The Hexham Heads
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I’m going to give you the moral of the story up front for this one: be careful what you dig up in your garden; you may unleash werewolves. I’ll also give you its secondary moral: be careful what you stake your academic reputation on; a construction worker may fool you.
In 1971, two young brothers, Colin and Leslie Robson, were digging in their garden at 3 Rede Avenue in the town of Hexham, England. The boys unearthed two small stone heads — rough, skull-like, and each about two and a half inches tall. The features of the two heads were different, but both seemed primitive, maybe a little creepy, and certainly strange. The heads had short stems on them, as if they’d been broken off at the neck from larger artifacts.
However, digging up tiny stone heads is not that uncommon in the United Kingdom. They’re called Celtic heads and are generally thought to be ornaments that have broken off from other objects and buildings. They can be thousands of years old or much more modern. Had the two heads that the Robson boys unearthed been mere Celtic heads, nothing much would have happened. Maybe they would have been taken to an expert to get validated. They might have ended up in a drawer in a museum somewhere, added to the tally of small stone craniums that the island is seeded with. It’s what happened after the heads were dug up that made them infamous, transcending their status as mere possible Celtic heads to named and known cursed objects.
According to various newspaper accounts, the boys took the heads inside their house, and weird stuff started to happen immediately. Items flew across rooms of their own accord. The heads seemed to swivel on their neck stumps, their rough-cut eyes following the Robsons across the room. Poltergeist stuff, really. But the Robsons’ neighbors, Nelly Dodd and her son Brian, got it far worse. They and the Robsons lived in semidetached housing, meaning they each lived in half of the same residential building and shared a wall. Over on the Dodd side, invisible entities pulled Brian’s hair at night and, in what would become a defining part of the curse of the Hexham Heads, Nelly spotted a were-creature — in this case, a weresheep (part man, part sheep). It ran through the house on two legs and out the door and disappeared bleating into the night. That might sound silly now, but in the middle of the night it could be as terrifying as any classic movie monster.
This was quite the escalation for a couple of stone lumps tilled from the soil of a backyard. And word got out. The media picked up the story and circulated it far beyond the reach of local gossips, far enough even that things got academic — but in a weird way.
Dr. Anne Ross was a University of Edinburgh–educated scholar and archeologist focusing on Celtic traditions and artifacts. In addition to her academic work, she also had some less-than-academically-respectable fringe interests around paranormal phenomenon. So she was both the perfect person to investigate the stones and the worst person to investigate them. When she got her hands on the Hexham Heads, she estimated them to be Iron Age artifacts, some two millennia old.
She was so enamored with them that she ended up taking the heads to her house. Soon enough, she began detecting cold spots in her residence, a shadow presence, and doors opening and closing by themselves. Then it happened again. She was visited by a were-creature, this time a more respectable werewolf, which acted just like the weresheep — running through her house until it vanished outside and into the night. She and her family eventually witnessed the creature multiple times in the house.
The testimony of an academic was the validation the Hexham Heads needed to really get their story to spread. And it was a unique situation: an academic who fanned flames around the incredible instead of wet-blanketing them. The wet blanket would eventually come, but from the testimony of a construction worker.
Desmond Craigie lived at 3 Rede Avenue before the Robsons. Once the infamy of the Hexham Heads reached him, he stepped forward and admitted to making the rough spheres in 1956. They were for his daughter, and he carved them during his lunch break at the concrete company he worked for. In fact, he made three. A chemical analysis was conducted with material removed from the heads, and it indicated that Craigie was telling the truth, even if he couldn’t quite replicate the heads when he tried to do so to prove his point. It had been almost twenty years, after all — he hadn’t honed his spooky head-carving craft.
Still, for many, the story ended there. The Hexham Heads had a mundane beginning in a residential garden, were completely misinterpreted by some superstitious Hexhamites and an overeager academic with a propensity for the nonscientific, and had their story spread around the country and world by gleeful media.
But plenty of cursed objects have mundane beginnings. There are two different cursed chairs in this book, for goodness’ sake. But to think that a couple of stones with faces probably made as a lark somehow prompted a small invasion of were-creatures, or at least the perception of a small invasion of were-creatures? Sometimes we should just be thankful for the story.
To make matters even more interesting, the Hexham Heads eventually disappeared. The chain of provenance, along with Dr. Ross, included the University of Southampton, the Museum of Antiquities in Newcastle upon Tyne, and a few other researchers and paranormalists, but eventually the trail goes cold. All that remains are photographs and drawings of the two artifacts.
But we do know that whoever has them must have a high tolerance for were-creatures. And then there’s the potential third Hexham Head that was never found. Maybe it’s still in the dirt of 3 Rede Avenue, waiting to be reunited with the other two. And who knows what will happen then.
