The Horsingdon Transmissions No.304: A Boreham Family Hallowe'en

A rare and unsettling photograph of James Boreham's wife Miriam, and children Edward and Judith  - dated October 31st 1892. Of note is the goatish visage of Edward, hinting at praeternatural parentage, as well as the face of Boreham's baby daughter, Judith - here already looking indistinct and vague, as if fading from view. In any case, this was the very last day Judith Boreham was seen in unveiled in public.

This above image depicts the only known, extant version of the photograph - one which appears To have been purposely cropped, with the intimation of additional figure to Miriam's left. This has led to speculation that there there may have been another Boreham child (despite there being no record of such) included in the original photograph: a sibling to Edward and Judith whose appearance was, perhaps, too disconcerting to be shown outside of the confines of this strange and closely-knit family.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.303: The Lights Below

The surface topography of Horsingdon is underwritten by another, secret, subterranean realm: a warren of tunnels both natural and artificial constitute the hidden arteries of the region - channels through which course deep currents of folk memory, and even deeper, more ancient flows of primordial myth left in the aftermath of those monstrous Powers which stalked the land long before the coming of humanity. 

Of those Powers, some element yet remains, haunting these chthonic zones in multifarious, nameless forms - but always with luminous eyes which shine like beacons in the darkness.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.302: A Hole in the Ground

A damaged manhole cover on the side of Horsingdon Hill. There are a few such covers - mostly rusted and overgrown now - upon and around the Hill. They lead to tunnels accessing what was meant to be a reservoir providing fresh water for the region: one tapping into an artesian well located below naturally-occuring caverns beneath the Hill. Construction on the subterranean reservoir began in the 1950s, but was terminated - as rumours have it - after the discovery that parts of the ancient cave system underlying the Hill were found to be artifically-produced by unknown agencies...

Unnervingly, it appears from the image above that the manhole cover has been torn open from the inside of the access tunnels that honeycomb the Hill's interior.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.301: New Build

More Ministry brutalism dominating the Horsingdon landscape - this time overlooking the Grand Union Canal from a patch of waste ground formerly occupied by one of the Borough's rapidly disappearing freehouses. It is unclear as to the purpose or remit of this particular installation, although it is inaccessible to the public and surrounded by a barred iron fence. Notably, the building was constructed relatively recently; given that most if the Ministry outposts throughout Horsingdon date to the 1950s and are largely abandoned, one wonders what might account for this apparent renewed interest in the region...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.300: Broken Gateways

A pathway off the Ebury Way which leads nowhere, quietly guarded by a rusted and broken gate. A scene of little significance to some - but not to the guardians of the Black Bowers, who regularly cross such intersections and traverse the anonymous paths whose thresholds these crooked doorways safeguard. Whence they take those guardians none can say - for every one of those brave souls who have attempted to follow in their sinister footsteps have never returned from wherever such pathways lead.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.299: Haunted Machinery

A piece of machinery supposedly recovered from the Horsingdon Bunker, whose function - despite extensive and painstaking analysis - remains a mystery; there has been some speculation that it may have been part of a torsion implosion device developed from Victor Shaubergers' research on anti-gravitics and dimensional boring - due in part to its bearing some resemblance to the mechanics of the infamous Die Glocke which Schauberger is said to have worked on towards the end of World War  II.

Those who have been in close proximity to the enigmatic contrivance swear that it is haunted by some sinister and unknowable presence - perhaps drawn to this world as a consequence of the vey same experiment for which this mysterious apparatus was devised.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.298: IndustrIalised Spectrality

The desolate industrial regions of Horsingdon are as much a part of the Borough’s hidden,  praeternatural topography as the apparent primordialism of its more rural spaces (although even these landscapes have long been shaped by human intervention).

