The heads came out of the back garden at 3 Rede Avenue, Hexham, Northumberland. Colin and Leslie Robson, brothers of about eleven and nine, dug them up in 1971. Each is roughly the size of a tennis ball, a stone-like ball with a face and a stump at the neck, as if it had once sat on something. Later writers called one the boy, with the hair cut in stripes, and the other the girl or the hag, with bulging eyes. The Museum of Antiquities in Newcastle was already writing about them by 29 October 1971. On 25 November they were packed and sent to Anne Ross, a Celtic archaeologist at the University of Southampton.

While they were still in the house, the Robsons said the heads turned by themselves overnight, and that bottles were thrown. Jenny Robson, the boys’ mother, told the BBC programme Nationwide in 1976 that a few nights after she showed the heads to the woman next door, that neighbor saw a creature in her bedroom, half man and half beast, and that the husband watched it pad down the stairs. Later retellings call the neighbor Mrs Dodd and the figure a sheep or a goat. A story told in Hexham afterward, and written up by Stuart Ferrol, has a drunk that same night with a sheep carcass from a nearby slaughterhouse on his back. That is a local tale, not a police note.

Ross had written on the old cult of the head. She published these two in Archaeologia Aeliana in 1973, among other Celtic heads, and she said at the time that where they came from and when they were made were problems. On Nationwide she said that a few days after they arrived in Southampton she woke in a panic and saw a figure about six feet high, slightly stooped, going out of the door. The upper part, she said, was a wolf and the lower part human, covered in black or very dark fur. She followed the sound down the stairs and lost it toward the back of the house. A few days later, she said, her teenage daughter came in from school, opened the front door, and saw a black thing as near a werewolf as she could picture, leap the banisters, land with a padded sound, and vanish into the music room. Ross said that the day the heads left the house, her husband included, everyone said a cloud had lifted.

The Evening Chronicle of 3 March 1972, under the headline “Terror from the Celtic mists,” carried a different account of the objects. Desmond Craigie, who had lived at 3 Rede Avenue, told the paper he had made them about sixteen years earlier, from bits of stone and mortar, to amuse his daughter. He said he had made three, that one was lost, and that the others had sat in the garden for years. He made new ones to show he could. They did not look like the pair from the garden. The same cuttings note that Colin Robson had been making clay heads at school before the find.

The stones were sampled twice. In 1972 Professor F. Hodson at Southampton looked at them under a microscope and called both a very coarse sandstone, with rounded quartz grains, and pointed to a local rock. D. A. Robson at Newcastle took a piece out. His report says the material is not like any natural sandstone of that country. In a real sandstone the grains touch. In these heads a fine matrix holds much larger quartz grains that mostly do not touch, and the grains are rounded and polished in the way of beach sand or builder’s sand, not the local stone. He concluded they were an artificial cement. If they were modern, he wrote, the sand was a builder’s sand. If they were old, someone would have had to carry seaside sand inland and mix it with ground limestone. The museum, having decided they were modern, wrote to Craigie in April 1975 that the tests were finished, the heads had gone back to the Robsons, and the file was closed.

That is not the last address on paper. Paul Screeton, working from the same letters, also has Anne Ross saying in 1977 that the heads were still in a box in Southampton, with a geologist who had sampled them. The chemist Don Robins, not the Newcastle geologist, took possession of a pair on 21 September 1977. In February 1978 he passed them to a dowser, Frank Hyde. After a car accident, Hyde was not there to return them, and that pair has not been produced since. The museum does not have them. Which box was the one the boys dug up, and which was a copy Craigie or someone else had made, is not settled by the letters.