The Culverts

Whew, this thing has taken up a lot more time and effort than I thought it would! What started out as a short fact-checked suddenly evolved into a full-blown investigation, and I’m still not at the bottom of it.

It actually started literally underground. There is a local culvert complex not too far from where I live, a large mass of really old, tunnels and pipes carrying water out under a hill, preventing the nearby town from being constantly flooded. Ever since I was a child, I’ve heard stories about how “Satanists” (the most evil people children know) lived there, and how going there at night or day (it’s always pitch black) was a death sentence that would see you become the sacrifice in a horrible ritual.

The complex was never the home of devil worshippers, but I recently discovered that there was some truth to the stories. The culvert actually used to be the gathering place of some sort of cult, but it was broken up in the 80s. Of course, stories like that take a long time to fade.

With the only thing to go on being a newspaper clipping I recently found, I recently went to have a look with my girlfriend, April. No-one ever goes to the complex nowadays, but we were surprised to actually find things there. It’s difficult to explain what sort of things we found, but suffice to say, I thought it was some sort of prank, just stuff left around by someone who had heard the stories.

As it turns out, the stuff we found actually seems to be legitimate, and has taken a lot of looking into. The more I keep digging, the more I feel like an archaeologist or cult historian specialising in the late 80s, but there is so much interesting stuff here I can’t turn the opportunity down.

There will be some very exciting updates coming over the next few weeks, I’ll tell you guys that much! Thanks for being patient.

The Hairy Hands Follow-up

The Hairy Hands. Woosh, has this been a tough one! I have been looking around and contacting people in an attempt to find a satisfactory explanation, but in the end there was preciously little, apart from a woodcut of the hands from a former folklore recorder for the Devonshire Association.

In the end, I had to track down a copy of a 1972-book by Leger-Gordon on the folklore of Dartmoor. She clearly pinpoints the stories as beginning at the turn of the 1910s, and stopped already in the 30s. However, there are some curious variations.

In 1921, the hands became a national sensation by way of a number of headlines in The Daily Mail (of course). An investigation was carried out, and officials said the camber on the road past Postbridge was at fault, having a subtle curve that could force vehicles off the road, especially when wet.

Of course, that would not account for horses throwing their riders, ponytraps becoming completely overturned etc., which continued for another decade after the road was fixed. However, it is worth noting that a lot of people undoubtedly wanted to jump on the sensationalist bandwagon. Before the headlines, reports varied from “hands appearing out of nowhere,” hands springing from the reins or steering wheel to grip something else, or even a tall figure watching drivers, compelling them to twist their vehicles off the road. After the headlines however, almost every accident was described as being a result of “the Hairy Hands, appearing out of nowhere.”

It is worth noting that inexplicable accidents have kept on happening up until our day, but without much interest. Over the years, there have also been a number of reports from caravan-campers who have claimed the hands appeared out of nowhere to claw at their windows in the middle of the night, scaring them witless. All these are from after the national publicity, however, making them far less believable.

Nowadays, “Hairy Hands” appearing out of nowhere sounds quite silly, but back in the early 1900s things were very different. The fact that they were hairy represented something wild and uncontrollable in a world humanity felt it had more and more mastery over. Hairy hands striking with complete surprise clearly preyed on fears that we no longer share today, but which at the time must have been… terrifying. So who knows, maybe the Hairy Hands were just a particularly good ghost story of its era, which by way of coincidence and publicity has survived to this day.

Apologies

Hi guys!

I’m going to have to apologise for no case this week, but I’ve been really busy looking into something strange that happened around where I live not too long ago. Being a local, I want to do it justice, so I’m planning to make sure I have enough of a story and enough of an explanation before I give it to you.

Stay alert. If this turns out to be anything like it sounds…

It’s going to be a good one!

P.S. I’ll have a follow-up on the hairy hands up soon. Don’t worry, they might just be more innocent than they sound!