One occasionally finds old factories in the deserted industrial parks of Horsingdon which no one remembers, and which seem to be without history: there is no record of their being built, no indication of ownership, and no name branding their shabby facades. No one remembers anyone working at these sites. Such places breed spectrality and mystery - they become generators of urban myth and modern folklore, zones of adolesent ostension which sometime beget genuine tragedies – in the form of an inexplicable disappearance, a fatal accident, or even an unexpected act of bloody murder - from which further mythmaking unravels and by which more ghosts are produced.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.297: Monstrous Aftermath

The aftermath of an 'incident' at a Ministry warehouse which occured in October 1970, allegedly caused by the mishandling of some item - or, as some rumours would have it, something - stored there. Whatever the source of the incident, it seems that the staff at the installation successfully limited the damage caused: if anything was released from containment, there are no reports in the newspapers of the day indicating that a horror had been loosed on Horsingdon.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.296: A Darkened Stairwell

According to one of the sayings of the guardians of the Black Bowers, 'there is nothing more seductive - and nothing more terrifying - than the unexpected discovery of a darkened stairwell in the middle of the night on a deserted Horsingdon street - for who knows where it might lead?'. 

The majority of Horsingdon's inhabitants have, at least, some intimation of an answer to this question, such that they steadfastly avoid such gloomy architectural apparitions whenever they encounter them whilst walking home alone at night.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.295: Strange Computations

In the depths of Horsingdon Bunker, a Ministry official oversees what was - at least for the late 1950s - cutting edge computer technology, which here seems to be slaved to archaic machineries of unknown purpose.

Rumours persist, however, that the sinister computations and disquieting calculations produced by these rudimentary forms of digital technology elucidated an alien mathematics, the implications of which threatened to turn the Cold War hot in a horrifying and unthinkable manner - an eventuality postponed only by the necessary and permanent 'removal' of all those unfortunate individuals who had come into even the briefest contact with these monstrous algebraics...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.294: The Hanging Tree

The Hanging Tree sits atop One Tree Hill, overlooking Welbury - a parish within the borough of Horsingdon, and a mile or so from Horsingdon Hill. Unsurprisingly, the Hanging Tree acquired its name as a consequence of it once being Horsingdon's central site of public execution. During the  latter half of the 17th, it was here that a significant number of people met their deaths as a result of being found guilty of the crime of witchcraft - including three individuals believed to have been active in the Horsingdon Coven.

A cloaked and hooded figure has occasionally been spied in the vicinity - usually around midnight and on the eves of certain festivals; local folklore holds this to be the revenant of one of the witches whose life the Tree once claimed. Strange offerings, whose nature and origins are uncertain, have also been found at the base of the Tree - although no one in their right mind touches such unwholesome leavings.

Like so many other of the strange places for which the region is renowned, the Tree has been the site of a number of mysterious - albeit infrequent - disappearances. As a consequence - and in spite of the quite spectacular view of the Borough available from the crest of the Hill where the Tree stands - few people nowadays care to visit the locale.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.293: Tunnels

Horsingdon subterrenea has been the locus of a good number of the speculative investigations recorded here. The above image supposedley depicts part of a network of vast tunnels which run below the region, connecting a large number of the Ministry and MoD sites spead across Horsingdon, Harlow, and Trentford; however the tunnels were not, as rumour has it, constructed by either of those agencies as much as repurposed by them - raising the question of precisely when they were built, and by whom...or what?

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.292: The Sounds From Below

Located at the farthest edge of Croxley Moor: another deserted Ministry outpost cloaked in an aura of sinister mystery. In this instance, residents local to area have, for the past two decades, told tales of strange chanting heard coming from somewhere below the building: a chanting clearly produced by human vocal chords - but which, on certain occasions, is answered by sounds wholly alien and inhuman…

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.291: The Streets of Horsingdon

An Autumnal twilight falls upon the streets of Horsingdon, cloaking the region in a strange, phasmagorical sodium haze. Streetlamps take on a sinister demeanour, looming out of the dusk like some bizarre breed of spindly alien mantis - everyday objects suddenly rendered unreal and intrusive upon an otherwise pedestrian landscape.

