Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.151: Kodak Factory, Harlow.

Kodak opened this photographic film developing/processing plant in Harlow during the early part of the 20th Century. However, by the end of 1970s, the plant had been closed down. Whilst economic factors were cited as the principle reasons for the plant’s closure, local rumour holds that its fiscal failure was, from the 1950s onward, due to the fact that a significant amount of the photographic film sent to the plant for developing was found to contain strange, anomalous - and often deeply disturbing - double exposures, containing impossible scenes and imagery overlapping the otherwise banal and prosaic representations of everyday life taken by the good folk of Horsingdon.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.130: Ancient Arcana

In Horsingdon, what passes as a simple graffiti tag may be something else entirely: an undecipherable glyph drawn from a body of incalculably ancient, inhuman - and unspeakably terrible - arcana.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.129: The Face in the Widow

This building once held host to James Boreham’s notorious occult soirees at which, it is said, he called forth to visible appearance the inhabitants of those nameless abysses which grind invisibly against the walls of our world.

The property has long since remained untenanted - perhaps on account of an enormous, pale, eyeless face rumoured to appear on auspicious nights, to stare silently, sightlessly and mindlessly from the upper windows.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.128: The Ghost Tree

The Ghost Tree, in Boreham Park. It is said that, if you dance widdershins round the tree at midnight on All Hallow’s Eve, you will see a ghost.

It is also said that the phantom you will most likely encounter is your own: the spectre of your eventual ending, beckoning to you from the moment of your future demise.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.127: Project TRIDENT

Three windowless towers rise from industrial installation fenced in by iron palisades topped with barbed wire - an installation which some have averred as having ties to a long-rumoured Ministry experiment known only as Project TRIDENT, reputedly dealing with the cryptolinguistics and decipherment of signals from an extraterrestrial source.

Whatever the case, on rare occasions a curious, sonorous sound can be heard emanating from somewhere close the the vicinity of these strange, windowless towers.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.126: Behind the Static

Uncanny signals broadcast from an unmanned transmitter array, located atop an abandoned warehouse somewhere in the industrial hinterlands of Horsingdon. 

No matter how hard you try, you won’t be able to stop yourself listening to the inhuman voices lurking behind the static once you’ve heard them.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.125: Hedgerows

In Horsingdon, it is quite possible to discover the most remarkable - and terrible - things hidden behind the hedgerows.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.124: Outpost

A curious, monolithic structure (part of a ventilation system) arises from out the ground in a secluded corner of Horsingdon Wood, signifying the presence of a subterranean outpost of the labyrinthine Horsingdon Bunker.

It is said that, on certain nights, black-robed figures may be spied in the vicinity of the ventilator, whilst an inhuman chanting may be heard emanating from the depths below the cone-like structure.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.123: The Watcher in the Woods

Appearing in my email inbox earlier today - courtesy of my inscrutable informant, ‘Mr Cold’ - this grotesque image purports to be of something monstrous photographed staring from out the darkness of Horsingdon Wood. The image was extracted from a digital camera found abandoned in the undergrowth in the darkest part of Horsingdon Wood. According to Cold, there was no sign of the camera’s owner.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdn, No.122: The Architecture of the Uncanny

It is not only Horsingdon’s external topographies which are enweirded: its internal landscapes are also marked by an architecture of the uncanny - one whose long, lonely corridors extend infinitely towards the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.121: The Enveloping Darkness of Unseen Things

An ominous, shadowy pall hangs over the cupola of one of James Boreham’s former residences in this old photograph. It is unclear as to what produced this curious effect: a slip of the hand, perhaps - or flaw in the film itself.

