The Hexham Heads: Stone Carvings That Allegedly Brought a Curse

 Quick Facts: Location: North East England (Hexham area) | Date: Found February 1971 | Status: Unresolved. Their age was never settled and their present location is unknown | Key figures: Dr. Anne Ross, a Celtic scholar who studied them, and Des Craigie, who said he carved them in the 1950s

A boy is digging in his back garden. It's February 1971, in the town of Hexham, Northumberland, and eleven-year-old Colin Robson is turning over soil near a flower bed when his spade hits something that isn't a rock. He digs it out. It's a carved stone head, small enough to fit in his palm, with hollow eyes and a face that looks like it's been worn down by centuries of weather. Then he finds a second one, buried just inches away.

Colin and his younger brother Leslie take the heads inside. Nobody in the house has any idea what they've just brought through the door.

A House That Started Acting Strange

The Robson family didn't think much of the heads at first — they were just odd little curiosities, something to sit on a shelf. But almost immediately, according to family accounts collected in the years afterward, things in the house started shifting. Doors that had never given trouble began opening on their own. Objects moved. And then Leslie's sister told her mother she'd seen something in her bedroom at night — a creature, half-man and half-animal, standing at the foot of the bed, covered in fur.

The family later described it as looking like a werewolf. Not the Hollywood kind with fangs bared, but something quieter and more unsettling — just standing there, watching.

Word got around Hexham fast. This was a market town, not the kind of place where werewolf sightings usually make the local gossip circuit. But the story didn't stay local for long. The heads eventually made their way — through a chain of hands that's still debated — to the Celtic scholar Dr. Anne Ros, one of Britain's leading experts on Celtic archaeology.

Anne Ross and the Celtic Theory

Ross examined the heads and came to a striking conclusion: she believed they were genuinely ancient, possibly dating back to the Iron Age or even earlier, and that they fit a known pattern in Celtic religious practice. Ancient Celtic tribes across Britain had what scholars call a "cult of the head" — the belief that the human head held the soul, and that carved stone heads placed near homes or wells could ward off evil or honor ancestors. Ross had spent years cataloguing similar carvings from Northumberland and the Borders region, and to her eye, the Hexham Heads fit right into that tradition.

Here's where the story gets its edge, though. Ross herself reported that not long after the heads came into her possession, she experienced her own encounter — a werewolf-like figure in her home in Southampton, more than 300 miles from Hexham. Her daughter said she saw it too, described as roughly six feet tall, half-human, and covered in dark fur, moving down the staircase before vanishing.

Two households, hundreds of miles apart, both connected only by two carved stones — and both reporting the same impossible visitor.

The Man Who Said He Made Them

Just as the story was gathering steam in the press, a very different account surfaced. A local resident named Des Craigie came forward and said the heads weren't ancient at all. He claimed he'd carved them himself in the 1950s, as a gift for his daughter, using a bit of leftover stone.

This wasn't some random crank chiming in. Craigie's claim carried weight because he was specific about it — the timeframe, the intent, even the tools he said he used. If true, it meant the entire werewolf panic, the Celtic religious symbolism, Anne Ross's scholarly excitement — all of it rested on a homemade garden ornament from twenty years earlier, not a relic from two thousand years back.

Archaeologists who later examined the heads noted that they lacked the kind of wear patterns and tool marks you'd expect from genuinely ancient stonework. The carving style seemed inconsistent with known Celtic examples too — a little too symmetrical, a little too modern in its simplicity. Doubt spread quickly through the academic community, even as the folklore around the heads kept growing in the public imagination.

Testing, Disputes, and a Second Opinion

The disagreement didn't end with Craigie's claim. Some researchers pushed back, arguing that folk-art traditions in Northumberland had a long, continuous history of head-carving that stretched from ancient times right up through more recent centuries — meaning a "modern-looking" head wasn't necessarily proof of a hoax. Stone doesn't always age the way people expect, especially if it had been buried in damp soil for an unknown length of time before the Robson boys found it.

Later scientific analysis added another wrinkle. When researchers examined the stone the heads were carved from, they found it wasn't from the immediate area — it appeared to be a type of tests could not settle their age, and pinning down exactly when it had been shaped proved close to impossible using the testing methods available at the time. No definitive age could be established either way. The heads sat in a kind of scientific limbo: not proven ancient, not proven modern, just unresolved.

Meanwhile, the werewolf sightings kept surfacing in secondhand accounts for years. Some skeptics point out that "waking hallucination" experiences — where a person half-asleep perceives a figure in the room — are a documented and fairly common phenomenon, and that stress or suggestion after hearing a strange story could easily produce something similar. Others weren't satisfied with that explanation, especially given how specific and consistent the descriptions were across two separate households.

Where the Heads Ended Up

Here's the part of the story most people don't expect: nobody knows exactly where the Hexham Heads are today.

They passed through several hands after the initial investigation — reportedly ending up for a time with a researcher named Dr. Don Robins, who conducted further tests on them in the 1970s and 80s. But the trail eventually goes cold. Some accounts suggest they were lost, misplaced during a move or a handoff between researchers. Others say a private collector may hold them, unwilling to draw attention. No museum has publicly claimed possession of the originals, and no verified photograph exists showing them being formally catalogued and archived the way a genuine ancient artifact typically would be.

For a case built almost entirely around two three-inch stone objects, it's strange that the objects themselves have simply disappeared from the public record. Replicas exist. Sketches exist. But the actual heads that started a small English family talking about werewolves? Gone, as far as anyone can verify.

A Small Mystery That Won't Resolve

What makes the Hexham Heads stick in people's minds isn't the werewolf, exactly — plenty of ghost stories have monsters in them. It's the shape of the mystery itself. No test ever managed to settle their age. A hoax confession was never fully verified against the physical evidence. A respected scholar's professional judgment collided with a private citizen's plain claim, and nobody ever settled who was right.

Fifty-odd years on, the case sits in an odd category — too documented to dismiss outright, too unresolved to accept as fact. Anne Ross, for her part, never fully backed away from her original assessment, even after Craigie's claim went public.

So maybe the real question isn't whether the heads were Celtic or homemade. Maybe it's this: if two small stone carvings — real or fake, ancient or brand new — were enough to make two separate families see the same impossible thing in the dark, what does that say about what we're capable of conjuring, and what does it say about what might already be there?
"Another English case where a hoax claim and strange reports collided is the Enfield Poltergeist."

FAQ

Q: What are the Hexham Heads?
A: Two small carved stone heads, found by a boy digging in a garden in 1971. They became famous after the family reported a werewolf-like creature in the house.

Q: Who made them?
A: Nobody has proven it. Dr. Anne Ross believed they were ancient Celtic, but local man Des Craigie said he made them himself in the 1950s for his daughter.

Q: Where are the heads today?
A: Their whereabouts are unknown. They passed through several researchers' hands, and no museum has publicly claimed them.