It is at such moments that the streets of Horsindon become subject to a mysterious perichoresis: everything becomes liminal, and a sudden wrong turning, or the misguided decision to take a shortcut down a rarely used and poorly-lit alleyway, can draw the hapless traveller inexorably into a vast and unknown realm from which few ever return - and from which fewer still come back unchanged.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.290: Residual Haunting

A dilapidated Ministry of Defence listening post at the edge of Horsingdon. A relic of the Cold War, the structure is bound up with the strange paranoia of that era: it is supposedly linked to Horsingdon Bunker by a lengthy series of access tunnels which, according to a few of the more choice rumours surrounding the place, are haunted by an awful presence released as a result the highly unorthodox physics with which the Bunker's research team were experimenting in secret.

Over the decades, the listening post has acquired a reputation as being a focal point of black magical and satanic activity in the region, perhaps in part because of its earlier associations with the mysteries of Horsingdon Bunker - and the residual influence of whatever monstrous forces were raised within its subterrenean confines.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.289: Lost Souls

This unique and rather unsettling photograph surfaced online recently, and has been doing the rounds of various conspiracy forums dedicated to the mysteries of Horsingdon. Purportedly it depicts an interior section of Horsingdon Bunker, and the large team of scientists who worked there during the 1960s as part of a highly secretive project.

Whatever the nature of said project, apparently none of the individuals depicted here lived to see it to its end; one can't help but speculate - given the seriousness of their expressions - as to whether the research which these men and women were engaged in had perhaps already provided some intimation of the terrible place to which it would ultimately lead them.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.288: The Haunted Vicarage

Horsingdon Vicarage has stood empty nigh on five decades now, since the untimely death of the previous inhabitants: one Joseph Penderton and his family. During his residence at the vicarage, Penderton uncovered strange markings carved into the stonework of the floor of the building's cellar. His diary recounts that subsequent investigations led to a momentous discovery of something below the cellar - although he is highly circumspect as to the nature of this something. In any case, a few days later, Penderton had killed his wife and daughter (in what was described in police reports as a ritualistic manner), before hanging himself.

Needless to say, the ghost of Penderton is said to haunt to building, manifesting as a slack-jawed, and dead-eyed spectre of a spectacularly mindless demeanour. Other stories tell of how, if one encounters the ghost and looks into those dead eyes, the percipient will be vouchsafed a glimpse of the maddening knowledge which caused Penderton to murder his family before taking his own life.

No one has yet found the strange markings mentioned in Penderton's diary, and whose original discovery seemingly precipitated the whole sorry affair.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.287: The Other Sounds

A Ministry installation not far from the Grand Union remains permanently cloaked within the noisy hum of strange machinery - a hum which on occasion grows in intensity to drown out other, less reconisable sounds which sometimes emanate from within the vast and unknown depth of this nameless, windowless structure.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.286: Aural Spectralities

An accelerative shift favouring hauntological static has been notable in the balance of signal-to-noise where Horsingdon's transmitter arrays have been concerned. In a matter of a few short days, the airwaves have been subject to unprecedented colonisation by strange and hyperstitial aural spectralities; they have spread with a mutable, liquid velocity, transforming even the most benign transmissions into a source of disquiet and dread: the parochial, comforting voice of a well-loved presenter becomes malign, distorted, and suggestive of terrible secrets; children's hour echoes with the fairytale sing-song horror of sinister and forgotten Machenesque languages - symbol-sounds resonant with the signification of an unspeakable witchlore; the afternoon play strectches on endlessly, the voices of the actors becoming sparse and faint, as if lost within the vast and hollow confines of a recording studio whose cobwebbed walls have come to encompass a whole, haunted universe...

