The Haunted Generation

(This feature first published in Fortean Times No 453, dated January 2025)

HEADS WILL ROLL

As a surprise Halloween treat, the BBC Archive’s official Youtube channel uploaded a 1976 news report that had become a holy grail for square-eyed forteans – Nationwide’s disturbing teatime feature on the infamous “Hexham Heads”. BOB FISCHER meets the archive’s own GREG McKEVITT, whose diligent detective work resulted in the unearthing of this long-buried TV treasure

“The first I heard of the Hexham Heads was a couple of years ago, just through online chatter,” says Greg McKevitt, content producer for BBC Archive. “I saw mention of the footage existing in the archive and obviously my ears pricked up. Nationwide was such an unusual programme, and it’s been fertile ground for our social media team. We’ve been posting clips from it for many years now.”

The Hexham Heads themselves? The central figures in a story that continues to baffle and fascinate in equal measure. In 1971, brothers Colin and Leslie Robson unearthed two small, carved stone heads in their Northumberland garden, and the discovery sparked a torrent of outlandish supernatural claims. There were reports that the Robson family had experienced a flurry of poltergeist-like activity in their home, with bottles flying and the heads themselves changing position when left unattended. For neighbour Nelly Dodd, the repercussions of the discovery were even more alarming: she claimed to have been visited during the night by a bizarre half man/half sheep creature (for comprehensive FT coverage, see FT294:42-47, FT295:44-49).

By early 1972, the story had made its way into the local newspapers. “Eerie tale of the two idol heads” was the headline in Newcastle’s The Journal on Friday 3rd March. The report quoted “one of the country’s top Celtic experts” Dr Ann (sic) Ross, and claimed the heads were “probably used for worship by a Celtic tribe 1,800 years ago”. That same day, the city’s Evening Chronicle ran a similar story under the headline “Terror from the Celtic mists”, with Anne Ross speculating that the Robson family’s council house may have been built on the site of “an old Celtic shrine or burial ground”. Two years later, the story was still rumbling, with Dr Ross now reporting her own terrifying nocturnal visitation. In The Journal of 14th January 1974 she claimed to have been visited by a bona fide lycanthrope: “half-human, half beast, like a werewolf”.

However, it was the report by BBC1 current affairs programme Nationwide, broadcast on Friday 20th February 1976, that cemented this curious tale in the psyche of a generation. In a filmed insert, journalist Luke Casey stressed the importance of the severed head in ancient Celtic iconography, before interviewing Colin and Leslie’s mother Jenny Robson and Dr Anne Ross herself. Casey also suggested that the supernatural visitations sparked by the Hexham Heads could potentially be explained by the stone carvings themselves harbouring centuries-old psychic echoes of Celtic brutality, a theory not dissimilar to that expounded in Nigel Kneale’s infamous 1972 BBC drama The Stone Tape.

In the intervening decades, this ten-minute news report took on its own mythical status. The footage was even rumoured to have been lost completely, with traumatised 1970s youngsters only able to draw on their own fading memories of the story. Until, that is, Halloween 2024. On the morning of Thursday 31st October, the entire Hexham Heads report suddenly appeared unannounced on the BBC Archive Youtube channel. It was the result of some diligent detective work by Greg McKevitt himself.

“When I heard about the Hexham Heads, I looked to see if the footage existed,” explains Greg. “Although full editions of Nationwide weren’t normally preserved, lots of the film inserts had been saved in various degrees of completeness. For decades, they would have been sitting as physical film on a shelf in Perivale, but over the last ten years or so there’s been a mass digitisation of content in the BBC archive. And it’s now all gone into a system that is searchable.

“It was buried away, and it took a bit of tracing. But lo and behold, I found the footage. There was a problem, though – it was mute. So although I’d seen the report being talked about as the holy grail of paranormal footage, it actually felt a bit underwhelming seeing it without the audio. It was ten minutes long with no real context as to what was happening. It went from shots of Celtic stone heads to footage of Hadrian’s Wall with weird, severed heads on stakes! There were interviews with people that we couldn’t identify, although they later turned out to be Jenny Robson and Dr Anne Ross. And then, bafflingly, at the end – why was Luke Casey holding up a cassette tape?”

