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I had first encountered the story of the heads in the Reader’s Digest compendium Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain in 1973. In the Introduction to this popular work there was a lengthy aside by the well known Celtic scholar, Dr Anne Ross, then of the University of Southampton, where she described her startling and very unpleasant experience with two Celtic carved stone heads, found in the garden of a council home in Hexham, Northumberland, which she had received for description and identification the year before.
Carved stone heads are well known from many Celtic sites throughout Europe and are easily recognized through their distinctive features. Generally they date from either the Iron Age, before the Romans overwhelmed Britain, or the Romano-British period…
In her own account Anne Ross described how, one night shortly after their arrival, she woke up suddenly at 2 a. m. feeling chilled and extremely frightened. At the instant of awakening she saw a tall, jet black wolf-headed figure standing against the faint white of the open door. It then moved out into the corridor and she felt an irresistible urge to follow it.
This she did, seeing and hearing the figure clearly as it made its way down the darkened staircase and along the corridor towards the kitchen. Anne Ross described the figure vividly, reporting not only its blackness and tallness but also its distinct part animal, part human appearance.
As the creature neared the kitchen the spell broke and Anne Ross felt fear overwhelm her and so she rushed upstairs to awaken her husband. Together they searched the house for intruders but found no-one and nothing disturbed by any forced entry and eventually concluded that she must have suffered a particularly vivid nightmare, although Anne Ross notes that she could not reconcile the vividness of the huge werewolf figure with a dream experience. Unsatisfied with this explanation they returned to sleep and since their children fortunately had not woken up they were not told of the occurrence. At this point, of course, there was nothing to relate the event to the presence of the new heads, although Anne Ross notes in her account that she had thought their appearance unpleasant and had taken an instant dislike to them on arrival.
Matters did not end there, for several days later she and her husband, the archaeologist Richard Feacham, returned home together in the early evening from a visit to London to find their teenage daughter, Berenice, already home from school but in a state of considerable distress. It was with some difficulty that they managed to persuade her to explain why, and her story suddenly threw the events of the earlier night into a grim and sinister pattern.
As Berenice eventually recounted, she had returned to the empty house at 4 p. m. and opened the front door with her key. As it swung open she saw something large, dark and inhuman rushing down the stairs (which faced the doorway) toward her. Half way down it had suddenly stopped and vaulted over the banisters, landing with a soft thud like a heavy animal with thickly padded feet…
After these unnerving incidents there were several other sightings of the creature, which the family all described as half wolf, half man, black as a shadow and over six feet tall, … and always with a great deal of noise. Anne Ross was emphatic that the creature was almost palpable, not a lurking shadow seen from the corner of an eye, and was usually seen or heard by several members of the family at the same time. Even when the creature was not in evidence there seemed to be a cold presence and a sense of evil in the house… It was only when Anne Ross made enquiries about the finding of the heads that she learned to her amazement that a similar creature had been sighted when they were discovered in the garden of the council house……
When cleaned, both heads were seen to be about the size of a small tangerine. Both were very dense and heavy, but each had a very distinct appearance. The first head had a vaguely skull-like appearance with the carved lines and pits of features only faint and vestigial. Nevertheless, its features were vaguely masculine, if gaunt and bony, and were crowned by a typically Celtic hairstyle with faint stripes running from front to back on the crown. The carved stone itself was greenish grey and glistened with quartz crystals.
The second head was more rounded and infinitely more expressive. The features were those of a formidable old wall-eyed woman with a strong beaked nose with hair combed severely backwards off the forehead into a bun. Unlike the skull-head the old woman, or hag, showed traces of red or yellow pigment on the hair. ” (2)
Notes: 1) Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology, 2nd Ed. , Vol. 1, A-G, ed. by Leslie A. Shepard, Gale Research Co. , Detroit, includes major use of Lewis Spence's work as well as Nandoor Fodor. PR. 285. 2) The Secret Language of Stone, by Don Robins, Ph. D. , Rider, London, 1988 pgs. 4-9.
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