A short one today, folks!

Dartmoor is a unique region in Southern England, unlike anywhere you’ve seen, and its eerie nature lends itself perfectly to stories of ghosts and monsters, as evident by the hundreds and hundreds of folk tales from the area. Some of them feature the ghosts of lords, a great cat-like beast, or the devil himself.

However, one of the most curious stories on Dartmoor is also one of the most modern. It is the story of the Hairy Hands. This is a very special ghost story, because it has been reported several times by separate individuals over the course of the early 20^th century, and it all takes place on one, very specific road. The B3212 past Postbridge.

Drivers would come along in their cars or motorcycles, speeding across the moor, before they would be forced off the road, sometimes with fatal results. Surviving victims reported that it seemed as though some strange force had taken hold and twisted their steering wheels, trying to force them into their doom! The first reports appeared in 1909, and already then some were describing the mysterious force as a pair of disembodied hands, appearing out of nowhere.

The story gradually garnered more and more attention, especially after the hands supposedly caused the death of the medical officer of Dartmoor Prison in 1921. Two girls who had been riding in his motorcycle sidecar described how the hands had gripped the handlebars and twisted the vehicle out of control. Later, a Captain in charge of one of the Dartmoor military training areas barely got away with his life in a similar situation, writing an official report on the event.

Occasional sightings continued up through the first half of the century, and with the occasional fatal accident, but since the 1940s, no-one has suffered the wrath of the hairy hands. Today the legend lives on as yet another scary tale among the children growing up around the moor. The hands have migrated to the marshes around Postbridge, and it is said that if you walk among at night, the Hairy Hands will burst up from the bog, grab your legs and pull you under. I guess they found that to be a more effective way of haunting.

A Follow-up on the Southampton Tunnel Cannibals

The other day I finally got a hold of someone from the Southampton Local Heritage group (http://southamptonheritage.org.uk/) who seemed to know something about the story. She had spoken to several people who had grown up in the post-war years, and while they were familiar with the story, they never knew where exactly in the city it was supposed to have taken place. The victims in it had varied greatly too, with some telling the story as involving a group of children becoming trapped, others saying it was British soldiers instead of American, and some even placing it in the interwar years, blaming it on a collapse during excavations.

However, she pointed out an interesting link I had completely overlooked myself. Southampton is not the only city with tunnels supposedly haunted by cannibals. There have been several stories across Europe, but the one she thought most relevant was a disturbingly similar story from Rome. Supposedly, way back towards the end of the Italian Unification in 1870, some of the city’s catacombs collapsed under artillery fire while troops inside were waiting to spring an ambush. As you can expect, it was said that the soldiers trapped inside fell to cannibalism, and had to be put down when they finally were unearthed.

Once again, there are no official records of this happening, but the story could easily have been told initially as an illustration of how close Rome was to collapse when it was “saved” by the Italian armies. It is also easy to imagine that these stories had a resurgence against the backdrop of World War 2, and it is there I see our most likely link. It is quite possible that some soldier from Southampton heard the story of the soldiers in the catacombs while stationed in Rome, either before or after the war. It is not difficult to imagine that this soldier, upon returning home to see the destruction of the underground tunnels, was reminded of the cannibals and decided to give the local children a scare at some point in the decade following the war.

Of course, as with any ghost stories the origins are difficult to pin down, but considering the evidence at hand, this explanation seems highly plausible. Therefore, sadly, I must conclude that if you were to dig up the tunnels under Southampton, you would probably not find the remains of a tribe of cannibals. All you would have done would be to dig the foundations of the city out from under it.

Southampton Tunnels

Southampton is a port town in the south of England that is important enough to get away with the occasional nickname “Gateway to the World.” It was the port of departure for the Titanic, and today often welcomes the largest cruise ships in the world. It was founded by the Romans, and has been known as the home of Britons, Saxons and Vikings, with the archaeological digs to prove it. It wasn’t until the fourteenth and fifteenth century, however, that the underground cellars and vaults where built.

They are a famous feature of Southampton, connected to the old walls circling the town centre, and many of them are regular tourist attractions. Some of them are small, while others are large enough to house hundreds of people. This has been tested, because they were often used as  bomb shelters during the many air raids on Southampton during World War II.

Those same air raids ruined even more vaults than had already been lost to the passing of time and reconstructions, but today it is still possible to see several of the remaining ones. I say several, because there are some that are closed off to the public, and as far as I have been able to find out, everyone else. The reasoning is, of course, that they are dangerous, and being down there is considered far too risky.

