A strip of tape is what keeps visitors off it now. In the Museo Provincial de Valladolid sits an unremarkable Spanish chair from the sixteenth century, the kind of object you would walk past without a second glance, except that for generations people crossed the room to avoid it.
They called it the Sillón del Diablo, the Devil's Chair. For a time it did not even sit like furniture: it hung in the sacristy of the university chapel, fastened to the wall with iron rings, mounted upside down and out of reach, as though the building itself were trying to keep it from being used. The precaution was not decorative. Local memory attached to that chair the deaths of two caretakers and a run of misfortune suffered by two students who had, depending on who told the story, dared to sit in it or simply crossed its path.
The legend did not stay safely in the past. Around the year 2000, the unsettling disappearance of a man named Laureano Candelario Huéscar became folded into the chair's mythology, a modern disappearance grafted onto a sixteenth-century curse, proof that a good story never really stops recruiting new victims.
Now a researcher has gone looking for what actually happened, as opposed to what people have agreed to believe. The philologist Francisco Javier Sánchez-Verdejo has led an investigation, reported by Mónica Arrizabalaga for ABC, that tracks the chair's history through testimonies and records rather than through the accumulated fear of everyone who ever refused to sit in it. The findings, as the research lays out, dismantle the deaths and disappearances that gave the chair its reputation, tracing how an ordinary piece of furniture acquired a body count it never earned.
What the investigation restores is not a chair. It is the far more interesting object underneath: the mechanism by which a university, a chapel, and a city spent four hundred years agreeing to be afraid of something made of wood. The iron rings were real. The height was real. The instinct to hang a chair upside down rather than simply move it to storage tells you that somebody, at some point, believed enough to act on it, and that belief, once bolted to a wall, outlives every fact sent to correct it.
The chair is still in Valladolid. The tape is still there. Nobody, it turns out, needed the devil's help to keep people standing.
