Spectral Frequencies - The Horsingdon Transmissions 2026, No.1: “Who Is This Who Is Coming?”

 

Whilst out for a stroll on New Year’s Eve, though a mist was rising in the dim twilight, I spied a cloaked and hooded figure standing still and silent amidst the local playing fields. The fields themselves were land once part of the Boreham estate, and there are scraps of regional lore which claim that the locale is a ‘thin place’ where Edward Boreham - probably the most infamous scion of that lineage - once performed strange rites, and made petition in an unknown and barbarous language to the black gulfs of space…and whatever he believed dwelt therein. There are other, more furtive rumours which suggest that such petitioning did not always remain unanswered. 

On taking the above photo, the distant figure appeared to notice my presence at the edge of the fields, and subsequently began moving towards me in a slow and horribly stilted fashion. Needless to say, to avoid any possible confrontation with this unknown individual, I hastily vacated the area.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.13: The Cemetery on Harlow Hill

 

Whilst the original boundaries of the cemetery attached to St. Mary’s Church were originally set within the level ground atop Harlow Hill, the dead who form its principal inhabitants have - over the years - slowly and insidiously colonised more and more of the tor’s steep slope. Thus do the dead ever encroach on the domain of the living.

Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.12: A Winter Wish

 

A bitter cold has fallen across Horsingdon. Times are hard and it is likely that, this year, Winter will make ghosts of more than a few of the populace - especially amongst the old, the infirm, and the lonely.

Whilst many wish for signs of an early Spring as the herald of warmer climes, others - especially the more avaricious amongst Horsingdon’s monied classes, unaffected by the politics of austerity - will soon wish differently: that they had been kinder, more caring, more neighbourly during the Winter months - or at least this will become the case as their consciences are nightly haunted by the spectres of those taken by the cold.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No. 11: Star Winds

 

On certain nights in the depths of winter, star winds filter down from the depths of infinite space, bearing upon their ineffable currents strange portents from the unreverberate blackness of the abyss - portents which infect the dreams of the more psychically-sensitive of Horsingdon’s populace to produce phantasmagoric visions both marvellous and nightmarish which will haunt the percipients for years to come - portents which further taint the parish’s already-impure soil with their star-spawned contagion.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.10: Crisis Apparitions

 

The generally accepted definition of a crisis apparition is where the spectre of a recently deceased person manifests to a friend or close relative, usually around the very time of death and often when the percipient is unaware of that person’s passing. 

In Horsingdon, the term takes on another, more sinister meaning: there are periods in the borough’s occulted history when some seemingly terminal - yet often hidden - moment of metaphysical catastrophe threatens; such times invariably coincide with increased reports of encounters with the restless dead - typically in and around local cemeteries and churchyards - who augur either in word or by virtue of their very presence the proximity of some dreadful occurrence which imperils the life, sanity and reason of the local populace.

In this manner the dead of Horsingdon, long lost to memory yet irrevocably tied in some strange and inexplicable way to its cursed soil, remain the most stalwart defenders of the parish - and of those guilty of such forgetting.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.9: The Whispering Void (redux)

 

As a curious addendum to yesterday’s entry, it is worth noting that the witchlore of Horsingdon is replete with stories of unseen things haunting the region’s woodlands, offering to make terrible pacts with local coven members. The wooded slopes of Horsingdon Hill being especially associated with such tales.

Typical elements of these stories include the following: strange lights witnessed in the sky above the Hill, which would pulse and change colour; a sound as of great flapping wings pushing against the air; and then the voices: hoarse, buzzing whispers issuing from strange presences which remain concealed within the woods - whispers communicating a monstrous arcana to any who would listen. Witches who were recipients of those hoarsely-whispered words were, it is said, often left awestruck by what they had heard, thereafter refusing ever to speak of that which had been imparted to them - even when subject to the most unendurable of tortures at the hands of local witchfinders.

The fact that similar elements appear in contemporary yarns concerning things supposedly spied and heard in the skies and woods of Horsingdon speaks to the pervasive and enduring power of folklore to inform the cultural imaginaries of the present - for surely that can be the only reasonable explanation behind the narrative and thematic consistency and uniformity of tales whose telling is separated by centuries…

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.8: The Whispering Void

 

St. Joseph’s Church on Horsingdon Lane is instructive of the disappearance of the religious traditionalism which once dominated the region, and its replacement by stranger faiths. Once a stalwart bulwark of Anglicanism, the now derelict Church became, about a decade ago, home to the Ministry of the Whispering Void, whose congregants espoused a New Age and Ufologically-inflected spirituality. 