Or the enveloping darkness of unseen things which cluster about a greater darkness which draws them to itself.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.120: Neighbourhood Watch

A dilapidated Neighbourhood Watch sign announcing Horsingdon Wood as ‘a safer community area’: one of the attempts by Horsingdon Borough Council to address the ominous reputation which clusters about the Wood. The irony of this programme has not been lost on local residents who have, for generations, avoided entering the Wood.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.119: Static from the Sylvan Depths

A tall, skeletal transmitter mast arises from one of the denser, more forbidding parts of Horsingdon Wood, broadcasting a soft, susurrate hiss of meaningless static. The residents hereabouts will not speak of the circumstances surrounding the transmitter’s construction - but they will warn that, when walking in the woods, you should never stray too close to its location.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.118: The Priory Hill Hanging Trees

Priory Hill. A low rise not far from Hallowmere Road, and once the site of a medieval cloister housing a rather peculiar and insular religious order.

In 1763, the line of trees atop the Hill was used to hang five witches, all of who claimed sorority with the Horsingdon Coven. The region’s witchlore holds that the revenants of the five executed beldams continue to haunt the locale, such that on certain nights their wan, spectral forms can be spied hanging silently from the branches of the ancient trees - five dead white faces staring with a horrid, mindless intensity from without the ghostly nooses which ended their corporeal existence.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.117: A Warning in the Woods

A sign posted by Horsingdon Borough Council within Horsingdon Wood. Whilst the warning of poison is an almost certainly spurious one, the sign’s cautionary intent is nonetheless best heeded - delineating as it does the outer boundary of an especially notorious zone with the Wood: rumoured to have once been the focal point of the Horsingdon coven’s monstrous ritual activities, the site is reportedly one within which a significant number of unsettling events and mysterious disappearances have occurred.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.116: A Quiet Voice Beckons

One of the entrances to Horsingdon Bunker. It is said that, on occasion, a low, soft voice can be heard from the other side of the heavy, locked steel door: a voice begging anyone who will listen to free it from its prison - offering the revelation of all manner of strange secrets in exchange.

No one has yet responded to such requests - in part because those who have heard the voice claim that its otherwise melodious, child-like tones are intertwined with a curious, buzzing, alien rhythm.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No. 115: An Abandoned Lock-Up

An abandoned lock-up near Horsingdon Hill. No one - not even Horsingdon Borough Council - retains any records concerning its ownership. The ghost of some grafitti lingers on the left wall: the faded shadow of some swirling glyph-like tag.

It is said that if one is able to decode the meaning of the symbol, another will appear further down the wall, slightly clearer than the last; and should the seeker be sble to interpret the meaning of this symbol, yet another will appear beside it, and so on. Accordingly, the once clearly-defined interior dimensions of the lock-up thus appear transfigured, stretching further and further into the depths of an infinite darkness...

It is also said that, somewhere within the seemingly-endless abyss of the lock-up, the patient seeker will eventually be rewarded with some ultimate, terminal revelation. Whether anyone has succeeded in this occult task, no one can say. In any case, if anyone has attempted this strange act of non-Euclidean decipherment, no one has yet returned to disclose what secrets were eventually revealed.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.114: Grave-Looting Spawn of the Stars

The following image appeared in my e-mail inbox this morning: another digital artefact forwarded by that strange individual going by the name of ‘Cold’ - the occasional (but always inscrutable) interlocuter in online debates concerning the curious events which afflict Horsingdon. 

The photograph supposedly depicts a large object, tightly-bound in sheets of black plastic, which appeared in the fenced-off area towards the northerly end of Hallowmere Playing Fields late yesterday evening. According to Cold, the object was approximately the size and shape of a human body; in his brief (but untraceable) e-mail Cold further asserts that soon after the appearance of the anomalous throbbing light which manifested above Hallowmere Playing Fields yesterday evening, the black-swathed item depicted here was observed to have mysteriously disapppeared.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.113: Return to the Uncanny Parish

This curious, pulsing light appeared above Hallowmere Playing Fields last night - yet one more of the many enigmatic mysteries which have, for as long as anyone can remember (and as far back as the folklore of the region stretches) plagued the uncanny parish of Horsingon.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.112: Scream and Scream Again

Few people realise that Screaming Lord Sutch has long associations with Horsingdon and its surrounding environs, having long resided near Harlow. After sadly taking his own life in 1999, Sutch was buried in Pinner (a suburb of Harlow), where to this day his grave remains a site of pilgrimage for politically-disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the outsiders, and for all those who feel their interior life is fundamentally alien to the fabric of this world, such that that they are unable to countenance its nature.

