Hexham Heads

Did You Know?

• In October 2024 BBC Archives announced it had restored an interview with Anne Ross on the Hexham Heads broadcast on Nationwide in 1976.
• The restored interview incorporated a clip of Oliver Reed from the Hammer film The Curse of the Werewolf.
• The BBC stated that the clip 'seared the report in the memories of many of those watching'.

History

In 1971, two boys named Colin and Leslie Robson uncovered the objects while digging in a garden, though some accounts mistakenly date this to 1972. After the discovery, the Robson household began reporting odd events: the heads would supposedly shift positions when nobody was in the room, and bottles were said to fly across rooms without explanation. Their neighbors, the Dodd family, also experienced strange occurrences. One of the Dodd children had his hair pulled during the night, and his mother, Nelly, claimed to have seen a half-man, half-goat creature leaving the house soon after.

The heads were later passed to Anne Ross, a scholar of Celtic artifacts. Ross noted that in ancient Celtic religion, the human head was considered a symbol of divinity and the seat of the soul, and similar Celtic head figurines have been discovered, often near water, which held spiritual importance in Celtic animism. While Ross kept the heads in her home, she reported waking one morning to see a figure that was part wolf and part man walking out of her room. She followed it downstairs and saw it heading toward the kitchen before it disappeared. A few days later, her daughter Berenice said that after returning from school, she saw a large, dark, werewolf-like shape on the stairs that leaped over the banisters into a corridor and vanished. This wolf-like entity was thought to be connected to the Hexham wolf, which had killed livestock in the winter of 1904. Ross also described feeling a cold presence, her study door bursting open for no reason, and another sighting of a dark figure. Aware of Nelly Dodd’s experience, Ross linked all these events to the Hexham Heads, and the phenomena reportedly ceased when she moved the two Celtic heads out of her house.