Curse Of The Hexham Heads

It was in the back garden of a council house in Hexham, northern England, that two small boys found crudely carved heads, believed to carry an ancient curse. But were the heads genuine?

The discovery of two carved stone heads in a back garden of a house seemed unremarkable enough at first. But it was when the heads triggered the appearance of a wolf-man that the nightmare began.

One afternoon in February 1972, 11-year-old Colin Robson was weeding the garden of his family's council house in Rede Avenue, Hexham, a market town some 20 miles (32 kilometres) west along the Tyne valley from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, in northeast England. To his surprise, he suddenly uncovered what appeared to be a lump of stone about the size of a tennis ball, with a strange conical protrusion on one side. Clearing the earth from the object, he discovered that it was roughly carved with human features, and that the conical protrusion was actually meant to be a neck.

Excited by the find, he called to his younger brother Leslie, who was watching from an upstairs window. The boys continued to dig, and soon Leslie uncovered a second head.

The stones, which soon became known as the Hexham heads, appeared to be of two distinct types.

The first had a skull-like face, seemed to be masculine to everyone who saw it, and was dubbed the `boy'. It was of a greenish-grey colour, and glistened with crystals of quartz. It was very heavy - heavier than cement or concrete - with hair that appeared to be in stripes running from the front to the back of the head. The other head - the `girl' - resembled a witch, with wildly bulging eyes and hair that was combed off the forehead in what was almost a bun. There were also traces of a yellow or red pigment in her hair.

After the heads had been unearthed, the boys took them inside the house. It was then that the strange happenings began. The heads would turn round spontaneously, and objects were broken for no apparent reason. And when the mattress on the bed of one of the Robson daughters was showered with glass, both girls moved out of their room. Meanwhile, at the spot at which the heads had been found, a strange flower bloomed at Christmas.

It could be argued that the events in the Robson household had nothing to do with the appearance of the heads - that they were, instead, poltergeist phenomena triggered by the adolescent children of the Robson family. But the Robsons' next door neighbour, Mrs Ellen Dodd, underwent a truly unnerving experience that could clearly not be explained away so easily. As she recounted:

'I had gone into the children's bedroom to sleep with one of them, who was ill. My ten-year-old son, Brian, kept telling me he felt something touching him. I told him not to be so silly. Then I saw this shape. It came towards me and I definitely felt it touch me on the legs. Then, on all fours, it moved out of the room.'

Ellen Dodd later described the creature that had touched her as 'half human, half sheep-like'. Mrs Robson also recalled that she had heard a sound like a crash as well as screams from next-door on the night in question. Her neighbour told her that the creature that made them was like a werewolf. And when Mrs Dodd went downstairs, she found that her front door was open. Whatever caused the phenomenon, Ellen Dodd was terrified, and as a result was rehoused by the local council. Eventually, the heads were removed from the Robsons' house, the abode itself was exorcised, and all became quiet in Rede Avenue.

Celtic rituals

Meanwhile, however, a distinguished Celtic scholar, Dr Anne. Ross, had become interested in the stones. In an article for Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain, Dr Ross had claimed that the heads were around 1,800 years old and had been designed to play a part in Celtic head rituals. When the heads were banished from the Robsons' house, Dr Ross took charge of them. She recalls what happened next:

'I didn't connect it with the heads then. We always keep the hall light on and the doors kept open because our small son is a bit frightened of the dark, so there's always a certain amount of light coming into our room, and I woke up and felt extremely frightened. In fact, panic-stricken and terribly, terribly cold. There was a sort of dreadful atmosphere of icy coldness all around me. Something made me look towards the door, and as I looked, I saw this thing going out of it.

'It was about six feet [2 metres] high, slightly stooping, and it was black against the white door. It was half-animal and half-man. The upper part, I would have said, was wolf and the lower part was human. 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 toward the back of the house. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I was terrified.'

That, however, was not the end of the story. A few days later, Dr Ross and her husband arrived home from London one evening to find their teenage daughter in a state of shock. Dr Ross described her daughter's experience as follows:

'She had opened the front door and a black thing, which she described as near a werewolf as anything, jumped over the bannister and landed with a kind of plop. It padded with heavy animal feet, and it rushed toward the back of the house and she felt compelled to follow it. It disappeared in the music room, right at the end of the corridor; and when she got there, it had gone. Suddenly, she was terrified. The day the heads were removed from the house everybody, including my husband, said it was as if a cloud had lifted; and since then there hasn't been, really, a trace of it [the paranormal activity].'

