The Hexham heads. It’s a phrase I’d never heard until this year, when I attended a show called Scarred for Life.
Actually, I may have heard it before, in February 1976 when I was seven. But if I had, I’d repressed it, such was the trauma of hearing werewolves discussed as a real-life phenomenon on BBC1.
I should probably backtrack at this point, to explain that Scarred for Life is a show for British Generation X-ers, devoted to the unnerving-bordering-on-horrific children’s pop culture of the 1970s and 80s.
Merseysiders Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence celebrate this in a mammoth, two-volume series of books, the first volume of which I’ve just bought online via lulu.com. It’s 740 pages long and I’m just itching to read it.
A spinoff stage show involves Dave, Steve and radio host Bob Fischer chewing the fat about everything from Blake’s 7 to those nerve-wracking public information films about electricity substations, broken bottles on the beach and, hauntingly, the Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water.
I have to say I loved it when I saw it at Stockton Arts Centre just before the lockdown. Indeed, the small matter of a possible coronavirus pandemic wasn’t enough to stop Teesside’s telly nostalgics turning out in force for what I can only describe as a joyous bonding experience.
Werewolves
I don’t want to spoil the show for those who plan to see it, so I’ll confine myself to the after-show Q&A, where I raised the matter of the Hexham heads.
Bob had noted – during a discussion about Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World and its follow-ups – that when we were young, in the era of UFO sightings and Erich von Daniken books, news and current affairs used to treat the paranormal with a straight face.
My contribution, then, was to bring up a petrifying report from the BBC’s early-evening Nationwide series: The One Show of its day, if you like.
“Oh, the Hexham heads!” said the trio on stage. I had no idea what they were talking about, even though I’d started my career as a reporter on the Hexham Courant.
“It was something about werewolves,” I said. “They were talking about werewolves like they were real – then they showed a clip of Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf, lunging at the camera.
“I remember screaming, bounding on to my mother’s lap and burying my face in her chest as tears streamed down my face. It was horrifying.
“The next night, Sue Lawley apologised to the country’s parents because so many had complained about the Hammer horror clip.”
Hysteria
Now, I can’t guarantee that my memories of 44 years ago are entirely accurate. But the werewolf clip (I’m pretty sure it was Reed) and subsequent apology certainly happened.
The report, I then learned, was about two miniature model heads, dug up in a garden in Hexham, Northumberland, which – supposedly – were cursed. So much so that at one point, a werewolf reportedly emerged from a bedroom wardrobe and vaulted over a bannister.
Well, that took me back.
Search online for ‘Hexham heads’ and there’s no shortage of blog posts about it. About the hysteria in the press at the time. The academic who took the accounts seriously, transported the heads to her house at the opposite end of Britain and, she claimed, saw a werewolf in her own home. And, amusingly, the man who’d lived in the Hexham house years earlier and said he’d made the heads for his kids to play with.
They’re funny things, childhood memories. I took the last bus home, arrived in my town at midnight and walked for half an hour to my house, during which time I felt more nervous than I had any right to be. Reading about the heads gave me shivers down my spine. Sure, I knew it was all nonsense, but my primal fears had risen to the surface.
Scarred for life? You can say that again.
This is a updated draft of a blogpost published on my old site, Ryanflair.org, on 7 March 2020. The old version perished in a tragic website migration accident.
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