Hauntology and the Hexham Head Hex

An episode under the former podcast name of Sh** Gets Weird.

An exploration of how deindustrialization and the “Black Aquarius” impacted paranormal encounters in early 1970’s Britain. We ask if the analytical concept of hauntology as elucidated by the late critical theorist Mark Fisher can be applied to tabloid stories of the supernatural.

Bonus: Werewolf ghosts and Druid nipple torture

Transcript

Starting in the early 1970’s a strange, tabloid worthy phenomenon spread across Northern England. People began to exhume strange artifacts from their yards and gardens; small, crudely carved stone heads that seemed to bring misfortune upon whomever beheld them. The most famous of which were found in the market town of Hexham in 1971.

While digging in his backyard at 3 Rede Avenue in Hexham England 11 year old Collin Robson unearthed something strange from beneath the soil of his family’s garden; a fist sized stone with a crudely carved face. After showing his family this peculiar find his brother then discovers another. The stones are placed high on a shelf after being told by a local museum that they may be of Celtic antiquity. The next morning the stone heads mysteriously repositioned to face the window looking out towards the garden from which they were pulled. This was just the beginning of what would be a slew of strange happenings surrounding the Robson home at 3 Rede Ave. The family soon began to hear the sounds of infant cries coming from the garden where the heads were found and on a few occasions shattered glass was found in various places around the house, including an incident where glass was found scattered on the mattress of the eldest Robson sister. The occurrences didn’t stop at 3 Rede ave; soon the neighbors, The Dodd Family, would have their own experiences. One night while Nellie Dodd was staying in her childrens room (stories vary as to why) Nellie awoke to a frightening sight; a sheep-like creature with the head of a man, she screamed, the being ran off, and she could hear the sound of it’s hooves clicking down the stairs. This incident frightened her and her family so much that they moved shortly after. 

These strange stories of cursed stone heads, poltergeist activity, and were-creatures soon became a tabloid sensation and eventually caught the attention of Celtic Scholar Anne Ross. Ross took the heads home with her for further investigation and had no doubt in her mind that they were Celtic in origin. Anne Ross took an immediate dislike to them and covered them up because it was obvious that “they hadn’t come alone.” Soon after the heads arrived at the Ross home she woke up suddenly around 2am feeling frightened and cold. She then saw a dark shadow-like figure that had the body of a man and the head of a wolf slipping out of her room, she heard it going downstairs and “felt compelled to follow it”. Ross saw it once more going towards her kitchen, fear overtook her and she didn’t follow it any further. Ross passed it off as a vivid nightmare and kept it to herself until her daughter came forward with her own story. Apparently when her daughter came home from school one day she opened the door to find a “huge, dark, and inhuman” being on the stairs. The werewolf like creature ran at her, vaulted over the banisters, and ran towards her room before vanishing. The Ross family experienced other poltergeist activity such as their cats getting upset for no reason and doors opening and slamming shut. These weren’t the only presumably Celtic heads in Anne’s collection, and whatever was attached to those from Hexham seemed to activate some dark, mysterious energy within all of them; for the activity only ceased when she removed her complete collection of strange head shaped artifacts from her home.

This wasn’t the first time Anne Ross was exposed to supposedly supernatural stone heads. In 1964, two stone heads were uncovered in Wales, similarly dug up from a garden, and she was called to collect them and transport them to the British Museum in London. She recalled that as soon as she began driving with the stones, a clap of thunder broke a previously clear and sunny day with a horrible storm. She got into several near collisions on this drive and at one point her car's brakes failed her. While we can quickly chalk this up to fickle British weather and shoddy automobile engineering, Anne couldn't help but wonder if the psychic pull of what she thought were ancient pagan artifacts in the trunk--or boot-- of her car was darkly warping the world around.

Problem was, it later turned out these heads were unlikely to be the artifacts from the ancient Celts. Archeologist Ian Armit in his book 2012 book “Headhunting and the Body in Iron Age Europe”--places the very notion that these heads were Celtic directly on Ross , noting Ross made the first synthesis of celtic ritual material from Iron Age Britain, and the longest chapter in the book delt directly with evidence for a cult of the head. Ross argued that after Roman rule outlawed literal headhunting, celtic peoples in Britain resorted to stone carved surrogates. Armit continues “Yet it is increasingly clear that many of these simple stone heads were actually carved much later. Indeed, there is increasing evidence for major regional folk traditions of head carving as late as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” He concludes that most, if not all of the stone heads that Anne Ross  documented and collected had nothing to do with the Celts.

