Midnight Signals Case Files
Companion to Episode: Hexham Heads
When the BBC came to tell the story of the Hexham Heads, it couldn’t get hold of the heads. Other carvings appeared in their place. By then, the little pair had been passed between a family, a museum and people who hoped to work out what they were. They had attracted newspaper stories and accounts of something entering two homes. They were small enough to fit in a box. Finding that box, however, was already proving difficult.
Jenny Robson had wanted them brought back to Hexham. In May 1975, a newspaper reported that she planned to bury them in the garden where her sons had found them. There had been enough trouble since the discovery. While other people wanted another look at the faces, she was ready to put them under the soil again.
Her older son, Colin, had been clearing weeds beside a hedge on Rede Avenue in 1971 when he uncovered the first face. Leslie came down from the house to help and found the second. Their mother could hardly have expected a garden find to become part of the family’s life for years. At first, there were just two little objects to clean off and show the neighbours. They were different enough to acquire names: the boy and the girl, although the second face was also called the old woman or the hag.
Once they were indoors, the Robsons began finding them turned away from the positions in which they had been left. Nobody caught them moving. Other incidents were harder to overlook. Bottles broke, objects were thrown, and glass appeared where someone would later lie down to sleep. Next door, Nelly Dodd described a visitor that seemed partly human and partly sheep. When the heads were sent south to the scholar Anne Ross, she reported a dark, fur-covered figure leaving her bedroom and going down the stairs.
The episode follows those encounters and the people who handled the heads. Beyond it lies a longer history of heads carried home, kept for protection or buried with a purpose. There are also some smaller discoveries: what Colin still remembered about the garden, what Ross put into her first paper, and how her voice was found again after part of the television report went missing. The heads themselves have yet to make a verified reappearance in the records used here.
The paid companion continues with those accounts, the older head traditions, a chronology and an illustrated case file to download.
