Quest for the Hexham Heads

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Little or nothing was heard of the Wolf of Allendale until the 1972 case of The Hexham Heads. Two carved, stone heads thought to be of Celtic origin, were unearthed in the garden of a house only ten minutes walk away from the Allendale woods. The Hexham Heads seemed to be accompanied by a bestial presence which would cause alarm in the vicinity of whoever posessed the two stone heads. Witnesses described the creature as half man, half beast; the beast part said to be a wolf. Interest in the local legend of The Wolf of Allendale was rekindled by this event and the stone heads became associated with the possible re-appearance of the wolf. Returning from battles abroad after many years, John Lambton recognises his responsibility for unleashing the worm. He fights and kills it after receiving advice from a local witch. In the intervening years, the worm grows into a huge beast, terrorising Wearside and curling itself menacingly around a hill (Worm Hill in Fatfield or Penshaw Hill depending on the version).

It was an average day in an average house in an average town, and this all happened to an average family. In fact, they would be the first to say that there was nothing unusual about them or their lives. Up until the point they found the heads. This is very much a short-short history of the heads -delving into all the press reports alone would take weeks. Thankfully, some very passionate head aficionados have written extensively on the Hexham Heads, including the scientific investigations and controversies. Some of those who handled the heads claimed to have witnesses ghostly occurrences shortly after, and at least one person claimed to have seen a werewolf-like creature. Let me know what you think, and follow The Hawthorn Files on social media for more and keep up to date with all manner of strangeness.

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I have one more post to write on the Hexham Heads, the tale of my own pilgrimage to Hexham and the urban street where these objects were once found…. Sources: The story of the Hexham Heads has been recounted in most detail by Paul Screeton in his book Quest for the Hexham Heads (Fortean Words 2010) and in Don Robins’s 1988 book The secret language of stone; both books were consulted in the preparation of this post. Stuart Ferrol’s Fortean Times articles (294/295) were also helpful. The newsclipping was sourced from Screeton’s book, while the top picture of the Heads – and the hands holding the ‘fake’ heads – are available widely online. And this is where perhaps the strangest aspect of this whole story emerges – how is it possible that two specialists (geologists no less) were able to look at these objects and come to completely different conclusions about the materials they were made from? Remember, Anne Ross had got Professor Hodson at Southampton University to look at them and he concluded ‘both heads are made from the same material….a very coarse sandstone with rounded quartz grains’ and he suggested local sources for this. But a second analysis came up with a very different conclusion. Undertaken by Dr Douglas Robson of Newcastle University (his report is reproduced below, and published in Screeton’s book), it concluded ‘the material from which the heads have been formed is an artificial cement’ and ‘the material is unlike any natural sandstone’. The former and earlier analysis seems to have been based on microscope work and limited visual analysis, while the latter appears to have been based on the invasive removal of a sample for analysis.

Dr. Ross believed that the werewolf-like creature that they saw was possibly linked to the notorious Hexham Wolf of 1904 and may even be the exact same wolf! In 1956, in an ordinary house on a quiet street in Battersea, South London, the Hitchings Family were woken by banging and scratching noises, so loud that the neighbours came round to complain. Things developed from there as multiple witnesses saw flying objects, slippers inexplicably walking around by themselves, unexplained spontaneous fires, and heard disembodied voices. The family christened the poltergeist ‘Donald’ and it became big news – so big in fact that, at one point, it was even discussed by the Home Secretary in Parliament.I found a few facts about Hyde during a 2007 intemet trawl which suggested a career in engineering and a fascination for pseudoscience. After the name F W Hyde came the letters FSE, FEng and FRAS. Born on 10 September I 909, it seems he was a consultant in technology with special attention to space exploration and space medicine. He was also a consultant in parapsychology and operating a unit of interface between man and his environment, including mysticism and related practices… The diviner lived in Kilburn, North-West London, and one evening in early February 1978, Don drove to deliver the Heads.”

A man named Desmond Craigie reported that he was the creator of the heads, making them in 1956 for his daughter while he was living in the house later occupied by the Robson family, along with a third head which became damaged and had to be thrown away. Craigie, who worked for a company that dealt in concrete at the time he allegedly created the heads, made some replicas to demonstrate his claim; however, these replicas were not satisfactorily similar to the original heads. The original heads were analyzed by Professor Dearman of the University of Newcastle, who concluded that the items had been moulded artificially rather than carved. [1] [4] It caused a bit of a stir among people with a penchant for the bizarre and unexplained, with some self-styled yeti hunters camping out overnight by the lake to catch a glimpse of the strange beast.Whatever the case, it is still an interesting situation. It is still being looked into today by Paul Screeton, one of the first to investigate it during the 1970s.

The problem we have is that all these are eye-witness reports, and as such, we are unable to prove or disprove them categorically. While a hoax can never be ruled out, Durham Constabulary were certainly investigating the reports as a genuine concern for a time. Oswald of NorthumbriaHe kept the Heads for some analysis until early 1978 during which time his dog got excited and bit one of the Heads. Robins recounts various rather weak experiences he had that might have been connected to the female Head such as his car electrics dying. Once he thought this Head’s eyeballs were watching him. But he seems to have been unable to connect the objects with the poltergeist activity, and then he passed them onto the final character in the story, a ‘dowser’ called Frank Hyde. The elusive Hyde was delivered the Heads in February 1978 to do some ‘dowsing experiments’ with them – and they have never been seen since. One of the Hexham Heads looms over the cover of Robins’s book