After the popularity of the Hexham Heads in British tabloids, the astrological writer Nerys (Neris) Dee recounted a similar haunted head she claimed her uncle experienced in 1966. She relates how her uncle pulled a large crudely carved stone head from his garden. The next day, while peering through his kitchen window, he claimed to witness a horned apparition he thought was the devil standing in the location of the stone head. He said it had the torso of a man but the horns and cloven legs of a goat. Over the next four years, until his death in 1970, this creature appeared in her Uncle’s garden at least ten times.  Folklorist David Clarke, in his very fun 1996 book Twilight of the Celtic Gods, says she later described how she returned to visit the cottage in May, 1977, seven years after the death of her uncle and found it was empty and up for sale for the third time since his passing. "Although there was no sign of the head, the feeling persisted that it was there, somewhere in the undergrowth…”

British folklorist David Clarke noted in his 1999 doctoral thesis--The head cult: tradition and folklore surrounding the symbol of the severed human head in the British Isle--that narratives surrounding cursed stone heads were not documented in British folklore until around 40 years before his research. This strongly implies that whatever curse held within the stone heads did not date from the ancient celtic world. Moreover, there is little reason to believe any of the allegedly cursed Celtic heads are actually Celtic.For instance, shortly after Ross came forward with her story, a former resident of the 3 Rede Court, Des Craige, told reporters that he had made the Hexham Heads for his daughters.

Ross challenged him to recreate the heads, which he did. The resulting head, however, bore little resemblance to the originals, and Paul Screeton--author of the Quest for the Hexham Heads--, having interviewed Craige decades later, found the story to be of little veracity. Either way, Ross’s claim that the heads were of Celtic origin is largely discredited, as similar stone heads have been carved at much later dates. Nonetheless, the origins of the stone heads are less important than what people believe they are capable of. How then can we account for the disturbing, pagan-esque anthropomorphic apparitions or the accompanying poltergeist activity seemingly attached to these heads? The answers must be in the psychological and social context of the last 60 years.

I think the answer in part lies in the counterculture of the mid-20th century. In the post-war boom of the 1960s, there was an explosion of new social movements challenging the empirical orthodoxy and alienation of the Cold War era. I mean there were Hippies. In 1965, the United States rescinded the Asian Exclusion Act, facilitating an interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. This in turn triggered a desire for a broader return to traditional ways of knowledge, situating the Celts as an indigenous mystic ancestor to many white people. 

Speaking at a conference on Celtic consciousness, Anne Ross related that the “fundamental nature” of the celtic psyche was “A capacity for worship, religion, a passionate feeling for the supernatural, for the gods….” as well as “a deep feeling for nature” which she described as something with “mystic beauty and spiritual fulfillment.”

Ross’s previously mentioned 1967 book Pagan Celtic Britain provided an image of an indigenous Celtic society that was more in tune with the Earth that alienated young boomers could root themselves in. Into the 1970s, various new religious movements started Druidic circles or revived those that stemmed from earlier Celtic revivals. In the United Kingdom, this quest for forgotten pagan knowledge was exemplified by the Earth Mysteries movement. The movement used dowsing and other pseudoscientific methods to study the alleged energy force that flowed through and connected ancient sacred places called ley lines.Earth Mystery devotees claimed that these trackways of esoteric energy shot through the English countryside and covered the planet. Some even associated leys with UFOs. Paul Screeton, the publisher of Ley Magazine from 1969 to 1976, was the primary investigator into the Hexham Heads.

Don Robins, who received the Hexham Heads in the early 1980s, was involved in the Dragon Project, a group of scientists interested in researching Earth Mysteries. He was the first paranormal investigator to really take the stones seriously.

Two authors intimately tied to the Earth Mysteries movement were Janet and Colin Bord, who wrote a 1977 book called“The Secret Country: An Interpretation Of The Folklore Of Ancient Sites In The British Isles” which explored British folklore around ley lines. In 1982, they followed this book up with Earth Rites, which linked fertility folklore to an ancient belief in the power of “Mother Earth.” They argued that modern society, in its technological materialism, was draining these energies and needed to be challenged by a new, ecological and mystical paradigm. The Earth Mysteries movement can be directly linked to a broader shift towards the New Age in the late 20th century West. 

By the early 70’s, the New Age movement began to attract academic attention. In 1972, sociologist Marcello Truzzi wrote an influential essay “The Occult Revival as Popular Culture: Some Observations on the Old and the Nouveau Witch” which noted the mass marketing of paranormal beliefs during this period. For instance, in 1968, he found 169 paperbacks dealing with the subject, three years later that number had jumped to 519. Truzzi theorized that the trend represented a burgeoning “pop religion” that corresponded to the general cultural milieu of what he called “playful contempt” for what some once viewed seriously. He argues that this contempt could, maybe paradoxically, open the way for a more reasoned society. While this did not play out, he was right that esoteric subjects became a massive commercial phenomenon. 

