In 1971, two brothers, Colin and Leslie Robson, digging casually in the garden of their family home in Hexham, unearthed two small carved stone heads, each roughly six centimetres across, one bearing a stark, masculine, skull-like face that the family nicknamed the boy, and the other featuring long hair and considerably softer, more feminine features, nicknamed accordingly the girl. Their actual age and true origin have never been conclusively established by anyone who has examined them since; suggestions have ranged from genuine Iron Age Celtic head-cult artefacts, connecting them to a real and ancient British religious tradition, to much more recent carvings made far closer to the present day, and this genuine, unresolved uncertainty is a large part of what has kept the case so durable in public interest over the decades since.
According to the family's own account, strange phenomena followed almost immediately after the discovery: poltergeist-style disturbances began occurring around the house, and the heads themselves were reportedly found to have moved position entirely on their own between one sighting and the next. The most dramatic claim to emerge from the case involves a next-door neighbour's daughter and one of the Robson children independently describing a creature they called half-sheep, half-human, entering the house on separate occasions, with the family's own cat also reacting visibly and inexplicably to something unseen on the stairs at the same time.
The heads were eventually sent away to Dr Anne Ross, a respected academic expert on ancient British head-cult artefacts, specifically for proper scholarly study; Ross herself later described experiencing her own nocturnal encounter with a large, wolf-like figure inside her own home after taking the heads in for examination, an experience she directly connected back to the case itself. The heads' current whereabouts remain genuinely disputed today, and the werewolf sightings rest entirely on the family's own account without any independent corroboration, making this one of Northumberland's most extensively written-about yet still least resolved paranormal cases, a mystery that has resisted any tidy conclusion for over half a century.
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