There is, you see, not only vaults and cellars and small chambers down there. Between many of them run tiny tunnels, often too small for a grown man to crawl through. They criss-cross the network of vaults, and were either designed as a good means of making air flow through them, or as a poor means of travelling between them. Unfortunately, as they are difficult to find, and too risky to discover exactly where leads, the number of tunnels and their extent can only be guessed at. The weight and pressure the modern world has heaped on these structures from above is why they are considered a risk, with many having been filled with cement. Some, however, have proved too deep to fill, and therefore stay open to this day. It is the chambers connected and adjoining to these tunnels that are closed off.

At least unsafe structures is the excuse the city council will give you. There is a different version of this story that the children of Southampton have been telling each other for almost 70 years:

The only recorded use of these tunnels happened in 1944. Two companies of American soldiers that were stationed in Southampton (awaiting the crossing to mainland Europe) had been designated one of the now-closed vaults as their emergency shelter. The day before they were to set off, the companies were preparing in a field just outside the town walls. When the air raid siren went off, the soldiers knew exactly what to do, and within minutes were locked up inside the vault. There was barely enough room for the two companies to stand, but the soldiers waited patiently for the thunder of falling bombs to pass. That was when someone started hammering away at the blast doors.

At first one of the captains tried to deter whoever was outside, but in the end the pleading woman’s voice from outside was too much, and three soldiers pulled the doors open. There stood close to half a hundred children that had been on their way to the train station for relocation. The air raid had been a surprise, and they were now in mortal danger, caught in the open. The woman in charge of them pleaded with the soldiers, who were already discussing what to do. There was no room for any more people inside, but anyone sent outside would be at extreme risk.

That was when one of the captains suggested his company could go further in to a different vault, through one of the tunnels they had discovered. It was quickly settled, and – leaving their equipment behind in order to have room – the company set off, crawling through the rocky tunnel.

Only a few minutes away, they entered a new, darkened vault, and shouted back to the people they had left behind. Everything was all right.

A moment later, the entire vault was a chaos of screams, falling pebbles and dust. A stray bomb had struck right above. The violent shake hadn’t hurt any of the soldiers or children in the first room, but had dislodged something in the tunnel between the two vaults, so the other could no longer be reached. The soldiers on the other side had been buried under countless tons of rock and dirt.

Operations started to dig open the tunnel and reach the men on the other side, but it soon became clear that there was next to no chance there would be anyone alive on the other side. Soldiers were needed on the mainland, and unearthing the dead here was as little of a priority as it was on the battlefields of Europe.

It wasn’t until almost a year later a troop of reserve soldiers, awaiting their orders to transport to Germany, decided to start digging through. It took them four days to dig through all the rocks and rubble, but in all that time they did not find a single body. Then, finally, they reached the other side. The tunnel had been ruined, and so had large parts of the other vault, but there was still a lot of open room. A few soldiers went inside, and the stench of rotting flesh stung in their nostrils as they swiped the light of their lanterns across the dark walls. It wasn’t until they looked down on the ground they saw the missing soldiers. Some were only skeletons, lying in pools of dried blood, while others seemed… fresher, their skin barely loosened from their starved faces. And then, seemingly from nowhere, a pale, screaming figure fell upon one of the soldiers. It fought viciously, arms and legs clawing away at its victim. With a heavy stroke, it bashed his head in with a club, but as it tried to scurry off in the darkness, the three remaining soldiers brought it down, as it screamed and twisted in agony.

It was only later, as they pulled the corpses into the daylight, it became apparent that the pale and malnourished creature had once been a man. Its club had once been a thigh bone. To make matters worse, inspection of the skeletons they found revealed that their flesh had not rotted away, but that their bones had been picked clean by human teeth. And by more sets than one.

The vault was sealed, and in the final hours of the war the event was covered up. Shortly after the peace, the rest of the vaults in that part of town were closed as well. For you see, not every soldier in the old company were accounted for. Since several people had participated in eating their brothers in arms, the assumption was that the other flesheaters had been killed off by the sole remaining soldier, their bodies hidden somewhere in the tunnels.

But they sealed the vaults for a different reason; an explanation fostered by the shrieks and pained howls people heard late at night. There were still were cannibals running mad in the tunnels of Southampton.