A doyen of 1960s rock n roll sonic horror (whose early work was recorded by Joe Meek, no less), it is easy to understand what drew Screaming Lord Sutch to the area; as leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, he was also, perhaps, the only politician in the entirety of British history who maintained any integrity whatsoever.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.111: Voorish Domes

These curious domes can be spied from the Ebury Way at the point where, for a few hundred yards,  it runs parallel to the River Trent. Whilst the function or purpose of these curious structures is unclear, what is known is that they have been built upon acreage owned by the MoD since the 1950s. More speculative still have been those attempts to bind these odd buildings to local scraps of folklore: vague, and incomplete narratives which hint at this very same locale as the place where once ‘Voorish Domes’ had been been raised, and about which certain primordial rites - referred to only as ‘The Scarlet Ceremonies’ in those deficiently fragmentary fables - were once performed...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmssions from Horsingdon, No.110: The Ancient Track (Redux)

Partially tracing the contour of the base of Horsingdon Hill, this neolithic track meanders its way northward, edging past the ancient ritual site of Harlow Hill toward Trentford.

Even up until the early years of the Twentieth Century, travellers along this archaic path would regularly recount strange tales concerning the spectral manifestations - and other, less comprehensible, praeternatural disclosures - which would be vouchsafed to them during their journeyings, producing rich and diverse folkways of the phantasmagorical and the supernatural.

Whilst the parish of Horsingdon continues to be afflicted by intrusions both monstrous and otherworldly, there is a definite sense (at least amongst the older inhabitants of the region) that these have increasingly affected a more secular, technologised cast - that the old tales of the uncanny have given way to a new kind of industrialised modernist weird. 

Now the only ghosts haunting these ancient tracks are, it seems the memorialised folk-spectres of their own imagined past.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.109: The Lost Tower

The Lost Tower stands somewhere within an industrial estate out on the northerly edgelands of Horsingdon. Many photographs exist of the structure, all of which depict its rising up from behind other buildings and warehouses - but never its base or foundation; indeed, no one has yet been able to find or verify its actual location within the dilapidated industrial estate. And some of those who have gone in search of it have never returned.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon No.108: Haunted Portakabins

This makeshift office - a once-temporary structure forged from convenient portakabins, and which which long ago transitioned to a state of permanence - sits in the foreyard of one of Horsingdon’s haulage firms.

It has, however, sat empty for the last few years on account of it being haunted.

No one is quite sure what is doing the haunting, or indeed how this spectral state of affairs came into being; nonetheless, speculation has been rife amongst the drivers (none of which seem to remain at the firm for longer than a few months) that something may have secretly hitched a lift on one of their lorries: something unnatural, which most likely crept or crawled from within one of the curious Ministry sites the drivers occasionally pass whilst out on their deliveries.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.107: Horsingdon Asylum

Reeking of an uncanny aura of abject abandonment, the dilapidated shell of Horsingdon Asylum is notable for the fact that, soon after the institution was decommissioned as a site for he cure of distraught souls and disordered minds, every one of its windows was bricked up. There are few alive now who recall the reasons for this - but those who do refuse to speak about the matter.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.106: Howling Tower

It is said that this transmitter array on the parish boundary between Harlow and Horsingdon was once part of a secret Ministry initiative, whose aim was the detection of non-human intrusions into terrestrial airspace, focusing on certain regional locales which ere reputed UFO hotspots

Scant days after it became operational, the array was disconnected from its power source - on account of the discovery of its broadcasting a continuous, dissonant howl along cryptic wavebands. It was later ascertained by Ministry radio astronomers that this discordant signal was emanating from beyond the furthermost rim of our galaxy.

Rumour holds that, despite attempts at terminating the signal, the transmitter array continues to mysteriously relay its cacophanous broadcast to this very day - even in the face of no discernable source of power...

