The Goat Head of Strumpshaw

"Norwich Evening News," February 3, 1970, via Newspapers.com

If you’re at all familiar with my Twitter/X or Facebook feeds, you know that I periodically share old newspaper reports about the seemingly endless varieties of mayhem carried out by goats.  (Why do I do this?  It’s just how I roll, I guess.)  So, you can imagine how delighted I was to learn of the following story, which just may be the peak World of Goats tale ever.

For about two hundred years, a pub called The Goat Inn stood in the Norfolk, England, village of Strumpshaw.  (It is now known as “The Huntsman.”)  It was an ordinary little British pub until an unwise purchase gained the place a certain eternal fame among those of us who like our locally-brewed ale and cider with The Weird for a chaser.

One day in 1908, the wife of The Goat’s landlord, a Mrs. Newton, took a fancy to the large, handsome white goat belonging to a traveling peddler, and bought it for a half-crown.  She then showed her esteem for the animal by having it butchered.  The body was transformed into a supply of goat meat for the pub’s kitchen, while the head was taxidermied, after which it occupied pride of place behind the pub bar.  

I can’t say this is my idea of how to drum up clientele, but perhaps that’s just me.

For the next sixty years, the unfortunate goat--who was soon nicknamed “Old Capricorn”--gazed down at patrons while they sipped their drinks, and, possibly, silently wished that Strumpshaw had a better class of pubs.

Those six decades were not uneventful around the pub.  Regular patrons of The Goat, as well as its owners, began noticing that they had become a particularly unlucky lot.  They suffered strange illnesses, financial misfortunes, domestic troubles, and more.  Many attributed their miseries to the pub’s resident goat head.  Was “Old Capricorn,” justifiably irritated at being slaughtered and then used as pub bric-a-brac, getting his revenge?  Over the years, the head--now universally seen as a curse--was stolen from the pub, but it always seemed to find its way back.  Presumably the thieves learned that actually possessing the thing just increased their troubles.

In 1967, the pub was purchased by one Frank Walpole.  He soon realized that he bought more than he had bargained for.  An uncanny force seemed to haunt the place.  Mirrors mysteriously flew off walls, the pub’s piano would play by itself, water would unaccountably drip from the ceiling.  Walpole and his wife and daughter began seeing shadowy figures walking around at night.  The tragic climax came when a teenage boy, apparently wanting to defy the alleged “curse,” grabbed the goat’s head in a very disrespectful manner.

The next day, the youth was killed in a car accident.

That was enough for Frank Walpole.  Ignoring the protests of some of the pub regulars, he removed Old Capricorn from public view.  However, two years later, public sentiment persuaded him to reinstall the head behind the bar.  No sooner had he done so that his family pets--birds, monkeys, dogs--began dropping dead or running away.  This convinced Walpole that the goat must go…for good.  In February 1972, he weighed down the head and threw it in the River Yare.  He hoped this would “drown” the evil forces.

Unfortunately, in every good horror movie, the villain just plain refuses to die.  Less than a month later, one Alfred Stone found the head in a dyke five miles from where it had been submerged.  It was, Stone noted, “looking more malevolent than ever.”  For reasons best known to Stone, he fished out the head and presented it to a Mr. Loades.  Loades’ son Dennis wanted it to “start his own museum.”  Well, he started something, all right.  The dogs on the family farm began turning angry and violent.  Mr. Loades’ mother had to be hospitalized.  The family finally got the message and returned the head to The Goat.  “I was pleased to see it go,” Loades commented.  Several months later the head again vanished.  It was found in a shallow grave in Strumpshaw’s gravel pit, the eyes staring up in an evil glare, “as if it was alive.”

It will not surprise you to learn that all this ill-treatment made Old Capricorn crabbier than ever.  The digger used to dig out the head blew a tire in the effort.  The mechanic who came to replace the tire was mysteriously shot in the arm from someone--it was never learned who--wielding a pellet gun.  When a dog belonging to one of the pit workers was confronted with the head, he ran to a shed, cowering in terror.

After that final bit of supernatural mayhem, the trail of the cursed goat head went cold.  When Paul Cornwall bought The Goat in 1984, he expressed interest in finding the head and returning it to its old home.  He cheerfully called himself a “glutton for punishment.”  However, his efforts to track down Old Capricorn were unsuccessful.

My opinion?  If you should ever be in that part of England, and you happen to see in a deserted barn or a junk shop, a very old, bedraggled goat’s head with a sinister expression on its face, leave the damned thing for someone else.