It was February of 1972, and at the Robson family home in Hexham an eleven-year-old boy and his younger brother were digging up weeds in their parents’ back garden when they unearthed two carved, stone heads, slightly smaller than a tennis ball and very heavy in weight.
Crudely fashioned and weathered-looking, one resembled a skull-like masculine head crowned by a Celtic hairstyle; while the other was a slightly smaller female head that possessed what were said to be witch-like qualities, including the classic beaked nose.
Shortly after the boys had taken the heads into their house, a number of strange incidents happened in the family home. The heads would move seemingly by themselves and household objects were found inexplicably broken.
Several nights after the discovery of the stone heads, neighbour Ellen Dodd and her daughter were sitting up late one evening when both of them witnessed a “half-man, half beast” entering the bedroom. The pair screamed in terror but the creature seemed indifferent to them and simply left the room, heard to be “padding down the stairs as if on its hind legs”. Later on, the front door was found open. It has been thought that the creature had been in search of something, and had left the house to continue searching elsewhere.
The two stone heads were thought to be Celtic in origin and collector Dr Anne Ross took possession of the heads as she had several other stone heads in her collection and wished to compare them to the Hexham pair. A few nights after taking possession of the heads, Dr Ross awoke at 2am one morning, feeling cold and frightened. Looking up, she saw a strange creature standing in her bedroom doorway:
“It was about six feet high, slightly stooping, and it was black, against the white door, and it was half animal and half man. The upper part, I would have said, was a wolf, and the lower part was human and, I would have again said, that it was covered with a kind of black, very dark fur. It went out and I just saw it clearly, and then it disappeared, and something made me run after it, a thing I wouldn’t normally have done, but I felt compelled to run after it. I got out of bed and I ran, and I could hear it going down the stairs, then it disappeared towards the back of the house.”
Dr Ross attributed the experience to a nightmare. She came home with her archaeologist husband one day, only to find their teenage daughter Berenice in a distressed state. Berenice explained that she had used her key to unlock the front door and entered the house that afternoon to witness a large, black shape rushing down the stairs; halfway downstairs the creature vaulted the bannister, landing with a soft, heavy thud like a large animal with padded feet.
Believing the presence of the stone heads to be responsible for these events, Dr Ross passed on her whole collection of stone heads, along with the Hexham pair to other collectors. The Hexham Heads found their way to the British Museum for public display, though were soon removed from display and mothballed, amid reports of unsettling events associated with the heads.
For now, the current whereabouts of The Hexham Heads remains unknown. Despite this, the legend of The Hexham Heads has become a cornerstone of the local folklore of the area.
Sources:
Nationwide TV programme, 1976
Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland – Graham J. McEwan, 1986