The Hexham Heads: A Nationwide Nightmare
Nationwide was a regional news and current affairs magazine programme aired from Monday to Friday at 6pm on BBC1, and for anyone with access to a television in the 1970’s and 1980’s it would have played a big part in their lives. It was always on in our house as I was growing up, but all I remember it for is the logo, presenter Michael Barrett, the theme tune, and the Wolf Man.
The nightmares began early one winter’s night in 1976. We were visiting my Aunt & Uncle in Aldershot and were sat in their front room watching the TV. One second Michael Barrett was talking, the next there was a half man, half wolf-like beast running toward the screen. It was terrifying. What made it even more terrifying was that not only had real people apparently seen the beast running down the stairs toward them upon entering their own house, but that I, for some reason, thought that the footage was real. The beast existed, and it was out there, somewhere.
It hadn’t terrified me enough to send me running from the room screaming, but in a sense it was worse than that. From that moment on I was filled with a persistent fear that whenever I opened a back door or climbed a set of stairs, a Wolf-Man might coming running at me, and not in a way that suggested they were pleased to see me. Soon it would be time to go to bed and, therefore, ascend the peculiarly steep stairs in my Aunt & Uncle’s house, into darkness.
I would forever associate the wolf-beast not just with those stairs, but also with that house and the town of Aldershot itself. Our relatives had moved from the house within a few years, and it was only then that it transpired that on one occasion, while living in their former home, my cousin had seen the ghost of an old man sitting on the toilet – the only toilet in the house, which was located at the top of the stairs. Whether or not I truly believed that story, if I’d been told of it whilst they were still living there I would have insisted on sleeping in the car and using a neighbours toilet whenever we visited.
That was my first introduction to the legend of The Hexham Heads, and yet I would only become aware of the connection some 30 years later when reading about the story in an issue of Fortean Times. The Nationwide news item with the wolf-man footage had been a re-enactment of an incident experienced by the Dodds family, but at the time I had no idea of the wolf-man’s connection with two small carved stone heads found in a garden in the town of Hexham, Northumberland in 1971 by two young lads named Colin and Leslie Robson. A brief synopsis of the story is that once the heads were inside the Robson family home the next door neighbours, The Dodd’s, suffered a series of strange and frightening experiences. The heads soon fell into the hands of a local expert on Celtic artefacts, Dr Anne Ross, whose own family began reporting similar experiences, including an encounter with the aforementioned wolf-man. As a result, the heads were deemed cursed. The story didn’t end there, however, as a former resident of the house at which the heads were found, Desmond Craigie, then claimed to have made the heads for his daughter some 16 years earlier.
Whether the heads were ancient and cursed, or makeshift toys made in the 1950’s was an irrelevance once the story had been reported on Nationwide. Imaginations were stoked and nightmares forged. The facts hardly mattered. The story, like Mythology itself, is an example that the past will never disappear completely but will re-emerge as slightly different versions of itself, depending on how individuals experience it, or its re-telling. There is also no single experience in my own personal history that better defines the concept of Hauntology. A hauntological experience occurs over time, in my case stemming from that one 1970’s TV show.
I see old clips of Nationwide, or even That’s Life, Newsround or any other news show of that era, and the image of Michael Barrett and the Wolf-Man are conjured somewhere in the recesses of my mind, whether it be literally, or as a distant echo of the same, and very real sense of fear and trepidation that gripped me whenever I opened our back door or walked up a staircase. The fear gradually faded, thankfully, but it still exists in some form. The jumbled, half-remembered facts of the case, the ifs and buts, the sense of unease, the time-warped memories triggered by old footage, the irrational associations. All the hauntological ingredients are there.
Well, nearly all. The one thing that has been missing to date is a soundtrack to those memories, and to that fear. Though I can still recall it, the Nationwide theme tune has rarely entered my head since the 1980’s, and I certainly haven’t come to associate it with the story of the Hexham Heads; the only thing that has accompanied it is silence. But now that has all changed, because The Night Monitor, aka electronic musician Neil Scriven, has provided the perfect soundtrack to the story and my continuing experience of it. Take any one track from his new album, Horror of The Hexham Heads, and it will rekindle, with unerring accuracy, the creeping dread that I felt on my first post-Nationwide ascent of that Aldershot staircase. So for that I should say thank you Night Monitor, for crafting such a chillingly good album and completing the picture. At least, I think should.
