For a time the building was a guest house. Occultist Roland Franklyn, author of We Pass From View, rented the tower rooms for a period in the mid-1960s whilst investigating some of the mysteries of the Horsingdon Triangle. Apparently Franklyn was particularly interested in the history of St. Ormund's.
Franklyn also maintained extensive connections throughout the occult underground, and had been in correspondence with the leaders of the Church of Starry Wisdom shortly before his death in 1967.
Juxtaposed with the progressive modernity of the new builds which surround it, Hallowmere House is mired in a dubious history of murder and madness which many new residents are unfamiliar with, and which the old ones would prefer to forget. Like other houses of its kind, it possesses foundations of a less tangible sort that have, perhaps, delved too deeply into the more dismal folkways and less pleasant mythopoeic currents of the local landscape. As a consequence, Hallowmere House has acquired something of a liminal character, demarcating a point of transition and a line of division between this world and the many other nameless and unilluminated ones that surround it. I suspect that is what drew Franklyn to the place. Its reputation for being haunted probably isn't helped by the fact that it is now a hospice.
While passing the building one cloudless winter night, I saw a pallid figure standing at the window of the uppermost room of the tower, staring silently into the starry void above. Its face held an expression of what I can only describe as horrified expectancy. I walked on quickly, as one is apt to do on such occasions.
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