The late 1960s and early 1970s was what British journalist Mathew Sweet has dubbed “The Black Aquarius” in a radio documentary of the same name. Popular culture had taken a decided turn towards the occult. In 1967, Aleister Crowley found his face on a Beatles album and in the early 1970s Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page opened a bookstore devoted to the dark arts. This trend even made its way into British children's television: In the winter between 1969 and 1970, the Owl Service mini-series depicted ancient standing stones and long forgotten Welsh goddesses that could possess the living. In 1976, the series Children of the Stones depicted a stone circle that contained a rift in time. Even Dr. Who got in on the action: the 1971 episode The Daemons begins with a team of archaeologists excavating a Bronze Age burial mound after being warned of an ancient horned entity residing within it and this episode depicted the good Doctor nearly being burned alive while tied to a May Pole. The 1978 episode The Stones of Blood has the Doctor challenged by a secret Druidic sect who worships the Celtic hag goddess Cailleich in a Cornish stone circle. The stones, of course, turn out to be aliens who feed on human blood. 

The emerging film genre of Folk Horror personified this pop cultural trend..  In 1973, director Robin Hardy released The Wicker Man, whose titular character was a colossal sacrifice originally ascribed to ancient druids by Julius Caesar. The “return to mother nature” that helped define the optimism of the 1960’s counter-culture was turned on its head. The pagan, communal, and naturistic became the pretext for human sacrifice to deities resurrected from the depths of time.

In 1977, BBC ran a series presented by Anne Ross titled “Twilight of the English Celts” which documented the alleged “Guardians of the Old Ways.” In it, she argued that rural communities within the Pennine hills of Northern England still practiced the remnants of celtic paganism; worshipping fertility deities on magical dates like May 1st. Contemporary historian Ronald Hutton has written a corpus of texts debunking claims of pagan continuity in modern folklore. Huttons notes that medieval law books in England make no mention of pagan beliefs-excluding amulets, divination and other forms of operative magic. This is not to say that Christianity did not absorb and transform pagan beliefs and customs--clearly they did. But the concept of surviving pockets of paganism appears unfounded. “Twilight of the English Celts” can be seen less as a documentary providing evidence of surviving pagan practices and more of a pop cultural artifact that emerged alongside films like the Wicker Man.

The tabloid stories about ancient stone heads can be seen in and of itself as a subtheme of the folk horror genre. Perhaps we can analyse these stories using the same tools as literary critics. Mathew Sweet, in his previously mentioned radio broadcast “Black Aquarius” asks if the late 60s/early 70s turn to the occult was, in his words “the spiritual equivalent to buying a lava lamp,” not unlike Truzzi’s idea of a “pop religion.” Or did it “reveal something about the people we once were, the people we became?” Author Adam Scovell, who runs the aptly named blog celluloidwickerman.com writes,  argues in his 2017  book Folk Horror: Hours Dreadful and Things Strange, that such questions are hauntological in nature.


To understand this, we need to take a journey to the often perplexing world of critical theory.  A portmanteau of haunting and ontology, hauntology was originally coined by the French theorist Jacques Derrida to describe the ghost of Marx’s past vision of the future haunting contemporary Europe. Scovell’s book on Folk Horror--taking a que from the late literary critic Mark Fisher--broadens the concept to explain why a “lost vision of a pagan free love utopia” became so prescient for British 1970’s audiences. He describes some as hauntological “When its forgotten presence is acting its will and power through what is perceived to be ghosts of the past…” Artifacts like the Hexham Heads are thus hauntological in the sense that they are embodied with the concept of a lost pagan past that doesn’t exist so much as insist. The haunting isn’t the result of an ancient arcane curse but rather the lack of an organic connection to nature, sense of community and heritage that seems to reach beyond the eternal present of capitalist society. 

The 1970s were a time of industrial downturn and decay for the United Kingdom, making the agrarian and utopian dreams of the 1960s cruelly ironic. Its why punk rock is so angry. A decline in manufacturing and mining jobs, depressed wages, and labor discontent led to what economists referred to as “The British Disease.” The election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 restored some economic growth by brutally dismantling the welfare state and breaking the once powerful labor movement. This mode of governance--worship of free markets and the shredding of working class unions and welfare systems--is what we now refer to as  neoliberalism. In Northern England, ground zero for haunted heads, these policies were particularly disastrous.  In the 1980s Yorkshire was hit with economically devastating coal pit closures, leading to a violent strike in 1984 through 1985, while the country in general was facing recession and austerity. Pit closures continued into the early 90’s, when coal mining was  finally privatized. South Yorkshire actually had the lowest European growth rate in the 80’s and 90’s, losing 60% of its industrial employment between 1980 and 2005. Undoubtedly, the Thatcher era in Yorkshire was particularly stressful.

