This sealed doorway down the side of Southcote Station apparently once opened in to a storage room. According to the accepted history of the station, the archway was bricked up due to concerns about the structural integrity of the building. Horsingdon and Northwich, however, have never been constrained by the need to conform to conventionalised histories. Indeed the non-canonical history of the station – which of course many of the local residents consider to be the authentic and authoritative one – holds to a wildly differing version of events. According to this account, workmen who were clearing out the storage space discovered a locked trapdoor beneath various pieces of rusting machinery which lay in the far corner of the room.
When no key could be found to fit the lock, it was quickly forced open, revealing a flight of relatively modern red brick stairs leading down to a cellar-like aperture of apparently far more ancient construction - and whose walls were scrawled with strange symbols. Leading off from this was a tunnel – although I have heard it described as being more akin to a burrow - which bored further downward into the darkness. This is where the events of the tale become somewhat fuzzy. It was growing late by the time of the cellar’s discovery; the workmen were also somewhat perturbed by what they had found, and so decided to finish-up there and then with a view to reporting the matter to their superiors the following morning. On returning the following day, however, they made a further, gruesome, discovery: the incomplete remains of the station’s night manager strewn around the storage room, with a set of strange, bloodied footprints leading in the direction of the trapdoor. The police were called, Horsingdon Coucil became involved, the archway was quickly sealed at the behest of a council official, and night manager's demise was recorded as an accidental death.
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