‘It moved out of the room on all fours’

The Dodds were so disturbed by the experience they even had to be rehomed by the local council.

By this point the Robsons had put two and two together and realised the events had begun at the same time the heads were discovered.

The relics were promptly donated to the Museum of Antiquities at Newcastle University.

Two years later, the heads were being studied at the University of Southampton by Dr Anne Ross, an archaeologist and expert in Celtic folklore.

Dr Ross, who recently passed away, was convinced the heads dated back to the Roman- British period 1,800 years ago.

But when she took the heads home for closer inspection, the curse claimed another victim.

She recalled: “I didn’t connect it with the heads, then. We always keep the hall light on and the doors open because our small son is a bit frightened of the dark, so there’s always a certain amount of light coming into our room.

“I woke up feeling panic- stricken and terribly, terribly cold. There was a sort of dreadful atmosphere of icy coldness all around me.

“Something made me look towards the door, and as I looked, I saw this thing going out of it.

“It was about six- feet high, slightly stooping, and it was black against the white door.

“It was half- animal and half- man. The upper part, I would have said, was wolf and the lower part was human.

“It was covered with a kind of black, very dark fur. As it went out I saw it clearly.”

Dr Ross didn’t breathe a word about the creature for fear of ridicule, but then her daughter, Berenice, encountered the entity just a few days later while sitting in the house on her own – the Hexham Heads only feet away from where she sat.

Dr Ross said: “Berenice had opened the front door and a black thing,

Perhaps they were buried on the site of a Celtic memorial.”

The heads ended up in London’s British Museum, where scientific analysis, surprisingly, was unable to determine their precise age.

“They were displayed, briefly, before being mothballed amid rumours of “unsettling events” in the famous and prestigious building.

Chemist Don Robins – who was convinced the quartz minerals within the heads acted like a “transmitter”, replaying past events – attempted to take them home.

But when he put them in the passenger seat of his car and turned on the ignition, the dashboard electrics went dead.

He turned to look at the heads, telling them firmly to “Stop it!”, and the car started!

Nowadays the whereabouts of the Hexham Heads remains a complete mystery.

Officially, they’re classed as ‘ lost’, though many suspect they’re firmly under lock and key to protect the public.