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The Hexham Heads and the Creature on the Stairs · Midnight Signals: History, Folklore and Unexplained Mysteries

• 0:00
  [gentle music] Anne Ross followed the thing down her stairs. In the account she later gave, she had woken around 2:00 in the morning, frightened and intensely cold, and looked toward the bedroom door.
• 0:13
  The hall light was on because her young son disliked the dark. Against the pale doorway stood a tall, stooping figure, black and covered in what looked like fur. Its upper part reminded her of a wolf.
• 0:26
  Below that, it had the shape of a man. As it moved away, she got out of bed and went after it. She could hear it descending, then she saw it again, farther along the passage leading toward the kitchen.
• 0:39
  Only when she reached the bottom of the stairs did the impulse to follow give way to fear. She ran back to her husband. Elsewhere in the house, two small heads sat in a box, recently arrived for examination.
• 0:52
  Anne had spent years studying objects like them. She had agreed to help find out what they were and had brought them into the home she shared with her children.
• 1:01
  The heads had come from a garden on Reed Avenue in Hexham, a Northumberland market town near Hadrian's Wall. In 1971, 11-year-old Colin Robson was clearing weeds beside a hedge when he found a small object with a face.
• 1:15
  His younger brother, Leslie, was watching from an upstairs window. When he came down to join the search, he found another. Each object could fit into the palm of a hand.
• 1:25
  Beneath each face was a short projection, like the stump of a neck, with nothing attached to it. The faces were different enough to acquire separate identities.
• 1:35
  One became known as The Boy, with a narrow, almost skeletal face and lines running backward over the crown to represent hair. The other had prominent eyes and a hooked nose, with the hair drawn back from the forehead.
• 1:48
  People called it The Girl, The Old Woman, or The Hag. The names suggested characters, although nobody could identify either face.
• 1:57
  Before long, people would be examining every feature, trying to understand what the boys had taken out of the ground. The Robsons showed their discovery to neighbors and took the heads indoors.
• 2:08
  According to the family, a head would be facing a different direction from the one in which it had been left. The movement itself went unseen.
• 2:16
  Someone would come back and find a face turned away or looking out at the room from a new angle. It was the sort of change that required a person to remember exactly how an object had been standing.
• 2:28
  Other disturbances soon left things that could be picked up from the floor. The family described bottles being thrown and household objects breaking.
• 2:36
  In recollections later gathered by journalist Paul Screaton, there was a sharp noise behind the television, like the crack of a whip. Broken material from around a mirror was found in a frying pan.
• 2:48
  One of the daughter's mattresses was scattered with glass. The trouble reached into places where people sat together in the evening and where they expected to sleep.
• 2:57
  Among the accounts of smashed objects were those quieter discoveries of the little faces having turned again.
• 3:03
  Next door, Ellen Dodd, usually called Nellie, was spending the night in her children's bedroom because her daughter was unwell. Her son, Brian, would remember that night into adulthood.
• 3:14
  In his later account, he went downstairs because the family dog was howling and noticed that the front door stood open. He returned to the bedroom and got beneath the covers.
• 3:23
  Something pulled his hair hard enough to lift his head from the pillow. He never saw what had hold of him. His mother began to scream. Nellie described a shape in the room that seemed partly human and partly sheep.
• 3:36
  In an early account, she said it came toward her and touched her legs before moving out on all fours. Later family recollections described a claw-like hand reaching toward her as the figure stumbled on its way out.
• 3:48
  It had been close enough for her to feel it against her body. Brian was in the same room, feeling something pull at him, while his mother watched the thing making its way toward the door.
• 3:59
  Jenny Robson recalled hearing a crash and screams from next door. The following morning, Nellie told her about the visitor and the sound of it going downstairs.
• 4:08
  Brian remembered the front door already standing open when he went to check on the dog. His father had hurried toward the bedroom when Nellie screamed.
• 4:16
  He saw nothing, although her description of the creature's departure would have brought it past him. Nellie was the one who saw it.
• 4:23
  According to her children, she never withdrew her account, even after decades had passed and the heads had become famous.
• 4:30
  The objects were taken to Hexham Abbey and eventually reached the Museum of Antiquities in Newcastle. A clergyman was also brought to the Robsons' home.
• 4:39
  By the autumn of 1971, museum staff were corresponding with Anne Ross about the find.
• 4:46
  Her work concerned the religion and imagery of the ancient Celtic world, and the human head occupied an important place in the traditions she studied.
• 4:54
  The small faces from the Robsons' garden seemed to belong within a much larger subject, one she had spent years trying to understand. Ross studied beliefs in which the head could retain a person's power beyond death.
• 5:07
  Ancient accounts of taking heads in battle, surviving carvings, and later traditions about protective heads all contributed to that picture.
