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.