The tenets of this unusual faith held that unseen extraterrestrial forces would communicate a body of secret knowledge - concerning the hidden history of our world and the true nature of reality - to the chosen amongst believers. However, the mystagogic dissemination of such arcana would only occur under very specific conditions: the entities in question would only manifest in wilderness places, and only after certain words had been spoken and the appropriate rites had been howled through by members of the Ministry and, although their apparent materialization would be accompanied by strange, multicolored glowing lights in the sky, the entities never made themselves visible, but would only speak from the shadowy undergrowth in hoarse, buzzing whispers - and of their origin, they would say only that they came from ‘Beyond the Wells of Night and the Gulfs of Space’. 

The nature of the peculiar gnosis transmitted by these secretive beings was, I am told, along the following lines: that those who adhered strictly to the key tenets of their teaching - involving ritual and meditative practices devised to facilitate the utter annihilation of the ego - would achieve an apotheosis in the flesh, and be taken bodily by the invisible entities to very same nameless void ‘Beyond the Wells of Night and the Gulfs of Space’ from whence they came, where the ascended would dwell in wonder and glory for all eternity.

In any case, the Ministry of the Whispering Void are long gone - no one knows where - and St. Joseph’s Church remains abandoned…unless one gives credence to the tales of hoarse, buzzing whispers said to sometimes emanate from within its locked and shuttered walls.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No. 7: The Last Broadcast?

 

A transmitter array spied from the Ebury Way - the rural pathway which links Horsingdon to Trentford - rising above the tree-line from the Royal Air Force base near Croxley Moor. During the Cold War era, this location was operational as a listening station, and remains today a constant reminder of the latent, unthinkable nuclear horrors which lurk, ever present, at the edge of consciousness.

In recent years, curious signals have been detected emanating from the base, broadcast into the singular, empty blackness of infinite space; equally strange clusters of pulsing lights have been sighted in the skies above this location. Whether there is any correspondence between these activities, one can only speculate - but one cannot help but wonder whether the base has turned its attention from the monitoring of terrestrial horrors to the calling forth of those of a more unearthly aspect.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.6: Words for Unravelling the World

The buildings and architecture of Horsingdon, like any other urban or suburban conurbation, has become canvas to many examples of graffiti. However, sometimes one can discern within examples of urban scrawl the camouflaged interventions of malign metropolitan sorcerers: those who seek to employ a forbidden arcana to recode primordial cryptographic systems - those which are foundational to the structure of reality as we understand it - for their infinitely wicked ends. In this endeavor, they employ strange and antediluvian linguistic structures which are not of this or any other conceivable world: languages which are not symbolic systems of abstract signification, but are, ontologically, non-representational and inseparable from the world they describe: in a very literal sense, what constitutes a word (at least in human terms) within such linguistic structures is the very thing being articulated - brought into being through the very act of its articulation. In other words, a speech act which transforms the nature of reality through its vocalization or inscription.

The above image being a case in point. This device, I am reliably informed, is but one component of a glyph belonging to the pre-human Nacaal language: a glyph also constituent of a greater ritual invocation which, when performed in its totality, possesses the power to unravel the world through illocutionary alien grammars of negation and undoing.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.5: The Sounds of St. Osmund’s

 

St. Osmund’s Church and Cemetery: services ceased here some four years ago subsequent to the mysterious disappearance of its previous pastor. The building has remained locked and barred ever since. 

Regardless, locals parishioners continue to report evidence of habitation: a peculiarly inhuman snuffling and scratching emanating from behind the door to the north transept (shown in the above photo) for example, or the indistinct intonations of some unearthly music echoing within the belfry, or the sound of chanting issuing faintly from some crypt below the Church on certain nights of the year - as well as other curious and disquieting auditory phenomena.

In any case, were one to take such accounts seriously, one might be obliged to consider the possibility that St. Osmund’s remains tenanted by someone…or something.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.4: The Rot of the Stars.

The 4th of January marks the peak of the Quadrantids meteor shower in the Norther hemisphere. Coincident with this is the curious appearance of ‘star jelly’ in the fields and pastures surrounding Horsingdon Hill. These gelid lumps of white ooze - also known as ‘star-slime’, ‘star-slough’, and ‘the rot of the stars’ - have long been prized by the region’s cunning folk for their alleged occult properties. Further to this, the substance has played an important part in Horsingdon’s witchlore, wherein it is said to constitute the principle ingredient of the vinum sabbati - a libation whose consumption by celebrants formed the central sacrament of the Witches Sabbath. Even today, in the early hours of the morning of the 5th of January, curious figures can sometimes be spied in the fields and furrows at the base of Horsingdon Hill, engaged in a strange harvest.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.3: The Way Through The Woods

 

A path through the woods on the slope of Horsingdon Hill leading to its crown. This same pathway is said to have been witness to the ritual processions of the Horsingdon coven to their sacred grove atop the Hill, until the cessation of their activities sometime in the late 18th century. 

