The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor: What the 1921 Papers Say
In October 1921 the Daily Mail printed an anonymous tale of hairy hands forcing a motorcycle off the Postbridge road on Dartmoor. The crashes behind the story were real. The hands first appear in that article, and later folklore books made them famous.
On 14 October 1921 the Daily Mail ran a short piece called “The Unseen Hands” by a contributor named T. Gifford. In it a young army officer, “Captain M.”, came back bloodied from a motorcycle ride on Dartmoor. He said a pair of “large, muscular, hairy hands” had closed over his own and steered him off the road. That article is the earliest known source for the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor. Everything told about them since grows from it.
What the record actually shows
The clearest account of the case is by Blake Smith, who traced the story back through the 1921 press for The Skeptic in 2022. This section follows his findings.
Gifford’s article used false names. It set the crashes near a village called “Midmoor”, a stand-in for Postbridge. It described three accidents at one spot. A doctor on a motorcycle was killed. Some weeks later a motor coach swerved up the bank and threw out several passengers. Then, on Friday 26 August, Captain M. crashed and told of the hands. Three days after the first article, on 17 October, the Mail followed up. It named the road as the Postbridge to Two Bridges road. It named the dead doctor as Dr E. H. Helby, medical officer of Princetown Prison. Gifford, described as “interested in psychic matters”, offered two theories. One was an “elemental” or nature spirit. The other was the earth-bound spirit of a murderer.
The first two crashes are real and were reported at the time. The Scotsman of 28 March 1921 recorded that Dr Ernest Hasler Helby, aged 51, died of a fractured skull “through the breaking of a portion of a motor cycle” while riding from Princetown to Tavistock. An inquest returned a verdict of accidental death. The notice said his two daughters were in the sidecar. Smith found no record that Helby had children, so that detail may be a press error. Some modern retellings, including Wikipedia, put the crash in June 1921, but the contemporary notice places it in March. The Western Morning News reported the charabanc accident on 25 August 1921. In September the same paper reported that an injured passenger, a Mr R. Lee, had died in hospital. Neither report mentions hands of any kind. Both point to plain mechanical or driving causes.
Captain M. is the weak link. He was never named and never came forward. His crash exists only in Gifford’s telling.
How the story grew
The Mail piece set off letters and theories. On 24 October 1921 the Dartmoor writer Beatrice Chase suggested in the Western Morning News that magnetic rocks on the moor were to blame. Spiritualist papers took it up too. In August 1922 the journal Light printed a piece signed “P. H. F.”, which Smith attributes to the explorer Percy Fawcett. It argued that Helby’s dying will had stayed fixed at the spot.
The hands then passed into folklore books. Ruth E. St Leger-Gordon gave them a chapter in The Witchcraft and Folklore of Dartmoor in 1965. Theo Brown, a Devon folklorist, wrote about them in Tales of a Dartmoor Village in 1973 and in Devon Ghosts in 1982. Brown added the best-known later episode. She wrote that her mother, camping in a caravan near Postbridge around 1924, saw a large hairy hand at the window and drove it off with the sign of the cross. That account was told within the family and written down decades later. It is the only named later sighting we could trace.
The Paranormal Database entry for the road repeats the motorcyclist and caravan stories. It adds a small childlike figure seen by the roadside, waving as if to flag down drivers. It gives no date or witness for that figure.
How to read it
The road and the crashes are real. The hands are a story attached to them by a writer with an interest in the psychic, in a year when motor accidents filled the papers and spiritualism was at its height. There is no independent witness to the hands in 1921. Wikipedia and many retellings say the road’s camber was later found to be dangerous and was altered. We found no dated record of that work.
The B3212 still crosses open moor, with sharp bends, livestock and sudden fog. Those hazards do not need a ghost to explain a crash. What makes the Hairy Hands unusual is that the paper trail survives. You can watch a newspaper tale turn into folklore, step by step, over sixty years. We class the hands as unverified. The case itself is well documented.
Sources
- Blake Smith, “The Hairy Hands of Devon: how a tabloid tale spiraled into a full-blown urban legend”, The Skeptic, July 2022 - traces the 1921 Daily Mail, Scotsman and Western Morning News reports and the later folklore books
- Wikipedia, Hairy Hands - summary citing the October 1921 Daily Mail articles and the camber story
- The Paranormal Database, Devon (entry #1129 Hairy Hands, Postbridge) - folklore catalogue entry for the B3212