• 5:16
  In her interpretation, a carved face could guard a boundary between a household and whatever threatened it. Heads were associated with springs and wells, with protection and the presence of the divine.
• 5:28
  A face carved in stone might have been left at a particular place because people believed it could watch over what happened there. She wondered whether the Hexham pair belonged to that tradition.
• 5:38
  Their short necks might once have fitted into sockets, holding them upright. Perhaps the garden covered an earlier shrine.
• 5:46
  Ross was considering objects that might have served a purpose long before the house had been built above them. Through that interpretation, the boys' discovery took on a different character.
• 5:56
  Something placed beneath the ground for a reason could have been carried indoors by people who had no way of knowing why it had been left there.
• 6:04
  When the heads reached her Hampshire home, Ross left them in their box in her study.
• 6:08
  She later said she had taken an immediate dislike to them, although she could point to nothing particularly unpleasant about their appearance. Her intention was to have the material examined and return them north.
• 6:20
  The figure appeared within a few nights of their arrival. At the time, she did not connect what she had seen on the stairs with the objects waiting in the study.
• 6:29
  Her husband, the archeologist Richard Feacham, searched the house after she woke him. He found no intruder and nothing that accounted for her alarm.
• 6:38
  They considered a nightmare, though Anne struggled to reconcile that with leaving her bed and following something downstairs. They decided to say nothing about it, and their children were not told.
• 6:49
  A few days later, Anne and her husband went to London. Their teenage daughter, Berenice, came home from school while they were still away and let herself into the house with her key. It was about 4:00 in the afternoon.
• 7:01
  In the account Anne later gave, Berenice immediately saw something large and dark on the stairs. It rushed downward, then vaulted over the banisters. The landing made a soft, heavy sound as though its feet were padded.
• 7:15
  It ran toward the back of the house. Berenice felt compelled to follow it just as her mother had and went after it along the corridor. By the time she reached the room at the end, it was gone.
• 7:28
  Her parents returned roughly two hours later and found her pale and badly shaken. At first, she would only say that something horrible had happened.
• 7:37
  Eventually, she described the dark figure and its passage through the house. They searched again and found no one. Anne had kept her own encounter from the children, hoping it had been a nightmare.
• 7:48
  Now her daughter was describing the same staircase and the same movement toward the back rooms. She had also gone after it, continuing along the route it had taken until there was nothing left to follow.
• 8:00
  Anne described further incidents in which the presence could be heard without being clearly seen. There were soft impacts near the staircase, like an animal's paws.
• 8:10
  Her study door burst open when nobody was there to open it. On one occasion, she and Berenice were coming downstairs together when they thought they saw a dark figure ahead of them.
• 8:20
  They heard it in the passage after it had left their view. At other times, Anne felt a cold presence in the house even when there was no movement to follow. Her husband never saw the figure.
• 8:31
  He could search the same rooms and find them empty while Anne and Berenice remembered something moving through them. The urge to follow remained one of the strangest parts of their accounts.
• 8:41
  Anne had been frightened when she woke, yet she had left the bedroom and gone downstairs after the shape. Berenice had pursued it after watching it vault over the banisters.
• 8:52
  Each recalled being drawn farther into the house in its wake, continuing after it had passed from view.
• 8:59
  Ross said she learned about the earlier disturbance near the heads discovery only after her own experiences had begun. When she heard about Nelly Dodds' visitor, the two households became connected in her mind.
• 9:11
  The creatures were described differently, but both accounts involved a human and animal form inside a home, followed by its departure down the stairs. The heads had traveled from one place to the other.
• 9:22
  Anne began to suspect that whatever her family had encountered was connected with the two faces in her study. Sending the pair away did not immediately settle matters.
• 9:32
  In her early account, Ross said the heads had gone back to the museum while the presence remained. She later described relief after removing her wider collection of carved heads.
• 9:42
  In her understanding, the disturbance could continue around other examples after the original pair had left. Eventually, she said, the oppressive atmosphere lifted and the disturbances came to an end.
• 9:55
  Even her husband, who had never seen the figure, noticed the change in the house. By then, the story was being carried far beyond Hexham.
• 10:04
  Newspapers connected the faces with ancient worship, and Ross spoke publicly about the figure in her home. In February 1976, she described it on the television program Nationwide.
• 10:16
  Viewers heard a Celtic scholar explain how frightened she had been while following something toward her kitchen. The program showed stone heads and considered whether experiences could somehow be retained within them.
• 10:27
  The original Hexham pair were already unavailable to the crew. Other carvings appeared on screen in their place. A former resident of the Robson's house had meanwhile supplied a different account of their beginnings.
