A Tale of Two Wolves in Hexham

As with many mysteries, and especially those where a significant amount of time has passed, ‘facts’ surrounding the story can become distorted. Obviously I use ‘facts’ in a loose sense when we talk about the Hexham Heads mystery because many parts of the story are open to interpretation, but even so there are still strands to this tale which are repeatedly fused together.

One such strand is the so-called link between the Heads and an earlier sighting of a wolf roaming around Hexham in 1904. This story is well documented, and what is fascinating is the number of times the paranormal activity surrounding the Heads in the 1970s, and the activities of an escaped wolf in the early 1900s, are linked together. Basically this comes down to some people believing that the presence of a wolf in 1904, and the sightings of a werewolf some 70 years later, cannot fail to be linked – even though one wolf was an escaped animal and very real, and one was a mythical creature which was said to have appeared.

It is now commonplace for journalists and authors who are composing a quick summary of the Hexham Heads mystery to mention both the Hexham Heads werewolf and the Allendale wolf (as the earlier creature was called) in the same piece. In fact only recently an article appearing in The Chronicle did just that.

It’s difficult to trace when these two stories were first conjoined. Examples I have seen are in Nick Redfern’s book on Secret Societies, plus numerous web pages such as Mysterious Britain. However I would imagine that two wolf stories occurring within close proximity would have had people linking the two not long after the Heads were first discovered in 1971.

I think the best discussion on this subject is covered in Stuart Ferrol’s 2005 article for the Fortean Times which is archived here. He covers all possible links and connections between the two wolves – in fact that could possibly be three, as a third wolf may have been found dead nearby in 1905 – and reaches some very measured conclusions. In essence he argues that environment, public hysteria, and fear can all contribute to the possibility of the triggering of strange phenomena rather than something directly connecting the two cases.

I personally don’t believe there is any connection whatsoever to the events of 1904 and 1971. Instead I think it was just a strange coincidence that wolves happened to feature in two stories within a small geographical area. Admittedly it is an interesting hypothesis that the two cases could be connected, but for me the evidence simply doesn’t stack up.