Rede Avenue, Hexham — the Hexham Heads

OVERVIEW

Rede Avenue is a street of council houses in Hexham, Northumberland. In February 1971 two brothers, Colin and Leslie Robson, digging in the garden at number 3, found two stone heads about six centimetres high. That night the family reported objects moving; a neighbour, Ellen Dodd, said a creature half man and half sheep came into her house. The heads went to the Celtic scholar Dr Anne Ross in Southampton, who said she woke to see a figure part wolf, part man leave her room, and that her daughter met it on the stairs; she had them removed.

HISTORY

A Hexham man, Desmond Craigie, said he had made the heads for his daughter in 1956 while living in the house; a Newcastle University analysis found the heads moulded rather than carved, which supported him, though the replicas he made were said not to match the originals. The heads passed through several hands and are lost. The BBC restored its 1976 Nationwide interview with Ross in 2024.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Two households and a scholar reported the same kind of figure without coordinating; the 'Hexham wolf' of 1904, a real animal that killed sheep, is the local frame. The case is recorded in the press and in Reader's Digest's Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain (1977). It is an object story attached to a place; the objects are gone.

VISITING

A residential street of private homes. There is nothing to visit and no one to ask. Do not knock.