The Hexham Heads were then investigated by a chemist, who discovered that they had a high level of quartz. Ever since their uncovering in 1971, the Hexham Heads have been points of curiosity — not only for the haunting anecdotes that float around it but also for the questions regarding their real origins.

Dragon stories are a common feature of Germanic folklore and our region's version, where the dragon is usually replaced by a worm, are common. The story was covered in several newspapers - including The Journal - but the current whereabouts of the heads is unknown. The objects made the papers as it was thought they could be a significant prehistoric find - but it's the paranormal stories which surrounded the objects which have lasted longest in people's memories.

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the first was that they had once been set up in a Celtic shrine, placed in a niche to guard the temple; The third of those stones were lost, while the two remained. He said he used local water, sand and stone to craft the faces. After becoming quite the local curiosities, the heads were passed on to expert in Celtic artefacts, Dr. Anne Ross. 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. It held out a contract of some kind, and accompanying it was a disembodied choir. Their voices echoed through the room with a description of this vile creature, as if to imprint it’s terrible visage onto my subconscious forevermore.

Unfortunately for them, it soon became objects of newfound fear when instances in their home began to turn increasingly eerie. It is difficult to see how two analyses of the same objects could lead to two such divergent identifications of the material involved, and it is a pity the sample fragments no longer appear to exist, as these could now be tested much more definitively (and without doing further damage to the materials). He 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 bookIn 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 am inclined to agree with the Newcastle analysis of the stones, which I believe, was based on an invasive sample, rather than the surface visual, as was the case in Southampton. This along with Craigie’s claims, do suggest that the heads are likely of modern origin. The Urban Pre-Historian, writing about Paul Screeton’s 2010 book ‘Quest for the Hexham Heads’ explained that, Believing the presence of the stone heads to be responsible for these events, Dr Ross passed on her whole collection of stone heads, along with the Hexham pair to other collectors. The Hexham Heads found their way to the British Museum for public display, though were soon removed from display and mothballed, amid reports of unsettling events associated with the heads. The problem we have is that all these are eye-witness reports, and as such, we are unable to prove or disprove them categorically.

However, nobody could have foreseen what happened next. A man named Desmond Craige came forward who claimed that he had made the stones. He said that in 1956, while he was living in the house that the Robson family occupied later, he made three of these stones for her daughter to play with. It may be simple enough to write this encounter off as a case of hypnogogic illusion. We must also take into account rumours of a “prank” involving a man wandering Rede Avenue with a sheep carcass, stolen from a near by abattoir. I can only assume that was a drunken case of “it seemed like a good idea at the time”. Around that same year, Sunday People published an article about the Hexham Heads, along with a few pictures — titled, “ Myth of the ‘Evil’ Heads”. 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. 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.The heads were no masterpieces, being basic humanoid approximations of a face with little pointy noses. However, despite this simplicity, many people interpreted the barely expressive heads in curious gender-centric ways. Language used around the female head is particularly unpleasant, especially when contrasted with the other, ‘male’ head (although how one can attribute a gender to two small stone balls is another mystery.) And as it happened, Craigie’s daughter had left the Heads buried in the garden for the years leading up to 1971. 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….