The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor

The B3212 crosses the open moor between Postbridge and Two Bridges. In 1921 one stretch, near the gates of Archerton, was described as "a wide, straight, open" road. Grassland sloped down on both sides to a brook crossed by a humped bridge. Later sources claim odd accidents there since around 1910.

March 1921. Dr Ernest Hasler Helby, medical officer of Dartmoor Prison, was riding his motorcycle and sidecar from Princetown towards Tavistock. Two children sat in the sidecar. Suddenly he called out. "There is something wrong. Jump!" The machine swerved. The engine broke loose. Helby was killed instantly. The children survived.

Some weeks passed. Then a motor-coach climbing the slope swerved, "quite suddenly and for no apparent reason." It mounted the grassy slope to the right of the road. It did not upset. But it lay over at such an angle that several passengers were thrown out. One, a woman, was very seriously injured.

Then came the third. An army officer and experienced motorcyclist, known only as Captain M., told his friend T. Gifford what had happened. "It was not my fault. Believe it or not, something drove me off the road. A pair of hands covered mine." He did not see them. He felt them. "I felt them as plainly as I ever felt anything in my life." They were "large, muscular, hairy hands." And "they forced the machine into the turf at the edge of the road." On 14 October 1921 the Daily Mail ran Gifford's article. Its title was "The Unseen Hands."

Summer 1924. Folklorist Theo Brown was staying in a caravan about half a mile from the road. Some sources say the witness was her mother. The account speaks of "some power very seriously menacing." Then, at the slightly open window, "the fingers and palm of a very large hand with many hairs on the joints and back of it, clawing up and up." The witness made the Sign of the Cross and prayed. "The hand slowly sank down out of sight."

Others followed. In 1962 Florence Warwick's car broke down on the road. "I looked up and saw a pair of huge, hairy hands pressed against the windscreen." The journalist Rufus Endle said that near Postbridge "a pair of hands gripped the driving wheel and I had to fight for control." He asked that the story wait until after his death. In 2008 a motorist reported hairy "paws" grabbing the steering wheel.

The records of 1921 offered other causes. The coroner returned a verdict of accidental death for Helby, a skull fracture caused by the breaking of a portion of the motor cycle. The Western Morning News blamed the motor-coach on a broken spring. Gifford, a spiritualist, suggested an "elemental" or an earth-bound spirit, though he found "no record of a murder having occurred near the spot." Beatrice Chase blamed "magnetic rocks, of which there are many on Dartmoor." Later investigations reportedly found a dangerous camber, which was altered. Folk tradition added an escaped convict and a Bigfoot type moor creature.

Brian Dunning of Skeptoid notes that Captain M. appears only in Gifford's article. Dunning does not try to debunk what the officer felt. His point is that the other two crashes had documented mechanical causes.

Today the tradition centres on Higher Cherrybrook Bridge, probably a couple of kilometres from Archerton. Books, radio plays, television and podcasts have returned to it again and again. It remains one of England's best known haunted roads.