• 10:40
  Desmond Craigie said he had made the heads around 1956 for his daughter, Nancy. He worked with artificial stone and had fashioned three little faces to show her the sort of material he handled. She used them as dolls.
• 10:53
  One broke and was thrown away. The others were eventually left about the garden. Craigie recognized the objects when they attracted publicity and insisted they were his own work.
• 11:03
  He made further examples to demonstrate the process. Tests also challenged the early identification of natural sandstone.
• 11:11
  An examination of a sample found artificial cement containing quartz grains, and museum staff came to regard the heads as modern.
• 11:19
  Ross eventually accepted their modern manufacture while continuing to stand by her experience. The ancient shrine could no longer account for their arrival in the garden in the way she had first imagined.
• 11:30
  She still maintained that something had appeared in her house after the heads came into it. Colin had made a head too.
• 11:37
  According to the recollection he gave Screeton, he had produced a clay face for a school art project before the discovery beneath the hedge. His mother was struck by the resemblance.
• 11:46
  Colin later gave his school piece to Screeton, who kept it among the objects associated with the case. It would appear in photographs beside one of Craigie's demonstration heads.
• 11:57
  Those faces were sometimes mistaken for the original pair, making the heads harder to follow even in pictures. Don Robins approached the affair through his interest in the properties of stone.
• 12:08
  A chemist, he wondered whether an object could retain something of an experience and release it again under certain conditions. A haunting, in that interpretation, might be a kind of replay.
• 12:19
  The idea gave him a reason to examine the heads even if they were modern. In nineteen seventy-seven, he visited Southampton to study them and speak to Ross.
• 12:29
  He left with the pair in a cardboard box, taking them to another home. Robbins kept them there for months, often in a garden shed. He never saw the creature he hoped to investigate.
• 12:40
  What he described instead was a growing discomfort around the head known as the Hag. During a photographic session, he and his colleagues tried different methods of recording the objects.
• 12:49
  He reported blurred or overexposed results despite their preparations. He could handle the heads and arrange for them to be photographed, but he had no way of calling up the presence Anne had described.
• 13:01
  He eventually agreed to let another interested researcher take them. Frank Hyde had experience with dowsing and wanted to conduct experiments of his own.
• 13:10
  Robbins described taking the box to Hyde in London in February nineteen seventy-eight. During the visit, Hyde worked with rods and a pendulum, then enclosed the heads in copper wire.
• 13:21
  He believed the wire reduced the response he was detecting. Robbins left the objects with him, expecting to be able to get them back. Other people were waiting for a chance to examine them.
• 13:32
  When Robbins tried to make contact again, he received no answer to his letters or telephone calls. An acquaintance told him Hyde had been injured in a car accident.
• 13:42
  As time passed, Robbins lost track of both the man and the heads. Years later, Screaton reported tracing Hyde's subsequent history and making contact with his family.
• 13:53
  Hyde had died by then, and his daughter was able to help with the research. The search had reached the last custodian's family, but the heads remained unaccounted for.
• 14:03
  By this stage, even some of the earlier handovers were uncertain. Museum correspondents placed the heads back in Hexham, waiting for the Robsons to collect them before Robbins described receiving them in Southampton.
• 14:16
  Their journey between those points was unclear. The faces had passed among people hoping to identify them, test them, or experience something in their presence.
• 14:25
  Roger Miket, who handled them at the museum, remembered nothing malevolent. There were stretches when they seemed to be ordinary objects waiting for someone else to take an interest.
• 14:36
  Jenny Robson had wanted a simpler end to their travels. In nineteen seventy-five, when their return was being discussed, she said she intended to bury them again in the garden.
• 14:46
  Her sons had found them there, and she wanted them put back. By then, the family had already lived with the reports of movement and breakage and heard what Nellie said had entered the house next door.
• 14:58
  While other people wanted to carry on examining the faces, Jenny was prepared to cover them with earth. Their present location remains unknown.
• 15:07
  The original faces survive in drawings and photographs, but the heads themselves are small enough to sit unnoticed among ornaments or stones. Someone could have them without recognizing what they are.
• 15:19
  Jenny's wish to put them back belongs to the people who knew their history. Whoever next picks them up may know none of it.
• 15:25
  They may see only what the boys first saw beneath the hedge: two little faces, small enough to carry in one hand and take them home. This has been a broadcast by Midnight Signals.
• 15:38
  I'm Russ Chamberlain, guiding you through the shadows where history meets mystery. Visit midnightsignals.net to continue the conversation, explore more episodes, and say hello.
• 15:49
  If you enjoyed tonight's journey, please like, subscribe, and drop a review.
• 15:54
  Until next time, stay vigilant, seek the hidden, and remember, in every silence there is a signal, and in every signal, a story waiting to be told.
• 16:03
  [outro piano music]