All of this is unsurprising. Such things are anticipated - expected, even - as All Hallows Eve steps another day closer to the borders of Horsingdon.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.285: Luminescent Horror

Shapeless, coherent light irradiates one of Horsingdon's alleyways with luminescent horror. The amorphous, glowing mass was witnessed crawling from out a circle of red chalk etched in the pavement by the side of an old brick wall - one bearing upon its wretched facade a spray-painted sigil of sinister demeanour. Fortunately, the thing dissipated - harmlessly, one hopes - soon after this photograph was taken.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.284: Street Sigils

The guardians of the Black Bowers - alongside other of Horsingdon's esoteric and psychogeographic hucksters and dilletantes - have, in recent months, been marking out the occult topographies of the region's urban spaces through a series of strange sigils, cryptic ideograms, and other highly abstracted systems of arcane hieroglyphics. That these symbols appear mostly at locations of notable disrepair and urban decrepitude perhaps indicates that they pertain to some hitherto hidden or as-yet unformed cosmology of ruination and decay.

There is, however, amongst these forms an occasional resemblance (albeit in a modified and modernised form) to certain highly secretive systems of signification associated with Those Who Wait - and with other veiled canons of occult knowledge linked to the denizens of those abysmal, hyperdimensional zones of entity and being which lie far outside the conceptual framework of minimally-sapient hairless primates.

Exactly why these sigils have begun appearing in the streets and alleys of Horsingdon remains unclear. But what is certain is that they herald the approach of nothing which the folk of Horsingdon would ever wish to countenance.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.283: Four Men Upon a Mound

Four guardians of the Black Bowers conduct business under cover of the pre-dawn mist upon one of Horsingdon's Neolithic mounds. In the folklore of the region, such a convocation only occurs when the guardians seek to enter into direct communication - usually for some sinister purpose - with Those Who Wait; the old tales typically recount such attempts as ending disasterously.

In any case, the subjects of the above image were apparently known to the photographer; soon after the photo was taken, the four men apparently walked calmly and in single file into the nearby Horsingdon Woods - and therafter were never again seen in Horsingdon or its adjacent parts.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.282: The Devil's Due

St. Stephen's Church in Harlow. Legend holds that the foundations of the church were originally laid upon the remnants of an old Roman temple at which nameless rites had once been performed; legend also maintains that during the 17th Century members of the Horsingdon coven would meet in the church's crypt, where they would make the Sign of the Goat, utter the Three Unspeakable Names, and call forth the Black Man of the Sabbat. That dread entity, it is said, always leaves its mark at the sites of its manifestation; indeed, there have been regular reports of the smell of sulpher in the crypt, and of a tall, shadowy shape which haunts the nave of St. Stephen's church - and which has been known to induce madness in those who have had the misfortune to encounter it.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.281: The House on the Borderland

On the parish boundary between Horsingdon and Harlow sits this crumbling domicile - long uninhabited on account of the long history of disappearances which haunts the place. Whilst the house has never undergone significant renovation or been subject to any structural changes since the time of its construction, accounts provided by previous inhabitants regarding its interior layout have varied widely - to the extent that there is little agreement between these statements concerning something as simple (and seemingly self-evident) as the exact numbers of rooms the structure supposedly possesses.

One previous occupant even described in his diary - discovered shortly after this unfortunate individual's mysterious disappearance - the existence of an extensive series of cellars and sub-cellers leading hundreds of feet below the house, culminating in a cathredral-sized grotto within which the narrator apparently discovered an 'Infinite Staircase' which apparently wended its way through 'those Lower Realms of which I dare not speak'.

Needless to say, no subsequent survey of the property has provided evidence of such cavernous subterrenean delvings; there has, however, been significant disagreement as to the exact dimensions of the house as provided by the various surveys to which it has been subjected over the years - including one notable claim that the building seemed to be endowed with a greater internal volume of space than the external measurements would allow for.

There is nothing else really to say about the matter, other than to mention the fact that, unsurprisingly, records indicate that the house was originally built by James Boreham.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.280: Horror Borealis

Strange particles bursting upon the stratosphere turn the Autumnal skies of Horsingdon a sodium orange - precipitating a sudden and unexpected thunderstorm.

