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Certainly the music that backed him up, which I believe he'd composed himself, set the scene as did his delivery - but it wouldn't have been a bad idea to dim the lights a bit to create a little more atmosphere. Never mind, the evening was sold out and a full house waited to hear the tale of the Hexham Heads, two small stone heads found in a Northumberland garden in 1971 whose story, potentially a paranormal one, remains controversial to this day.
But first, Richard was going to set the scene for us by explaining how he got in to the paranormal and the supernatural. His introductory tale told of an RAF Mosquito raid on Karlsruhe on 4th December 1944 in which a plane crashed in enemy land yet the pilot Albert, believed to be dead, returned home.
Not an uncommon occurence during World War II but one that held deep significance to Richard MacLean Smith for Albert was his grandfather. He heard the story many times as a youth and it varied little but, one day, an extra detail was added that sheds light on Richard's later curiosity towards all things unexplained.
Albert had told of a vision he saw in his crashing plane of an elderly woman, something he'd always put down to hallucinations caused by trauma. Yet Albert's devoutly Catholic mother was, at that same time, trying to ease her worries about her son by visiting a medium who told her that Albert was being looked after by a deceased elderly relative.
A love of the paranormal, and, indeed, storytelling, began and, then, so did the story of the Hexham Heads. One evening after school, in June 1971, brothers Colin and Leslie Robson were playing in their garden in Hexham when they found, buried two feet deep in a part of the garden where nothing ever grew, a pair of tennis ball sized sandstone heads, one of which appeared to to look like a witch.
As their parents weren't home yet (it was the seventies) they showed their neighbours, the Dodd family, the heads. The Dodds felt that the heads may have some archaeological importance so they suggested that Colin and Leslie take them to Hexham Abbey which they did. The verger took possession of them but told the brothers that, all being well, they could pick them up next week and keep them.
The following week saw some very peculiar goings on at the Dodd residence. Mr & Mrs Dodd and their three children were woke by strange noises and saw a creature with the body of a ram and the head of a man stumbling around the room. They found it terrifying but they did not, as far as we can ascertain, make any connection with the strange heads unearthed next door.
When Colin and Leslie duly collected their finds a week later they were informed there was a strong possibility they were of Celtic origin. Returning home, they put the heads on their mantelpiece to act as ornaments but, by the next morning, the heads had changed direction and were looking out to the spot in the garden where they'd been discovered.
The kitchen tap started turning itself on, as did the lights, and, finally, the television, releasing the sound of static into the room. Later, Colin saw a glow coming from the spot where the heads had been unearthed and found there, where previously nothing had grown, a strange flower blooming.
Colin and Leslie's elder sister, Wendy, suspected her younger brothers were trying to hoax, to scare, their parents so she confiscated the heads and placed them in her bed. When she awoke they had moved to the bottom of the bed.
Eventually Dr Anne Ross, a renowned expert in Celtic artefacts, got involved and when she made the mistake of taking the Hexham Heads home she soon came to regret it. She awoke from a nightmare at 2am in the morning and saw a tall shadow leaving her room. She followed the shadow and, in her kitchen, observed a wolf walking on two legs.
On another occasion, Dr Ross's daughter saw the same wolf who, this time, ran towards her before vanishing into thin air right in front of her eyes. Doors began to burst open seemingly of their own free will and cold spots would appear in random locations around the house. Understandably spooked by all this, Dr Ross handed the heads to Professor Frank Hodson. As soon as she had done, the wolf stopped appearing, the cold spots warmed up, and doors remained closed unless opened by an actual person.
Under Hodson's ownership, the Hexham Heads made the news which alerted the story to another local man, Des Craigie. Craigie, a lorry driver, contacted the Newcastle Evening Chronicle and informed them that he was the previous occupant of the home where the heads had been found and they weren't, as some were speculating, 1,800 year old Celtic mysteries, but simply a couple of toys he'd made to amuse his daughter, Nancy. It wasn't until the Q&A that Richard MacLean Smith revealed that Craigie's previous job had been at an artificial stone making company!
