The Hexham Dog Man
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In 1971, beneath the tangled roots of a Newcastle-upon-Tyne garden, two young brothers unearthed a pair of nightmares. Colin and Leslie Robson, ages 9 and 11, dug two tennis-ball-sized stone heads from the dirt near a privet hedge—unlocking a gateway to something ancient and malevolent.
When their mother, Jean, scrubbed away the earth, she found etched, haunting features. One stone, the “Boy,” gleamed with grey-green quartz crystals and mirrored a human skull. The other, the “Witch,” stared back with bulging eyes, her hair swept back in a frozen gale of yellow and red pigment. Though small, the artifacts possessed an unnatural weight, heavier than any common cement or concrete.
The family placed them on a shelf as curiosities. They did not yet know that the stones were watching them back.
The Haunting of Rede Street
The discovery acted as a dark catalyst. Poltergeist activity soon tore through the Robson home. Bottles flew across rooms and pictures leapt from the walls. A shadowy vandalism manifested in ripped curtains and mirrors shattered on the kitchen floor. One night, a bedroom window exploded inward without cause, showering the sleeping boys in jagged shards.
The terror bled through the walls to the neighbors. Ellen “Nelly” Dodd, a mother of six, described, “I had gone into the children’s bedroom to sleep with one of them who was ill. My 10-year-old son Brian kept telling me he felt something was touching him and pulling his hair. I told him not to be silly. Then I saw this shape in the room… it was like some terrible, blurred creature crawling around the floor on all fours. I screamed, and it disappeared.”
She described it as a grotesque chimera—half-man, half-beast—that vanished the moment she screamed. Nelly’s health plummeted so drastically following the sighting that the local council eventually rehoused her. She believed everything was tied to the heads. The Robsons believed it as well
Desperate, the Robsons asked for an exorcism to be performed after surrendering their heads to academia.
The Archaeologist’s Shadow
The artifacts were examined by Professor Dearman of the University of Newcastle, and also by Dr. Roger Miket, who brought them to the attention of Dr. Anne Ross (1925-2012), an archaeologist and linguist.
Before inspecting the site, Dr. Ross said if the garden sat where once a shrine was erected, she would not be surprised to hear of supernatural manifestations. She cited how other discoveries on the continent and Britain had a correlation with ancient Celtic temples and hauntings.
As a renowned expert in Celtic culture, she suspected they were linked to ancient “head cults”—tribes that used the severed heads of enemies to harness their power. These Celtic headhunters worshipped the stone heads as gods.
Dr. Ross estimated they were approximately 2,000 years old, highly sophisticated and were made to take part in ancient occult ceremonies.
The heads were brought to the Ross home and soon strange things started to happen. On the first night, Dr. Ross said her husband and she woke up convinced that “some evil was near, and that the family was in danger.”
She said, “Something made me look towards the bedroom door, and I saw this thing going out of it. It was about six feet high and half animal and half man. It was covered in dark fur. I saw it very clearly, and then it disappeared. It was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen.”
Dr. Ross watched, paralyzed, as the creature padded down the stairs and dissolved into the shadows of the house.
In another interview, she described the creature she saw with more detail: “It was about six feet high, slightly stooping, and it was black, against the white door, and it was half animal and half man. The upper part, I would have said, was a wolf, and the lower part was human and, I would have again said, that it was covered with a kind of black, very dark fur. It went out, and I just saw it clearly, and then it disappeared, and something made me run after it, a thing I wouldn’t normally have done, but I felt compelled to run after it. I got out of bed, and I ran, and I could hear it going down the stairs, then it disappeared towards the back of the house.”
Within days of the sighting, their daughter Berenice was the next person to have a strange experience. Dr. Ross described what occurred after she arrived from a trip to London with her archaeologist husband Richard Feacham, “She was in a terrible state and told us that she had opened the door and a black thing, half man and half creature, had rushed down the stairs, jumped the bannister and gone into a room at the back.”
They searched the house, but could find nothing. Her daughter hid behind the locked door of her room until they arrived.
On another occasion Dr. Ross reported her study door flew open by itself, the sensation of a cold figure close to her and the appearance of a dark figure.
The Ross family, like the Robsons, got the heads out of their home. She said it was like a cloud had been lifted from their house. She said everyone who came to the property felt the presence of evil. Once the heads were gone, all the manifestations ceased.
Dr. Ross remained convinced they were Celtic, and the curse they carried was kept by the minerals they were made of.
The Legend of the Hexham Wolf
The description of the creature seen at the Ross household revived memories of the Hexham Wolf, who in the autumn of 1904 ravaged the countryside close to where the heads were found. It was suspected that the animal escaped from a zoo. The loss of livestock in the area of Hexham and Allendale became so dramatic that farmers resorted to housing their animals indoors at night.
During this time, a young wolf had escaped from Captain Bain of Shotley Bridge, but it did not match the description of the killer wolf, which was described as much larger.
What was unusual about this event was that the livestock were not always eaten, and wolves had not been sighted in Northumberland in centuries.
