“ After the Downeses ceased to reside there, Wardley Hall was occupied for a time by Lord Barrymore. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Thomas Barritt, the Manchester antiquary, visited the Hall, where he says there is "a human skull, which, time out of mind, hath had a superstitious veneration paid to it, by [the occupiers of the hall] not permitting it to be removed from its situation, which is on the topmost step of a staircase. There is a tradition that, if removed, or ill-used, some uncommon noise and disturbance always follows, to the terror of the whole house ”

“ This wilful piece of mortality will not allow the little aperture in which it rests to be walled up—it remains there—whitened and bleached by the weather, looking forth from those rayless sockets upon the scenes which, when living, they had once beheld. ”

“ The Countess occasionally accompanied visitors from the neighbouring Worsley Hall, and herself unlocked the door and revealed to her friends the grinning skull of Wardley Hall. The writer paid another visit to this quaint old Hall in October 1861, and again held the old skull in his hands. The bone of the lower jaw had become detached; but there is no sign of violence about the skull itself. If the tradition as to the violent death of its owner be correct, that result has been effected without any fracture of the bone. ”