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Hotel History - The Skull
 
 

No More Trouble From The Jinx Of Tobermory
  In 1952, a team of Royal Navy divers came to the Sound of Mull in a bid to find the wreck of the Florencia, the pay-ship of the Spanish Armada, which sank there in 1588, loaded with riches. They didn't find the galleon—but they did find a human skull. 

A senior diver brought it ashore and after many years it came into the possession of Richard Forrester, who then owned the Western Isles Hotel.  In 1969 he decided to mount the skull on the wall of the public bar.  As he drilled a hole in the skull to attach it to the wall, he broke a couple of pieces off.  He thought nothing of it. But soon after he began to suffer terrible migraine headaches which became so severe he was eventually forced to sell the hotel.  But before he sold up, something else happened. 

His wife took down the skull to dust it one day. She thought nothing of handling it.  But not long after, she was in a bad car accident. She was lucky to escape with a fractured skull.  Just bad luck or coincidence, you might suggest.  But the man who first brought this jinx ashore was 


The Archives

Hotel History
In Brief

"I know Where
I'm Going"

The "Terror
of Tobermory"

Commander Buster Crabbe, whose headless corpse was found in May 1956 after a secret mission to spy on a Russian ship berthed in Portsmouth Harbour. 

In the Western Isles Hotel, others began to wonder if the skull had some secret power, for staff who touched it had freak accidents. 

A maid had a window drop out of its frame on to her. A porter fractured his skull in a motorbike accident. 

Phil Bird bought the hotel in 1984, no one dared to touch it for fear of a freak injury befalling them.  But Phil wasn't concerned with bad luck. He simply thought that the sanctity of the human body deserved a better end.  He took the skull from the wall of the bar, carried it to the water's edge, and placed it back in the Sound, where he felt it belonged. 

At last, locals reckon, the jinx has been laid low.

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