Untainted, so far, by this knowledge, we heard the story of how Des Craigie and Dr Anne Ross ended up at loggerheads (see what I did there?) with each other over the origin of the Hexham Heads. Dr Ross had her reputation to worry about. To have made such a woefully inaccurate call would not be far from career suicide.
We didn't really get to the bottom of how that panned out (hey, we're talking about mysteries, right?) but we did discover that in 1977 the Hexham Heads somehow found their way into the possession of the controversial chemist Don Robins, a man who was a firm believer in something called 'stone tape theory'.
Stone tape theory was the belief that stone, like tape, could retain memories of events, using magnetic properties. Traumatic or important events could be historically retained in ancient megaliths, Stonehenge being a particularly prominent example of this theory and the Hexham Heads a smaller version of the same thing.
Needless to say, stone tape theory has been roundly dismissed by academia but, due to its sheer oddness perhaps, was embraced by storytellers like Nigel Kneale in his 1972 Christmas ghost story The Stone Tape.
The year the Hexham Heads were discovered was also the year that the celebrated paediatrician Donald Winnicott died. Winnicott's studies had seen him become fascinated with children's toys and their security blankets. 'Transitional objects' he named them and suggested that, at a very early age, we begin to imbue things, non-living things, with meaning.
This related to the idea of phenomenolgy proposed five decades earlier by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, and it's not something that stops when children move into adulthood. Look at a flag or a religious idol and its meaning will very much depend on what you have decided, consciously or subconsciously, you think it means - or want it to mean. Some feel (and some fake) huge passion when they see their national flag, others nothing.
Religious idols carry the same duality and you only have to look at the craze for collecting the former belongings of deceased celebrities such as David Bowie to see that this practice is not confined to those with a belief in the religion or the supernatural (the same thing, basically). Is David Bowie's tape recorder really any different than any other similar machine because he once owned it? Does Fred West's cardigan carry the memory, or the germ, of his evil?
Cardigans, tape recorders, flags, idols, Stonehenge. Our human desire for a story, a narrative, a reason, means we attach meanings to things that perhaps have none. In the winter of 1904 just outside of Allendale, near Hexham, a young farmer found the grisly and mutilated carcasses of two of his sheep. It was a clear sign of a wolf attack and although a wolf had been reported escaped in the area recently it was not rendered chief suspect by dint of only being four and a half months old and thus incapable of such a lethal assault.
A 150 strong search party found nothing but, soon, further sheep were savaged. The search parties grew larger, dogs were added, but still nothing was found until, one day, a wolf corpse was discovered lying on a railway track. Some speculate that this wolf and the apparition that walked on two legs were somehow connected.
Eventually a dowser named Frank Hyde borrowed the Hexham Heads from Don Robins. Not long after that both Frank Hyde and the Hexham Heads disappeared, never to be seen again. Will they, one day, return to Hexham and, if so, what form will they take?
Or, more likely, will they feed into the collective imagination of the area and the next time something a little creepy, a bit weird, happens and can't be explained the memories of the Hexham wolf and the Hexham Heads will feed into the story, creating a mythology that could, perhaps, be easily disproved but one that we, as humans who love and crave stories, would rather believe?
Richard MacLean Smith ends the evening as if panning away from Hexham to see how this series of events relate to the world, and humanity, in its entirety. In a brief, but powerful, coda he spoke of how, one day, all human life would end, all life would end, all lights would go out, and the universe would be plunged into an eternal darkness.
It is said we live in uncertain times and, indeed, we do - but it was ever thus for the future can never be certain. We can never know anything with absolute sureness of the future and we can never even know what we don't know. Thoughts possibly far more terrifying than an upright wolf or a stone that has a memory?
Or, maybe, we must embrace the uncertainty and live in the moment a bit more. When I arrived home I watched Newsnight and witnessed the latest developments on the absolute clusterfuck that is both Brexit, and the government's mishandling of Brexit, and that only shored up those thoughts a bit. No mischievous spirit from times gone by could cause the level of damage that we humans do to ourselves, each other, and the planet we all share. Sleep well tonight.
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