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.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.49 - Corporate Horror

One of the seemingly-untenanted corporate premises - leased by some nameless organisation engaged in some anonymous enterprise - which one finds scattered through the desolate business estates which constitute Horsingdon’s new edgelands.

In such occulted sites, it is said one may, on occasion, spy through the grimy windows of these buildings the vague outline of grotesque, malformed shapes, mindlessly labouring through a Byzantine bureaucracy: insensate, monstrous puppets engaged in the unthinking performance of a vast and complex ritual process - one encoded in perplexing and convoluted protocols and set in motion by…what? Perhaps something vast and inconceivable which has forced enough of its ineffable substance through the walls of our world to enact its vacuous schemes.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.48 - 6.30pm, St Osmund’s Lychgate.

It might be supposed that the witching hour of 3am is when the unfortunate late-night traveller through Horsingdon’s lesser known byways is most likely to be waylaid by some dreadful apparition or frightful, phantasmal force. Here, the clock upon the Lychgate of St Osmund’s Church is showing just before 6.30pm: in the winter months, even this is not too premature an hour for horrifying spectral presences to disclose themselves - especially to those lone, unwary commuters who, in taking a hurried shortcut through an old graveyard in the early evening, trespass unwittingly into territories over which borough’s restless dead hold dominion.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.47 - A Geography of Evil

The vale of Horsingdon by night, viewed atop Burn Hill. From the panoramic crown of that witch-haunted place, one can survey the borough in its totality.

A malignant topography. 

A spectral landscape.

A geography of evil.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.46 - Dead Line

There is said to be a telephone box somewhere in Horsingdon which will ring three times and three times only at a certain hour on a certain night each year. No one has yet answered, and so the phone will continue to ring three times at the appointed time once every year until the intended recipient of that call picks up the receiver, and listens as a dry, hollow voice intones a message meant only for them.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.45 - Strange Provender

The remains of Horsingdon’s unquiet dead provide strange provender to the flora of the borough’s burying grounds, and the tomb of a long-dead sorcerer will often invite the embrace of abnormal verdure which seeks to siphon the illicit power contained within back into the land from which it was torn.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.44 - The Music of the Spheres

The old music rooms of Harlow School: no longer in use since the late 1960s when the School’s Head of Music hanged himself in the upper room shown here. An amateur radio enthusiast, this tragic event occurred in the aftermath of said individual - an amateur radio enthusiast - claiming to have attuned one of his home-made radio sets to a certain, haunted frequency which gave him access to ‘the Music of the Spheres’.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.43 - Lychgate Alley

 

This alley in Lower Harlow follows the old lychway to St Mary’s Church, and runs past a new upmarket housing project which the developers - presumably with little understanding of the provenance or significance of the nomenclature they have employed - have named ‘Lychgate Manor’. More of this in a later post. For now it is enough to know that the alleyway which meanders past the Lychgate Manor development has a reputation for being the haunt of ghostly apparitions, and site of spectral manifestations, of various kinds. This is, perhaps, unremarkable given the history which underlies the alley; indeed, those residents of Harlow Hill who have lived in the area for the better part of their lives - and are respectful of the antiquity and traditions of the locale - have largely remained undisturbed by the odd things occasionally seen or heard in and around the site. For their part, whatever phantasmal presences make claim to this territory seem not to exhibit any malign intent towards the long-term inhabitants of Lower Harlow; their intentions towards the perceived interlopers of the Lychgate Manor development may, however, be a very different matter.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.42 - Dead Futurities

 

This partially-hidden building on MoD land was, apparently, once the analytical hub for various listening stations during the Cold War, where military cryptolinguists sought to decipher those signals and coded messages, each a potential harbinger of a moment of pure, existential horror wherein the commencement of a world-ending nuclear conflagration might have been terminally announced. Fortunately, that scenario did not and still has not come to pass - at least not yet. Even so, it is rumoured that the pressure and trauma of this work caused a number of analysts to take their own lives during prolonged postings at the site.

Although now abandoned, the installation remains an alluring challenge for urban explorers, some of who have reported seeing silent, spectral figures staring awestruck or with a look of profound horror on their pale, dead faces, out of a window from the building’s upper floor - perhaps viewing an indescribable future which even the act of self-immolation could not prevent them from witnessing.