The Hexham Heads

In 1971 two boys digging in the garden of their home in Hexham, Northumberland, turned up a pair of small stone heads, each roughly the size of a large fruit, carved into crude faces. One appeared masculine, with a jutting skull-like brow; the other, more rounded, was taken to be female. They were unremarkable objects to look at. What followed was not.

The family who owned the heads reported strange disturbances in the house, and a neighbour claimed that something entered her bedroom one night: a creature she described as half-man, half-sheep or wolf, which padded down the stairs on its way out. Once the heads left the street the manifestations were said to cease.

The heads passed through several hands, and here the account grows genuinely curious. A Celtic scholar, Anne Ross, who had written extensively on the ancient British cult of the severed head, borrowed them for study and later described a nocturnal encounter of her own in her Southampton home, a towering wolf-like figure that she and her daughter both claimed to have seen, and a house that felt afterwards to be under siege. She came to believe the heads were dangerous and eventually parted with them.

The rational counterweight arrived promptly. A local man, Desmond Craigie, came forward to say he had made the heads himself around 1956 as toys for his daughter, casting them from a mix of sand and cement in the same garden. Geological examination gave contradictory verdicts on their age. Whichever story one prefers, the objects themselves have since vanished from public record, their present whereabouts unknown.

Provenance: unearthed at Hexham, Northumberland, England, 1971; current location unknown.