Postbridge is a small hamlet at the heart of Dartmoor, best known to most visitors for its 13th-century clapper bridge over the East Dart River — a slab-and-pier crossing believed to have replaced an earlier stepping-stone ford for packhorse traffic. It’s an unremarkable, pretty stop on most tourist itineraries. The stretch of road running west from the village toward Two Bridges is a different matter entirely.

Since around 1910, drivers and motorcyclists using that road — now numbered the B3212 — have reported an unusually high number of accidents in which their vehicle suddenly jolted or swerved off the road, as though something had seized the steering wheel or handlebars and wrenched control away. Reports picked up sharply through the early 1920s. The most widely cited incident came in June 1921, when Dr E. H. Helby, medical officer at Dartmoor Prison, lost control of his motorcycle combination and was killed; the two young girls riding in his sidecar survived. That same year, a British Army captain reported being physically thrown from his motorcycle after a pair of unseen, hair-covered hands gripped his controls and steered him into a ditch — one of the earliest accounts to explicitly name “hairy hands” as the cause rather than simply an unexplained loss of control.

The legend’s most personal and frequently quoted testimony comes from Theo Brown, a respected Devon folklorist who was camping in a caravan half a mile from the road in the summer of 1924. Brown described waking to see “the fingers and palm of a very large hand with many hairs on the joints and back of it,” clawing up the inside of her caravan window before she forced it back and latched the window shut. Unlike the driving accidents, which could plausibly be attributed to a narrow, unlit road and drivers travelling too fast, Brown’s account involved no vehicle at all — just a hand trying to get in.

Skeptics have long argued the mundane explanation is the more likely one: an unlit, narrow, camber-heavy stretch of moorland road, unfamiliar to most who drove it, in an era of far less capable brakes and tyres. Retrospective analysis has traced how a handful of early-1920s local newspaper reports were amplified into a full-blown national tabloid sensation, then calcified into folklore once Theo Brown’s personal account gave it a face. No official inquiry into the road’s accident rate has ever been conducted, and there’s no physical evidence beyond consistent testimony repeated for over a century — a good case study for our guide to how ghost hunting evidence gets evaluated.

What makes Postbridge unusual among Weird World’s entries is the shape of the haunting itself: not an apparition glimpsed from a distance, but something that reaches out and takes hold — of a wheel, of handlebars, of a caravan window latch. There’s no named ghost, no backstory, no grave to visit. Just hands.

A century on, the stretch of the B3212 between Postbridge and Two Bridges still carries the reputation, and still, every so often, someone driving it after dark reports the wheel jerking in their hands for no reason at all. Dartmoor keeps more than one reputation for dread within a few miles of here — Wistman’s Wood, further along the same national park, has its own long-standing folklore of unease.