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.