Unwelcome guest

Before the heads were removed, however, there were a number of other manifestations of the unwelcome 'lodger'. During those frightening months, Dr Ross insisted, the creature appeared to be very real. It was not something shadowy, or only glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. It was noisy, and everyone who came to the house commented on a definite presence of evil. While he never observed it directly, Dr Ross' archaeologist husband was fully aware of his unwelcome guest's presence, although he is not usually sensitive to psychic phenomena. The phenomena ceased after the heads had been removed and the house was exorcised - but not before Dr Ross had disposed of her entire collection of Celtic heads.

The story took on a new twist in 1972 when Desmond Craigie - then a truck driver - announced that the Celtic heads were actually a mere 16 years old. They had not been fashioned as votive offerings by a head-hunting Celt - for, Craigie claimed, he himself had made them as toys for his daughter, Nancy. He explained that he had lived in the house in Rede Avenue that was now the Robsons' home for around 30 years; indeed, his father had remained a tenant there until the previous year. One day, his daughter had asked him what he did for a living. At that time, Craigie worked with artificial cast stone, making objects such as concrete pillars. In order to explain to his daughter what he did during the course of his working day, he made three heads especially for her in his lunch break, and took them home for her to play with.

'Nancy played with them as dolls,' he said. 'She would use the silver paper from chocolate biscuits as eyes. One got broken and I threw it in the bin. The others just got kicked around and must have landed up where the lads found them.'

Embarrassed by the publicity that his own handiwork had attracted, Desmond Craigie said he was concerned merely to set the record straight. Speaking of the heads, he said: 'To say that they were old would be conning people.' But Dr Ross was not entirely convinced. 'Mr Craigie's claim is an interesting story... Unless Mr Craigie was familiar with genuine Celtic stone heads, it would be extraordinary for him to make them like this. They are not crude by any means.' Scientific analysis has, surprisingly, been unable to determine the precise age of the heads.

If the heads are indeed Celtic, it is easy to imagine that they may be the carriers of some ancient curse. But if they are not, why is it that they appear to provoke paranormal phenomena? The evidence that they do so is strengthened by the testimony of inorganic chemist Don Robins, who has explored the idea that mineral artifacts can actually store visual images of the people who made them. He also suggested that places and objects can store information that causes specific phenomena to occur - an idea similar to Tom Lethbridge's notion that events can be 'tape-recorded' into the surrounding in which they take place. He has stated, too, that certain minerals have a natural capacity to store information in the form of electrical energy in their crystals.

Summing up this theory, Dr Robins stated: 'The structure of a mineral can be seen as a fluctuating energy network with infinite possibilities of storage and transformation of electronic information. These new dimensions in physical structure may well point the way, eventually, to an understanding of kinetic imagery encoded in stone.'

Robins was interested, too, in reports of sounds that had allegedly been induced by the presence of the heads, and drew a tentative parallel with a creature from Norse mythology, called the wulver, powerful and dangerous, but well-disposed towards mankind unless provoked. There are several reports of sightings of this creature in the Shetlands this century.

Dr Robins' interest in the heads prompted him to agree to take charge of them. As he put them in his car in order to take them home, however, and turned on the ignition, all the dashboard electrics suddenly went dead. He turned to look at the heads, telling them firmly to `Stop it!' - and the car started! No one could have been more surprised than he was.

Now Dr Robins, in his turn, began to find the presence of the heads disquieting. Perhaps disappointingly, however, Dr Robins did not witness any paranormal events that might have been caused by the heads. There were, however, some perturbing moments. One day, leaving the house, he muttered to the heads: `Let's see something when I get back!' Moments later, he re-entered the house to collect a book he had forgotten. Outside, it was fresh and blustery - but in his study the atmosphere seemed `almost electric with a stifling, breathless quality.' Attributing the effect to the `girl' head, he left hurriedly. But he found absolutely nothing amiss on his return home.

The present whereabouts of the Hexham heads is unfortunately not known. Consequently, there remains a three-fold mystery; their whereabouts, their age and why they should have produced such startling phenomena.