In a cupboard of the master bedroom, Captain Braddock discovers a bandbox containing the top half of a skull. "One always remembers one's mistakes much more vividly that one's cleverest things, doesn't one?" he ...
The Screaming Skull is a monologue, written in 1908 by the Italian-American writer and historian Francis Marion Crawford. On the surface it's a hammy story of a worldly old sea captain who has inherited the house of a doctor friend, whose wife predeceased him in mysterious circumstances. In a cupboard of the master bedroom, Captain Braddock discovers a bandbox containing the top half of a skull. "One always remembers one's mistakes much more vividly that one's cleverest things, doesn't one?" he muses, confiding that his big mistake was to entertain the doctor with murder stories, one of which involved a wife who did away with three husbands by pouring molten lead into their ears.
Like many ghost story protagonists, Braddock is a practical man with no patience for superstition, coupled with an old sea dog's imperviousness to howling winds. But he is at a loss to explain the unholy screaming that starts up every time he tries to evict the skull. Nor can he ignore the discovery of a bottom jaw in a nearby lime pit which is a perfect fit with the top jaw in his bedroom cupboard. After settling for an uneasy cohabitation, which condemns him to sleeping on the ground floor, he becomes increasingly obsessed with the rattle of a small hard object inside the skull. Could it, he wonders, be a nugget of lead?
He recounts his story over one long evening to an unnamed visitor, in a monologue that moves from a narrative of past events to a dramatisation of what is happening in the house as he speaks. At the climax of his story, he brings the skull out to show it to his guest, only to discover that it has disappeared from its box. No sooner has this discovery been made than a window crashes open and in it screeches, biting his friend's hand on its way. Stoically he seals it up again and puts it back in the bedroom where he has decided to spend one last night to free the downstairs room for his friend.
The story ends with a local newspaper report of his murder, "bitten in the throat by a human assailant with such amazing force as to crush the windpipe." At first this ending seems a failure of narrative – the inability of a monologuist to report his own death. But the more you think about it, the clearer it becomes that Captain Braddock is not the innocent he purports to be. Who is this friend on whom he presses glass after glass of rum while protesting that he can't take it himself on account of his rheumatism? Why did he so relish telling Dr Pratt how to commit murder? How did he know the rattle in the skull was lead? And why is the skull so intent on revenging itself upon him?
The newspaper offers no clues, merely reporting: "The whole affair is shrouded in mystery. Captain Braddock was a widower, and lived alone. He leaves no children". The question of the captain's complicity in his own murder rattles on like the lead in the skull.
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