In late December 1904, a reward was offered for the wolf’s skin. On the 29th, the carcass of a wolf cut in two by a train was buried and then disinterred. It was brought before the Hexham Wolf Committee, which had been organized to hunt the animal. Captain Bain said this wolf was too old to be his, which was 4 months old when it escaped.
Contradictory sightings were reported of a dark wolf or a tan wolf. Was there more than one wolf stalking prey in the area?
Hunts were organized, tracks were followed, and hounds were brought to the site of fresh kills, but the animal could not be found.
W. Briddick, a big game hunter, joined the search, but was unable to kill it even though he claimed to have sighted it more than once.
Toward the end of January 1905, interest waned, no doubt because the slaughter of livestock ceased after the carcass of the wolf was found. How this animal came to be in the area was never explained.
In the book Lo!, author Charles Fort noted that in the area of the wolf sightings in 1904, there were reports of poltergeist activities, spontaneous human combustion, and a religious revival, perhaps as an antidote to this high strangeness.
Over 60 years later, when the Robson boys dug up the heads, the reports from their mother and Mrs. Dodd brought to mind the strangeness of the wolf that killed so many livestock. It was claimed that the artifacts were tied to this animal through a curse.
Hexham is an old Anglo-Saxon town. The German word for witch is “hex”. A few miles away is Haltwhistle, known for witchcraft, where present-day witches still gather.
Some whispered that the heads were not just depictions of the beast, but the anchors that kept its spirit tethered to the Northumberland soil.
The Vanishing
In 1972, Desmond Craigie, 59, a lorry driver, came forward to say he had produced the heads in 1956, for his daughter while he lived at the house at 3 Rede Street. He had lived there for thirty years, and his father had left the year before the Robsons moved in. He had made three of them, but one was damaged, and he threw it away. Craigie worked for a concrete company at the time. He created replicas that were not similar enough to the original heads, which left his claim in doubt.
In 1972, Sidney Cartwright, who was once the curator at the Cartwright Hall Museum had found several Celtic heads that dated from 200 BC to 400 AD. He said some were modeled as humans, and others like animals such as bears, dogs, lion-like animals, and “a weird beast of no known species”. This tradition dates back to the Iron Age, when the North was inhabited by a tribe called the Brigantes.
Celtic heads have been found built into churches like gargoyles. This is proof that the tradition was incorporated into Christianity. Usually, to ward off evil, they were placed over doorways, in gables, and troughing ends on old yeomen houses.
In 1975, the Celtic idols were sent back to the family who found them after spending four years at Newcastle University’s Museum of Antiquities.
The Robsons gave them to their cousin George Watson. His wife told him to return them. This is when the Robsons decided to bury them in the exact spot they were found. If they were ever buried, they were destined not to stay there.
In 1977, Dr. Don Robins, an inorganic chemist, took the heads home after he found them in a box kept in the office of Prof. Frank Hodson at Southampton University. On the trip home, the electrical system in his car went out. He took the heads out, and the vehicle operated as it should. He believed the influence of the artifacts came from the female, and that her eyes were ever watchful. He felt the atmosphere around her was electrified.
Dr. Robins said, “I was convinced these lumps of stone were possessed of very definite powers of evil.”
He had collaborated with Dr. Ross on their book about the Lindow Man bog body, titled The Life and Death of a Druid Prince. He authored The Secret Language of Stone, where he posited that stone could record events, something known as the stone-tape theory.
Dr. Robins kept the heads until February, 1978, when he passed them to Frank Hyde, a psychic and dowser. After this, the exact whereabouts of the relics disappeared until today.
Whether they were authentic or not, the type of encounters described by those who had contact with them is similar to other places and times where there are reports of wolf cryptids.
According to the book Hunting the American Werewolf (2006), “wolfenstones” depicting devils and werewolves have been dug up around the Palmyra area, close to where the Bray Road Beast has been sighted.
Linda Godfrey, in The Beast of Bray Road, described a find on Frank Arnow’s ranch:
“On the ground in front of the bunkhouse was what looked like some kind of old pedestal about a foot square, with a face molded in relief on each of the four sides. The faces looked like werewolves!
It seemed like an odd thing to have on a Wisconsin horse ranch, and I asked John Arnow where he found it. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I dug it up in the back of the property.’ He actually had two of them, and a nearby neighbor had another, all nearly identical; what’s more, he thought there might be others!
He was right. A quick dig a few months later revealed a fragment of another block, displaying one entire side with the same werewolfish face, weathered but plainly evident. That meant there had to be at least four of the blocks, and my best guess is they date from the early twentieth century, because they are poured or molded concrete aggregate.
But why were they there? …why would early Wisconsin farmers desire stones with wolfen or demonic faces for decoration? …The very same face, pointed ears, and wavy fur and all, was in plain view, decorating a chapel attached to a building in the Old Town Square called the Carolinum (Prague). …And two farmhouses built by prominent, early families of Palmyra on other sides of the town feature the same mysterious wolf-faced blocks as column support on their front porches. …There has also been some speculation that perhaps the town’s first Masonic Lodge may have used the stones found on Arnow’s farms as column supports in their temple.”