An Extract from the Fortean Times, via the brilliant series of articles from The Urban Historian An Analysis Our tale begins in 1971, on Rede Avenue in Hexham, Northumberland, home of the Robson family. Their two boys, ages eight and eleven, were playing in their garden, as children of that age are inclined to do. Whilst doing so, the two unearthed a strange pair of stones that preceded an even stranger chain of events. The best known is the Beast of Bolam Lake, a yeti-like figure a group of fisherman claimed to have spotted in Northumberland. In the morning, the Robson’s awaken to the sight of the Heads in a different position from when they were last seen!

The heads were originally dug up by two boys, Colin and Leslie Robson, who found them in the garden in 1971; a number of sources incorrectly give the year as 1972. After the discovery, the Robson family reported strange phenomena, with the heads allegedly being moved when no one was in the room and bottles being mysteriously thrown across rooms. The Dodd family next door also reported phenomena, with one boy’s hair pulled in the night and his mother Nelly seeing a half-man, half-sheep figure leaving the house shortly afterwards. Does anyone remember an article on a north east BBC news programme in the mid seventies about two stone heads unearthed in Hexham that conjured up a werewolf apparition? The 'werewolf' appeared to a pretty eminent archaeologist and her family and used to appear with a sort of banging noise at various times of day.... it was passed on to another and the same thing happened. The mysterious thing is is that i looked into this story and rang a museum at Hexham who sent me some newspaper clippings and said that the heads hade been buried in a secret location due to 'trouble'. This really spooked me and sent me off trying to get in touch with anyone involved. I managed to reach an old man who told me he'd MADE the heads - something the archaeologist had disputed (she said they were celtic). As for her - one Anne Ross - I've never managed to reach her (and she is pretty well known). According to the family, the heads would move about by themselves. And that wasn’t all: the haunting of the Hexham heads had just begun. All of the people who examined these Hexham heads gave different descriptions, but they were sure they were palm-sized. These stones were no masterpiece art but were just basic approximations of a human face.

Scientist Dr Don Robbins, a chemist who became involved in the investigation into the mysterious heads, on hearing of this strange night-time visitor, drew a tentative parallel between the half-man half sheep seen in Mrs Dodds bedroom and a creature from Norse mythology called ‘The Wulver;’ a powerful and dangerous creature, he said. It soon became apparent that they startlingly resembled their departed sisters; Jennifer had a white line on her forehead where Jacqueline had had a scar and bore the same birthmark as Jacqueline! As the twins grew, Florence and John saw increasing similarities and became more and more convinced that the two girls were their late sisters reborn. The family left Hexham when the girls were still babies but returned to the town when the girls were aged four. On their return, both girls were able to identify landmarks such as the school their sisters had attended and were able to name dolls and toys belonging to their sisters. They even had nightmares about being run over by a car. Jennifer also looked to be older than Gillian, despite being a twin; Joanna had been five years older than Jacqueline. Then, as they turned five, all memories of their former lives faded away.

To prove this, he made replicas of the two surviving heads, by moulding the form and carving the details with a knife. Surprisingly, these replicas are said to have been “subpar” to the originals, with many seeming to believe that Craigie could none have been responsible for them. Surviving photographs of the original heads are of poor quality, and no images of the replicas have been verified, so we are, unfortunately unable to examine them ourselves. However, it later emerged that a previous owner of the house in Hexham, where the heads were originally found, came forward and said that he had made the heads as toys for his children. I made them – about 16 years ago. I made the heads from bits of stone and mortar simply to amuse my daughter when she was a little girl. I actually made three but one appears to have got lost. They were out in the garden for years. I definitely made them. I have been laughing my head off about these heads and I cannot understand why all this attention is being paid to them’. What most of us know is that in the garden of the Robson family’s 3 Rede Avenue home in Hexham, brothers Colin and Leslie found — what looks to be — two odd-looking stone carvings of heads. 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 academic was the recently deceased Dr Anne Ross, a well-known Celtic scholar whose interests straddled the worlds of archaeology, history, and art history, with a bit of dabbling in folklore and Celtic mysticism thrown in. Her best-known and quite well respected publications hint at her proclivities: The Pagan Celts and Pagan Celtic Britain have both run to multiple editions. It would be fair to say that Anne Ross has a somewhat ambiguous reputation amongst early medieval archaeologists, a nice person but with some strange side interests. The problem we have is that all these are eye-witness reports, and as such, we are unable to prove or disprove them categorically. Perhaps due to these strange events, the Robson family passed the heads on to Hexham Abbey where they eventually fell into the hands of Dr Anne Ross, an expert in Celtic artefacts.