Hexham Heads

In 1971, brothers Colin and Leslie Robson unearthed two small, crudely carved stone heads in the garden of their Hexham home — roughly 6 centimetres high, one male-looking and one female-looking, with large staring eyes and rough, archaic features. Within days, both the Robson household and the neighbouring Dodd family began experiencing disturbing phenomena: objects moved, a boy's hair was pulled in the night, and Nelly Dodd, woken by a noise, saw a half-man, half-beast figure leaving her son's room before vanishing into the street. When the heads were passed to Dr. Anne Ross — a specialist in Celtic ritual objects at the University of Southampton — she woke in the night to find a tall, dark, wolf-like figure standing in her bedroom doorway. She followed it downstairs, where it disappeared. Her daughter Berenice, arriving home from school a few days later, encountered the same figure on the staircase and watched it vault the banisters before vanishing.

The heads passed through several owners and eventually went missing entirely, but the legend they generated became permanently entangled with Northumberland's older supernatural geography. Researchers pointed to the 1904 Hexham Wolf affair — documented sightings of a large wolf-like animal across the same area decades before — as evidence of a pre-existing local tradition into which the heads had tapped. The archaeological origin of the heads was never settled. Some experts considered them genuine pre-Roman Celtic cult objects, a type well-attested in northern England; others concluded they were modern pieces, possibly carved in the 1950s by a former resident. The question remains open, making the Hexham Heads unusual even within paranormal folklore: an object-legend in which the physical object is both the cause of the haunting and the one thing that has been completely lost.