Locals often avoid such ‘witch roads’ on account of their being residually haunted by the lingering aftermath of whatever awful rites were once enacted in their vicinity. Indeed, occasional reports still surface concerning the disappearance of casual hikers - invariably visitors from outside the region - last seen traversing one of Horsingdon’s witch roads en route to a terminally unexpected destination.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.2: Edgeland Broadcasts

Beyond the periphery of Horsingdon’s farthest suburbs, one encounters desolate edgelands comprised primarily of deserted, overgrown industrial estates; however, these zones of abandonment occasionally reveal the rewilded brutalist architecture of an ominously-vacant and derelict state installation - some dread-infused relic of the Cold War. The image above was taken at one such site: a transmitter array entangled by and partially subsumed within the unrestrained verdant growth engendered by Horsingdon’s cursed soil. 

Yet despite the site’s current condition of apparent neglect and disuse, the array - so I am told - continues to broadcast an uncanny and indecipherable signal. 

But to whom and for what purpose?

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.1: Keep Out!

 

One of the vacant and dilapidated premises which dot the uncanny suburban topography of Horsingdon. Its state of abandonment may, of course, be due to any number of reasons. However, in the social imaginaries of long-term inhabitants of the borough, the fact that the building is fenced in and clearly marked with a ‘Keep Out’ sign speaks (albeit obliquely) to a somewhat more sinister history behind this forsaken habitation: for local residents, such cautionary signs warn not only of the impropriety of seeking admittance on account of likely physical dangers posed by the property’s structural instability - they are also deterrent to encounters with…less tangible perils; in this latter regard, the remonstrance to “Keep Out!” is as much about the containment of any malefic forces bound within the building’s confines as it is apotropaic to those seeking forbidden ingress, across an uncertain threshold, to a malignly haunted space.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.55 - The Shadow over Boreham

An image I received via e-mail earlier today: the shadow of ‘COLD’, at the dilapidated grave of a member of the Boreham family who - I am reliably informed - was involved in the founding of MI6 in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Unfortunately, the inscrutable ‘COLD’is never forthright where the content of his missives is concerned: undoubtedly some elusive nugget of information - presumably relating to the ‘incident’ at the decommissioned MoD site near the Ebury Way, with which my mysterious informant currently seems obsessed - is encoded in this peculiar image. Certainly, the close association of a member of the sorcerous Boreham clan with the British intelligence services is a singularly curious. Although perhaps not quite as surprising as one might initially infer, given the interest shown by various agencies in Horsingdon’s praeternatural topographies and the rich but hidden heritage of arcane lore which remain the region’s unseen and terrible legacies.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.54 - Saplings

 

Though not entirely clear from the above photograph, rows of recently planted saplings are housed behind the black iron railings, which separate them from the churchyard of St Osmund’s - though no doubt in time, as their roots begin to spread, they will find the adjacent burying ground a source of peculiar sustenance. It is ever the way of things in Horsingdon, where the dead sustain and give life to strange new forms.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.53 - The White Tower

A transmitter array atop the decommissioned MoD building known locally as ‘The White Tower’ - a few miles south of the installation which my informant ‘COLD’ claims was the location of an extremely strange event or visitation in the 1980s. According to ‘COLD’, The White Tower was operational at that time, scanning the airwaves as part of a cryptic military intelligence gathering programme. However, on the night of the event in question, a short but cacophonous burst of static - which was broadcast by way of a very curious frequency - disrupted these secretive activities for short while, and sent three radio operators who were on duty at the time stark, staring mad.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.52: Haunted Lockups

A strange hovering light - like a single, sinister glowing eye - is caught on camera at a local Horsingdon storage unit. The photographer, I am reliably told, felt compelled to take the photo after experiencing a creeping unease whilst walking down this darkened corridor. This strange beacon was not visible to photographer at the time.

A crumbling castle in the midst of a storm-wracked forest. A dilapidated house at the very edge of town on a fog-shrouded night. These are the kinds of locations which, typically, evoke in us anticipations of the ghostly. But sites of the spectral may take many forms, and the socially-uncolonised hinterlands of metropolitan modernity spawn their own unique - and terrible - hauntings.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.51 - Priory Hill at Night

Priory Hill at night: supposedly once the home of an obscure monastic order devoted to Saint Osmund. It is rumoured that, on the very darkest of winter nights, robed and hooded figures of a phantasmal cast may sometimes be spied at the crown of the hill, where the Priory of Saint Osmund is said to have stood until its destruction by fire - figures which for a time stare silently and terribly into the utmost blackness of the gulfs between the stars, before fading slowly into nothingness.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.50 - Eldritch Graffiti

A simple graffito tag? Or symbol from some obscure or hitherto-unknown body of arcana? In either case, the Horsingdon’s street sorcerers and urban cunning folk are known to employ their weird cryptonomicons to hex the metropolitan flow of capital, delineate zones of vampiric commerce with their strange signs, and, through creative sigilisations, fashion powerful apotropaic wards to obstruct unthinking and parasitic mind-viruses which, with the aid of iniquitous corporate conjurations, seek entry into our world.