The Hairy Hands

The popular version goes like this: somewhere on the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges, drivers in the early 1900s began reporting attacks by a pair of disembodied hairy hands that would grab the steering wheel or throttle, forcing vehicles off the road. The story has accumulated details over time (phantom hands scratching car paint, a monk's curse, a murder victim, take your pick), and it has become one of Dartmoor's best-known modern legends.

As for where it actually came from: the written trail is surprisingly short. The tale seems to have consolidated in print chiefly through 20th-century folklore collections, including references in Legendary Dartmoor and other regional sources. Whether the legend grew from a cluster of genuine accidents, from a single sensational retelling, or simply from the moor's reputation and the road's reputation for being lonely and difficult, I cannot say with confidence. The sources do not always agree on dates or details. Like most legends, this one has mutated in the telling.

The real event behind this stretch of road: Dr Ernest Helby, medical officer at Dartmoor Prison, died here on 24-25 March 1921 after a motorcycle accident, reported at the time by the London Daily Chronicle as a plain mechanical failure. It was not until the Daily Mail's "The Unseen Hands" piece seven months later, on 14 October 1921, that the story gained its supernatural framing, independently rewritten again by regional papers within days. (Wikipedia, cited above, gives Helby's death as "June" 1921; the probate record and the Chronicle's own report both place it in March.) The stretch runs between Postbridge and the Two Bridges Hotel.