Anne Ross woke to find a tall, fur-covered figure in her bedroom doorway. Its upper body reminded her of a wolf, while the lower half had the shape of a man. When it moved away, she got out of bed and followed it downstairs. Elsewhere in the house, two small carved heads sat in a box. Unearthed by two brothers in a Hexham garden in 1971, the faces had already become associated with broken household objects and an animal-like visitor in the home next door.
Ross had spent years studying beliefs in which carved heads could guard a home or hold a power beyond death. Her daughter later described a dark figure on the same staircase, despite having been told nothing about her mother’s encounter. Both recalled feeling compelled to follow it. As researchers examined the objects, questions about their origins became entangled with experiments and an increasingly uncertain trail of handovers. The heads eventually disappeared, leaving open the possibility that someone still possesses them without knowing the history of the two faces brought into their home.
