Even in daylight the landscape around the B3212 across Dartmoor possesses an unsettling quality: sudden fog, prehistoric stones, streams black as oil beneath narrow bridges. The moor seems less like scenery than weather made solid. One understands immediately why generations of people travelling across it began imagining things moving in the mist beside the road. And on this particular stretch between Postbridge and Two Bridges, they imagined the Hairy Hands. The legend emerged properly during the early twentieth century after a succession of violent accidents on the moor road. Drivers and motorcyclists described losing control suddenly and inexplicably, as though some external force had seized the wheel or handlebars and wrenched them sideways. Survivors spoke of large disembodied hands — cold, muscular, covered in dark hair — appearing from nowhere and dragging vehicles towards the verge. One of the most famous cases involved a doctor travelling by motorcycle in 1921. His machine suddenly swerved off the road near Postbridge, killing him instantly. Other witnesses reported similar experiences: steering wheels twisting violently in their grip, invisible forces dragging vehicles across the carriageway. By the 1920s the story had spread nationally through newspapers and collections of Dartmoor folklore. The details vary wonderfully. Sometimes the hands are visible; sometimes merely felt. In certain versions they emerge through the fog ahead of travellers before fastening themselves upon the controls. Elsewhere they become almost vampiric in behaviour, scratching at caravan windows at night or creeping across the glass towards sleeping occupants. One woman reportedly escaped only by making the sign of the cross upon the windowpane. What makes the legend so effective is its absolute simplicity. No face. No voice. No explanation. Merely hands appearing suddenly where hands should not exist. And Dartmoor itself encourages precisely this kind of fear. The moor has always possessed an atmosphere peculiarly suited to English folklore: ancient crosses marking forgotten tracks, Bronze Age burial sites half-submerged in grass, ruined farmhouses dissolving slowly into rain and granite. Even modern roads across the landscape feel temporary, vulnerable to weather and darkness. The Hairy Hands seem less like a ghost story imposed upon Dartmoor than something generated naturally by the place itself.

The telegram arrived on the day of the funeral. “Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!” Nothing else. No explanation. No sympathy. Just those three grotesquely cheerful words sent anonymously from Dublin to the parents of Lieutenant Hubert Chevis after their son had died in agony from strychnine poisoning. Weeks later another message arrived: “It is a mystery they will never solve.” And nearly a century later, it still is. The death of Hubert Chevis possesses the atmosphere of an English detective novel written by somebody slightly unwell. Summer 1931. Surrey. Military camps hidden among pine woods and heathland. Manchurian partridge served for dinner in a bungalow at Deepcut Barracks. The details arrive already carrying the faint unreality of fiction. Chevis himself seemed almost aggressively conventional: handsome artillery officer, Charterhouse-educated, recently married to Frances Rollason, a wealthy divorcée six years older than him. On the evening of the 20th of June, the couple entertained friends with cocktails before dining early so they could attend the Aldershot Tattoo later that night. Dinner was prepared by the cook and served by their batman with the full machinery of upper-middle-class military England still functioning between the wars. Then Chevis tasted the partridge. “Take this bird away,” he reportedly said after one mouthful. “It is the most terrible thing I have tasted.” His wife agreed the meat seemed “fusty”. The birds were taken back to the kitchen and burned. Soon afterwards, Chevis collapsed with violent convulsions. Frances Chevis also became ill, though less severely. By the following morning Hubert was dead. Two grains of strychnine were found in his stomach. What followed feels peculiarly British in its combination of restraint and deepening nightmare. Detectives traced the poisoned birds backwards through butchers, suppliers and storage rooms, discovering no obvious contamination. Nobody appeared to possess motive. The marriage seemed happy. Chevis was popular. His wife inherited money independently and gained little from his death. The partridges themselves had vanished into the kitchen fire before examination could occur.