The solution would come, heartwarmingly, from a 48-year old edition of Fortean Times.

“We sat upon the footage until a couple of months ago, when we were talking about what we could do with our social media for Halloween,” continues Greg. “Then I started to do a bit more digging. There’s a small community of Hexham Heads enthusiasts online, with some fantastic blogs that go into great detail. And I discovered that Issue 15 of Fortean Times, dated April 1976, contained pretty much a verbatim transcript of the full Nationwide audio. So I thought that if I could trace a copy, then we might be able to re-voice the whole thing for Youtube. I bought a compilation of Issues 1-15, and it filled in so many blanks.

“But then… part of the digitisation of the archive has involved running voice recognition software across some of the programmes, and that gives us an extra means of searching them for individual quotes. So with Fortean Times Issue 15 in my hand, I actually started searching the archive for a few different phrases from the transcript. And one of them came up trumps! It was a quote from Dr Anne Ross about the werewolf she saw: ‘the lower part was human’. I could only find the missing audio from the second half of the report, but it had most of Anne Ross’ quotes, as well as Luke Casey’s theory about The Stone Tape.

“It was a mind-blowing discovery for us. It was tagged onto the end of a programme called Under Bow Bells, broadcast on 29th Feb 1976: ‘A series of dialogues from St Mary-Le-Bone, introduced by the Reverend Joseph McCulloch’. At the end, the colour tone bars came up and then the missing audio from the Hexham Heads report kicked in from nowhere.”

Greg admits he has no idea why the absent audio was located on the end of a completely unrelated religious programme, but says he is excited at the possibility of this new search facility ultimately being used to locate the first half of the missing soundtrack. “I have tried!” he insists. “There’s been nothing so far, but I haven’t given up.”

In the meantime, the Hexham Heads report on the BBC Archive Youtube channel is as complete a version as currently possible. The missing audio – from approximately the opening five minutes of the insert – is replaced by narration from Greg himself, using Steev Moore’s transcription from FT15:4-5 as source material. The footage itself, meanwhile, is as originally broadcast: with the exception of the opening titles from The Stone Tape, added by Greg to provide useful context. The report as a whole makes for gruesome viewing, with the Celtic fascination for beheading indeed illustrated by shots of (hopefully) prop heads on spikes, and Dr Anne Ross’s account of her own terrifying visitation punctuated by a sudden cut to a howling Oliver Reed in furry-faced make-up: a clip from the 1961 Hammer horror film, The Curse Of The Werewolf.

There is, however, one glaring omission from the report: footage of the heads themselves. The carved stone heads used on Nationwide to illustrate the story are not the originals. Even by 1976, their whereabouts was a mystery, although a story published by The Journal on 1st May 1975 suggested they were on their way back to Jenny Robson, who intended to “bury them back in the garden where they belong”.

And that mysterious cassette tape? It’s used by Luke Casey to illustrate his own Stone Tape theory. “Can it be possible that horrible experiences that happened thousands of years ago can somehow be imprinted or recorded in a stone head and then sort of played back when something comes along to trigger them off?” he asks Nationwide viewers. “It sounds fanciful in the extreme, but then supposing somebody had told one of the great composers that – hundreds of years after his death – an entire symphony could be captured on a little thing like this…”

For Greg McKevitt, the BBC Archive has almost provided its own Stone Tape, with the reconstituted Nationwide report bringing this long-lost example of suburban weirdness back into the public arena to haunt a whole new generation. At time of writing, a fortnight after being uploaded onto Youtube, the footage has already racked up over 16,000 views.

“People of a certain age were really traumatised by this thing, and had built it up in their memory,” smiles Greg. “I’d even seen people talking about getting a crowdfunder together to pay for the footage! I just love the idea of these things existing in the folk memory, waiting to be unearthed. One of the great privileges of this job is to be able to bring things like this to people.”

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