but near
the village of Alton, in the
county of Staffordshire, in central UK,
chains are used to keep things up, photograph Gary
Rogers/Geograph.org.uk (CC BY-SA 2.0), the
story of the Chained Oak goes like this, it is said that one day during the
1830’s, as the Earl of Shrewsbury was returning home to his home at Alton
Towers estate, a beggar woman stopped his carriage in the middle of the road and
asked him if he could spare a coin or two. The earl cruelly dismissed her and
urged the driver to move on, at which point the woman allegedly cursed him to
lose a member of his family whenever a branch fell off a magnificent oak on the
side of the road, well you know what is going to happen next! that same night,
a storm brewed up and one of the branches of the oak fell to the ground. As the
woman had promised, a member of the Earl’s family died in mysterious
conditions, which understandably scared the noble out of his wits. To prevent
other tragedies, the next morning, he ordered his servants to wrap metal chains
around the branches to stop any more from falling off,
“I believe that it is all true, because when I
visited it this year, you could tell just by looking at the chains that they
are nearly two hundred years old,” one person commented on a BBC article about
the oak. “Also, when you ride Hex, you may notice in the queue line inside,
they reveal a 40 second video clip which was taken back in the early 19th
century, to prove the earl really did chain it up.”
“After reading the latest comments about the
chained oak, I think the curse is still intact. When I went to see the tree
last time, I still felt this strange, dark, unfriendly presence surrounding the
tree like there is someone or something there watching in anger, something that
doesn’t want anyone visiting the tree,” someone else wrote, in fact, most of
the comments on this BBC article suggest
that the legend of the Alton Old Oak holds some truth to it,
according to the Stoke Sentinel, the large chains were forged in the early
1800’s, around the same time that the tree’s legend is based. Then there are
the stone steps leading up to the tree, and the clearing around it, which
someone spent a great deal of time and effort creating. It’s such details that
have some people believing that there is something of about the chained oak, the eerie story of the Alton Old Oak served as the
inspiration for the HEX ride at the nearby Alton Towers amusement park, which
only attracted more attention to the mysterious tree, no one knows if the
legend really is true, but a lot of people seem to think there is something
creepy about it.
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