And multiple studies have confirmed that high stress situations may lead to individuals-particularly those who have trouble accepting ambiguity, to ascribe paranormal causes to their misfortune. Stressful life events are associated with an increased propensity towards sleep related hallucinations, and it is well documented that anomalous experiences often correspond to traumatic life events.

The economic anxiety and depression of Northern England has to be part of the cursed head story.. The cursed stone heads were discovered in a period primed to believe in their antiquity via the earth mysteries movement, and the economic and geographic context of their discovery undoubtedly affected the negativity that surrounded them. They were not haunted by ancient druidic spirits, but were rather hauntological in that they insisted upon an absence of a connection to the past.

In the summer of 1985, a few months after Margarat Thatcher's government crushed a nationwide miners strike against pit closures, Anne Ross was once again called upon to examine some curious stones found in North Derbyshire--a stronghold of the recently disempowered miners union. The stones were first uncovered in 1840 at Mouselow Castle, a hilltop in Glossop, Derbyshire. The stones were marked by a series of strange symbols, the most intriguing of which was a head that appeared to be sprouting horns.

 The stones were passed around to different owners until settling in the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery. The stones and surrounding hill piqued the interest of local archeologist Glynis Reeve, who, in 1984, excavated the hilltop site where the stones were originally found.

Not unlike the Dr. Who episode Several years prior, Reeve noticed that as soon as they began excavating the site, she began to be harassed by mysterious callers. They demanded to know why she was digging there, what she’d think she would find, and left ominous messages about the evil of the stone heads, horned figures, practitioners of the Old Ways, and the possibility of “ending up nailed to a tree.” One visitor to the museum told her she risked opening up the gates of hell.

The dig continued into the summer of 1985. Every single member of the crew suffered blood drawing freak accidents at the dig site. It was at this point that Glynis Reeves called upon Anne Ross to examine the original stones. Dr. Ross thought that “a strong local feeling about certain stones which had been sacred, which were believed to have certain powers” could be affecting the excavation

The following year, Glynis Reeve made an effort to calm the distraught local followers of the ‘Old Ways’ by trying to communicate with them on May 1st, the ancient Celtic festival of Beltane. 

She went to the excavation site and announced to people moving about by torchlight that they had nothing to fear from her. The harassment consequently stopped. Like the Hexham Heads, it is highly improbable that the Mouselow stones date beyond the early modern era. Nonetheless, it seems the belief in their antiquity and a suggestion that the excavation was on sacred land drove the perception of the supernatural.

The last case we found of an alleged cursed head occurred in 1989 around 40 miles north of Glossop in the small village of Crossflatts. Michael White, owner of the sixteenth century Ryshworth (Rushworth) Hall, dug up a curiously shaped sandstone boulder beneath a sycamore tree on the Hall’s grounds. Dubbed the “Druids Head,” the object became fodder for tabloid magazines when White’s wife, Alison, became desperately ill and his building business collapsed. 

He gave the head to a disbelieving friend, who then gave it back after suddenly going bankrupt soon afterwards.

The family home began to experience paranormal activity, such as being touched by unseen hands. Alison claimed to have seen a ghostly disembodied hand on the top of her stairs and further complained that her children would come into her room at night stating that people, and one time a dog, watched them sleep. They tried to put the head up for auction but had no buyers.

After the Ryshworth Hall Cursed Head became a tabloid sensation, a Halifax woman contacted a local newspaper to report that the 'Celtic’ head had actually been carved in 1978 by her father, who was  a previous occupant of Ryshworth Hall. She said he buried it to amuse his grandchildren, telling them it would confuse future archaeologists. 

Fittingly, the last tabloid stone head emerged in the last years of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. Her neoliberal policies, however, became hegemonic around the world. The proximity to an occult past imagined during the Black Aquarius had given way to an inability to imagine a past or future. Late social theorist Mark Fisher used the term “capitalist realism” to describe our neoliberal society’s inability to imagine a world beyond the alienation and anxiety of the capitalist economy. A world where the potential of a past embedded in the stone head tabloid stories of the 70s and 80s is no longer remotely imaginable. Then again, Fisher wrote Capitalist Realism in the late 2000s, and did not live to see the resurgence of the mass socialist movement following the election of Trump imagining life after capitalism. Perhaps, if the cursed heads were a manifestation of a disconnect from the natural world and community in the UK from the New Age through Thatcherism--an age where alienation and economic downturn ignited a fascination with a dark, cursed past--then today we can collectively imagine a positive future of ecological balance and community. A world where stone heads found in the garden remain just that.

While Anne Ross’ hypothesis was disproved, it evident that she was a brilliant archeologist especially considering how male dominated her field was. I mean if it weren’t for her we wouldn’t be making this episode.