The Hairy Hands haunt a stretch of the B3212 road across Dartmoor, between Postbridge and Two Bridges, where a run of crashes in the early twentieth century gave rise to one of the moor's most unsettling legends. Motorists and motorcyclists told of a disembodied pair of large, muscular, hairy hands that would suddenly appear and grip the steering wheel or handlebars, forcing the vehicle off the road; a noted case in 1921 involved an army medical officer thrown from his motorcycle after, he said, a force wrenched the controls from his grasp.
The story
Reports multiplied through the 1920s — a caravan was said to be visited at night by the hands pressing against the window — and the local belief grew that some malevolent presence on that bleak crossing of the moor reached out for the unwary. The road was eventually re-cambered, and the crashes were doubtless owed to a genuinely dangerous bend, but the Hairy Hands have kept their grip on Dartmoor's imagination as a peculiarly modern haunting, a ghost of the motor age clinging to one of the loneliest roads in England.