Some residents claim they can hear monstrous howlings interwoven with the roar of superheated air, as something unspeakable the size of continents grinds its vast apocalyptic bulk against the meagre walls of this world, seeking purchase, seeking ingress.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.279: Strange Delvings

This image purports to show a site not far from Northala Mound which was being excavated by the Ministry sometime in the late 1950s. Note the curious apotropaic markings carved into the earthworks at the far edge of the site near the bottom of the photograph. There are no accesible records - or any other tangible evidence - which recount the purpose or indeed the aftermath of the dig; nor is the site readily identifiable today. All one can say about the matter is that - hopefully - nothing untoward has been roused by these curious delvings.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.278: St. Joseph's Church

St. Joseph's Church in Trentford has remained closed for the best part of three decades - although it has not, as yet, been deconsecrated. Its closure coincided with the disappearance of the parish priest and a number of his congregation, all of whom participated in black magical rites conducted in a basement beneath the church. Or so it is rumoured.

It is also rumoured that during one such rite, this heterodox group called up a formless shape from some nameless abyss which they lacked the skill or knowledge to put down: something which to this day prowls the nitrous cellars beneath the church, alone but for the bones of those who brought it into this world; something whose mournful howls rise forever upwards, unanswered, through the vast black emptiness of space.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.277: Bridgewater Avenue

Some places exude spectrality: it has become the fundamental constituent of their being - even though they were not always this way. A lonely row of shop fronts, long ago abandoned and boarded, form an eyesore along the otherwise leafy and suburban Bridgewater Avenue. Yet their anomalous status is not so much a condition of their disrepair, but because bypassers sense their inherently unnerving, spectral quality. It is a quality which, like their abandonment, was produced epiphenomenally out of something terrible which once occured here: an operation so inconceivable in its unnaturalness that it effected a monstrous transformation upon the intangible substance of the real: an alchemy of horror.

No one remembers who once owned the shops; neither is there any local memory of what was once purveyed within their walls; nor are there any extant local scraps of folklore which recount their haunting - surprising for a place like Horsingdon, whose every side alley seems to possess its own ghost or tale of terror.

But perhaps it is best that such things remain unbidden and unremembered, lest recollection calls forth the liveliest awfulness of that which, for the time being, can only be sensed and intuited uneasily.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.276: The Lower Tunnels

Boreham Park Station on Bridgewater Road is overlooked by Horsingdon Hill, and is a stone's throw from the Park itself.

Whilst the station platforms are above ground at street level, they are connected by an underpass of classic London Underground design, tiled in the colours of the Piccadilly Line (at whose suburban hinterlands Boreham Park Station sits). Midway along this underpass one encounters a locked iron gateway, blocking entrance to another tunnel - one which leads even deeper downwards to a room which always appears to be very brightly lit - so much so that its is impossible to discern the overall shape or contents if the room. The light which emanates from that place often seems to flicker and pulse in odd ways, such that the casual observer can sometimes be left thinking that there are shifting shapes or figures trapped behind that blindingly uncanny luminescence.

Station staff remain reticent when questioned on the matter. Most of them seem to have been resentfully employed at the locale for decades, such that one wonders if they were sent there for some past yet unnameable infraction - perhaps being forced to wait out the rest of their working lives as the guardians of a deadly secret...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.275: Figures in the Mist

The first mists of October have yet dissipate, and there have been reports of two disappearances in Boreham Park, which seems moreso afflicted by a thick layer of damp fog than anywhere else in Horsingdon - indeed, there have been rumours of strange, bulky shapes spied moving ponderously through its vaporous depths.

There are also those from within the ranks of the guardians of the Black Bowers who have hinted that the uncanny mist is the harbinger of the return of someone - or something - to the ruins of Boreham Manor.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.274: The October Country

On the first of the month, the sodium haze of Boreham Station's platform lights greets unwary visitors to the region, illuminating a shifting and uncertain route through heavy fog toward the October country.