West Devon
3 legends
The Hairy Hands of Dartmoor
A stretch of the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges on English Dartmoor, where unexplained crashes began in the early 1920s: drivers and motorcyclists described hairy hands seizing the wheel and wrenching it towards the verge. After several deaths in 1921 the local press took it up, and engineers who examined the road found a plainer cause — a badly cambered surface that pulled vehicles off line. The road was rebuilt, the crashes stopped, and the legend stayed.
Wistman's Wood
A tiny grove of dwarf oaks on Dartmoor, growing straight out of granite boulders and covered entirely in moss and lichen. The trees are wind-twisted past recognition and there are gaps between the stones deep enough to swallow a person. The name is traced to the dialect word wisht — eerie, enchanted. It is thought to be one of the last remnants of the forest that covered Dartmoor before the Bronze Age.
Dartmoor
The Devon moor that gave Conan Doyle The Hound of the Baskervilles: he heard here the tradition of Richard Cabell, a seventeenth-century squire whose coffin was said to have been followed by a pack of spectral hounds. They are called the Wisht Hounds and are still described along the old track. A separate story concerns the Hairy Hands on the B3212, which motorcyclists say grab at the handlebars.