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Guess what folks?

I was very interested in seeing your thread as guess what? I live in Hexham!!!

And guess what part 2? I used to live only 100 yards from the place the heads were found!

Somewhere else on this message board I related some of the connected strange goings on near that area and I'll repeat some if I may -

The area was home for a long time to an aboittor (slaughterhouse) which used to fair stink in the summer I can tell you and I won't relate any further on the screams of doomed animals that used to fill the night air. Also right on it's doorstep was the remains of an old farm called Bog farm (Bogle?) which was destroyed to make way for the school which stands there now (which my father was caretaker of for 20 years).

The school itself was home to a few old scary tales including a previous caretaker who took his dog into the school and it froze on the spot in a particular part (nearest the old farm - coincidentally?) one of our own dogs used to make a beeline to that area and sit and whine.

In 1980 or 1981 several people including two policeman and my own mother saw a ufo above the gothic style bell tower of the school.

And for about 5 years from the mid to late eighties onward I heard a baby crying in the middle of the night - the same sound and always seeming to out in the open.

Thanks to Sally by the way for clearing up the confusion with the name of the town she is spot on on the original.

And I agree also with the opinion that no matter what the origin of the actual heads was it still doesn't mean that the paranormal events could not have been triggered off by them. Ask a pagan about thought forms!

Finally I have studied the wolf scare of Hexham also and actually had an article about it published in Strange Times magazine. If anyone wants a copy of the original text drop me a message and I'm happy to oblige :D

Lastly but not leastly here's a couple of pics you might like to look at. One is of the actuall house the Heads were found!! And the other is of that spooky gothic school belltower. Be warned!!!!

I'll see you in time :eek!!!!:
 
... continued

and here's the other pic

oh and did I mention that only about 100 yards from the Heads house there used to be a hospital for incurables and a mortuary? :eek!!!!:
 
The bell tower is nicely creepy, Zavian, but a pic of an ordinary house on a fine sunny day doesn't have any spooky overtones!

Couldn't you retake the pic on a stormy winter's day, and preferably get a lightning flash in the background?

:D
 
Baby crying at night? Isn't that one of John Keel's symptoms of the presence of ultra-terrestrials or something? Does that last sentence make any sense? Look, I'm tired, you know what I'm on about.
 
Pumas can sound very like a baby crying - any big cat reports in the area at the time?
 
big cats

Wenna said:
Pumas can sound very like a baby crying - any big cat reports in the area at the time?

Not that I'm aware of but there certainly has been around the turn of the milennium. Now you can add to that a Yeti, okay Bolam is about twenty miles away but it's still local, see my article on the home page for further details.
 
a stoat or weasel killing a rabbit sounds just like a baby screaming, and the sound can go on for a horribly long time.

every area has pockets of weirdness and Hexham, and surrounding countryside qualifies in the NE. Going back to pre-Roman times the town has been the scene of truly awful events during the days of the Border Rievers and beyond.

the country up to Alston in Cumbria has a long association with witches and one of the most famous recent witches is buried up there - details

there is strong and compelling evidence of current witch activity in the region.

the links between the blcksmith trade and witchcraft are well known and this guy has been linked in rumour with witchcraft for many years.

no proof, just persistant rumours. Whatever. The man makes outstanding furniture.

theres also the Cambo Beasts, no supernatural connotations, more one for your cryptozoologists

The Cambo Beasts link is dead. The MIA webpage can be accessed via the Wayback Machine:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030114155651/http://www.uktouristinfo.com/myst/gazetteer/gaznorth5.htm
 
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No, it's not cats or weasels, damn you. It's ultraterrestrials. Apply Occam's razor, it's clearly the simplest and most rational explanation. I will brook no argument.
 
as a local volunteer for the RSPCA in the Tynedale Region I must take exception to the application of razors to weasels

whilst the creatures have a dodgy rep, attacking the poor dears with honed steel is just weird, weird.

kind regards, Nurse Ethel, (RCN, SRN) Secretary to the Garisgill Branch of the RSPCA - call 0345 909 090 and win a free holiday in the Algarve
 
ethelred said:
as a local volunteer for the RSPCA in the Tynedale Region I must take exception to the application of razors to weasels
Didn't BBC Radio 3 favourite, composer Frank Zappa, attempt to use weasels, instead of razors for shaving at one time?

From the pictures I've seen, the results were not very favourable. :(
 
indeed so

'Weasels Ripped My Flesh' was a gem of his ouvre

but then he died of foot cancer

's a wiggly world, eh?
 
Mean buggers, them weasels. A little too much for their own good.
One of them tried that hypnosis gig on my late pooch; her and her daughter nearly had it for lunch.
 
Nationwide and the celtic heads

I recall, when growing up in the 1970's, that the teatime TV show, Nationwide, on UK BBC, ran a story about the discovery of some Celtic stone heads.

The story then descended into true 'Tales of the Unexpected' territory when they announced that there was a curse on any who touched the heads, when they would be visited by a werewolf.

There then followed (allegedly) a bloodcurdling tale of a boy who had the misfortune to touch one in a museum and upon his return from school was confronted by a werewolf in his empty house.

This tale terrified our whole school and for weeks no one would go home after school on their own, irrespective of the fact that as far as I can tell none of use had ever seen a Celtic stone head.

The strange thing is, talking about it years later, we could all remember the story but none can recall actually seeing it on TV - so did Nationwide run this tale, and do others remember it?
 
