THE HAIRY HANDS OF DARTMOOR

The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor

Imagine driving alone across Dartmoor. It’s late.

The road is almost empty. Mist hangs over the moor, the headlights carving a narrow tunnel through the darkness. There are no houses. No streetlights. Nothing but the ancient landscape and the road disappearing into the blackness ahead.

Then, without warning… Something grabs the steering wheel. Not a person sitting beside you. Not an animal....Hands.

Large, powerful, hairy hands that seem to appear from nowhere.

You fight them. You wrench the wheel back towards you. But whatever has hold of it is stronger. And the car begins to drift towards the edge of the road…

This is the legend of the Hairy Hands of Dartmoor — one of Devon’s strangest and most enduring ghost stories.

The story centres on the B3212, the lonely road between Postbridge and Two Bridges.

For more than a century, travellers have told stories of vehicles suddenly swerving or becoming impossible to control on this stretch of Dartmoor. Some claimed they actually saw a pair of hairy hands seize the steering wheel.

Others said they couldn’t see anything at all. They simply felt something invisible fighting them for control.

And then came 1921.

In June of that year, E. H. Helby, a medical officer at Dartmoor Prison, was travelling by motorcycle with his two children in a sidecar. Something went terribly wrong.

The motorcycle left the road. Helby was killed. His children survived.

According to later accounts, they remembered their father struggling desperately with the controls and telling them to jump clear.

Then, just months later, another motorcyclist reported an extraordinary experience.

He claimed that a pair of invisible hands had suddenly taken control of his motorcycle and forced him towards the roadside.

The story was sensational. And newspapers seized upon it.

By October 1921, the mysterious phenomenon had reached the national press, where the sinister name “The Unseen Hands” helped transform a collection of strange accidents into a full-blown supernatural mystery.

Soon the stories multiplied.

Drivers spoke of violent swerving.

Motorcyclists described something gripping their handlebars.

There were tales of enormous hairy hands appearing on windscreens.

And in one later account, a woman camping on the moor claimed that a single hairy hand tried to get into her caravan during the night.

She said it disappeared after she made the sign of the Cross.

So whose hands were they?

That’s where the story becomes even stranger.

Some versions say the hands belonged to the spirit of someone who had died on the road.

Others have suggested a murdered man.

There have even been stories connecting the phenomenon with Dartmoor Prison.

But there is another explanation — one considerably less supernatural.

After the stories attracted attention, the road was investigated. One theory was that a dangerous camber in the road was causing vehicles to lose control, particularly at a time when early cars and motorcycles were far less forgiving than modern vehicles.

Road repairs followed. And perhaps most tellingly…

The phantom hands seemed to become much less troublesome. But here’s the thing. A dangerous road can explain an accident. It can explain a vehicle suddenly pulling to one side.

It can explain a frightened driver fighting to regain control. It doesn’t explain why people claimed they felt hands on the wheel.

And that’s why, more than 100 years later, the story refuses to disappear. Drive across Dartmoor today and the landscape can still feel otherworldly.

The open moor. The sudden fog. The silence. The ancient stones. And that lonely stretch of road between Postbridge and Two Bridges.

Perhaps the Hairy Hands were nothing more than a combination of dangerous road conditions, early vehicles, frightened travellers and a newspaper story that caught the public imagination.

Or perhaps…

Just perhaps…

there is something on that road that doesn’t want you to stay on it.

So if you’re ever driving across Dartmoor and suddenly feel another pair of hands closing around your steering wheel…

Don’t panic. Don’t look in the passenger seat. And whatever you do… Don’t let go.

A Lost Entity Story