Re: Nationwide and the celtic heads

Dominic Brayne said:
There then followed (allegedly) a bloodcurdling tale of a boy who had the misfortune to touch one in a museum and upon his return from school was confronted by a werewolf in his empty house.

I believe this event happened to Dr Anne Ross, who owned the heads at the time. At any rate, there's a thread here somewhere on the subject, search for 'Hexham Heads' :)
 
I always thought it was terribly funny that there should be cursed objects connected with a place called 'Hex 'em'.
 
Yes, I remember it. I seem to recall that the encounter in the house occurred as the boy opened the front door and a werewolf jumped down the stairs and landed in the hallway in front of him.

Can't remember what it did next though...
 
It was Nationwide,

they often had a Fortean strand on their programmes. I was a kid at the time and I remember its scared the bejayzus out of me too, although I don't recall discussing it at school with anyone. I think it gets a namecheck in one of Janet and Colin Bord's fabulous books... maybe Modern Mysteries of Britain. Nationwide also did something on UFOs about the same time. I'm certain that this and the werewolf programme are the root of my interest in Forteana.
 
Re: Nationwide and the celtic heads

Dominic Brayne said:
The strange thing is, talking about it years later, we could all remember the story but none can recall actually seeing it on TV - so did Nationwide run this tale, and do others remember it?

Yes, absolutely. I remember watching it and being terrified. Wasn't helped by the fact that my parents house was semi-derelict at the time, half the lights didn't work and someone hammered on our front door just as the werewolf launched itself at the screen.

I was right off me fish fingers for days.
 
So I didn't imagine it then!

I think the whole atmosphere of the time was compounded by the fact that (and this may only be an example of false memory syndrome!) we were in the middle of the three day week, power cuts and spending evenings sat round with candles because the power seemed to switch off after the news because of the strike.

It is interesting to see how stories then become ingrained, and I often wonder if we were, even just for a few months, returning to the ways of our predecessors, and beginning to talk and tell stories again.

Certainly, something occurred in that decade that made some news items very memorable, and yes, Nationwide definitely had a Fortean edge - I lost count of how many haunting stories they covered!:eek!!!!:
 
I must dredge up this 2 year old thread, just because, holy cow, those stones are creeeeeepy.

That is all. :eek:
 
I remember reading a series of newspaper articles on this topic and they mentioned a pagan god called "Manopus". Can anyone connect this name with the Hexham heads or did I just hallucinate it?
 
These dinky little items turned up in The Unexplained - Vol.10, pp 2326-9

A Doctor Ross still maintained that they were genuine Celtic artifacts despite Desmond Craigie claiming he'd made them in 1956 for his kids.
Doctor Don Robins theorised that a poltergeist phenomena linked to an artifact depends not on the maker but where it was made.

Sounds like scientists with pet theories refusing to admit not a hoax but a simple mis-identification.
 
Threads merged.

As for the continuing existence of the heads, whatever their provenance, I never heard from the author that e-mailed me about them again (can't remember who it was, even - mea culpa.)

I'm sure I came across a full account of the events online a while back, though - I'll see if I can dig it out.
 
DanHigginbottom~ said:
They were, apparently, made by lorry driver who had lived in the house previously. He made them for his daughter to play with.....However; the kids who found the heads also made very similar looking ones before they dug up the supernaturally empowered originals. So was something compelling people to carve Celtic style heads in order to summon a Wolf God?

This can't help but remind me of H. P. Lovecraft's horror fiction "The Call of Cthulhu," wherein a young artist in a sort of fugue state sculpts impossibly old bas reliefs of pre-human gods.

The same theme also appears in Lovecraft's Commonplace Book, with a short reference to an artist whose recently-carved "ancient" relics throw archaeologists into states of sheer terror, even though they also appreciate their modernity.
 
Stormkhan said:
A Doctor Ross still maintained that they were genuine Celtic artifacts despite Desmond Craigie claiming he'd made them in 1956 for his kids.

Can a buried item or two, especially if they have in some way been inbued with any sort of malignant power, induce people living above them to (unknowingly) sketch or sculpt them?

There's a bit of a fictional hint of that in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT.
 
There was a letter in the FT recently (last year?) outlining the continuing adventures of the Hexham Heads, so the weirdness is still going on around them.
 
gncxx said:
There was a letter in the FT recently (last year?) outlining the continuing adventures of the Hexham Heads, so the weirdness is still going on around them.

Don't remember reading that, must've missed it! ... what's the latest weirdness? :shock: :)
 
gyrtrash said:
gncxx said:
There was a letter in the FT recently (last year?) outlining the continuing adventures of the Hexham Heads, so the weirdness is still going on around them.

Don't remember reading that, must've missed it! ... what's the latest weirdness? :shock: :)

There were two letters, one in FT217 and the other in FT220. Both outlined strangeness (like a sheepman apparition) experienced around the heads, but the verdict seems to be now that no one knows where they are, the last owner having been seriously injured in a car crash according to the second letter.

There's a great documentary in this somewhere.
 
gncxx said:
gyrtrash said:
gncxx said:
There was a letter in the FT recently (last year?) outlining the continuing adventures of the Hexham Heads, so the weirdness is still going on around them.

Don't remember reading that, must've missed it! ... what's the latest weirdness? :shock: :)

There were two letters, one in FT217 and the other in FT220. Both outlined strangeness (like a sheepman apparition) experienced around the heads, but the verdict seems to be now that no one knows where they are, the last owner having been seriously injured in a car crash according to the second letter.

There's a great documentary in this somewhere.

Thanks gncxx, I'll go search the letters out in my back issues...

Cheers
Dave :)
 
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