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon No.105: Sleeping Giants.

Enclosed behind steel palisade fencing crowned with barbed wire, this anonymous, windowless facility is fed an endless supply of power: the cryptic thrum of inscrutable energies, forcibly extracted from the landscape by means of proscribed technologies, thence channeled along thick reams of heavy cabling whose outer casing is indented with strange sigils.

An aura of alien unease permeates the site - as if one is transgressing some hidden, unspoken threshold and, in that act of transgression, entering into the presence of a malevolent, sleeping giant.

Malign Fequencies 104 - Harlow Hill Field Report 10: The Lychgate

The Lychgate is a narrow path which leads north out of St.Mary’s crooked, hillside cemetery towards the pedestrian, urbanise modernity of Harlow town centre. Demarcating the threshold between the temporal and the incorporeal, the Lychgate evidences more than its fair share of spectral inhabitants who exist between worlds - and whose hauntological state is the due of all those who fully understand what it is to really dwell within Horsingdon’s strange topography: existing within the narrow corridor where worlds overlap, participating in a kind of ghostly, ephemeral half-life within that twilight fringe between two realms, but never truly belonging to either.

Malign Frequencies No.103 - Harlow Hill Field Report 9: Star Stone

This strange, tentacular star-shaped icon sits atop a roughly hewn tombstone, overlapping a carved scroll upon which are inscribed curious and unintelligible symbols. As with others of its ilk found within the cemetery of St. Mary-on-the-Hill, it is said that this nameless grave hides monstrous secrets fallen from the stars, long since forgotten, and best left undisturbed.

Malign Frequencies No.102 - Harlow Hill Field Report 8: Praeternatural Radiation:

The cemetery attached to St. Mary’s Church is somewhat unusual as the majority of the graves have been dug on the incline of the Hill, on its densely-wooded Northerly slope; close by is the appropriately-named exclusive gated community of Lychgate Manor. As noted in yesterday’s post, a number of Harlow and Horsingdon’s famed occult practitioners - including members of the Boreham family - have their final resting place in the cemetery.

The overgrown hillside burying ground is also notable for a number of curious, cylindrical, coffin-shaped gravetop monuments - all of which sit atop graves whose markers bear no names or dates. Rumour has it that these stone cylinders are not, in fact, ornamental in nature, but are in actuality squat stone sarcophagi within which certain remains were once interred; stranger still is the claim that the stonemason whose services were employed in the construction of such bizarre stone coffins was also requested to line them with lead. It is difficult to fathom who - or what - might be inhumed within these incongrous tombs - or indeed what abnormally praeternatural radiations their lead lining might prove an apotropaic barrier against...

Malign Frequencies No.101 - Harlow Hill Field Report 7: The Thing in the Steeple

St.Mary-on-the-Hill is the site of a number of alleged paranormal phenomena (including visitations by a huge, spectral, crimson-eyed black dog), the steeple of which is said to been the site of a monstrous conjuration by one of Harlow University’s Masters in the 1790s. Rumour persists that the ectoplasmic residue of whatever nameless thing was called forth still haunts the spire - and that on certain night the thing can be heard fumbling against the walls of its lightless prison, perhaps seeking egress from that benighted space into our world.

Notably, a number of the region’s occult luminaries have been buried in the graveyard attached to the church.

Malign Frequencies No.100 - Harlow Hill Field Report 6: Boreham’s Room

This large window in one of the Harlow University’s oldest buildings looks out from one of the rooms which formed part of James Boreham’s apartment during the time he was an undergraduate studying medieval metaphysics at the institution.

Boreham’s shadow hangs heavy over Horsingdon and Harlow and, whilst there remain longstanding historical links between the Boreham family and the witchlore of the region, rumour has it that it was during his time at Harlow University that James Boreham attained mastery of the occult arts and sciences. Exactly how he achieved this whilst under the protection and guidance of such a prestigious academic establishment remains open to question.

Malign Frequencies No.99 - Harlow Field Report 5: Physics and Folklore

Yet more of Harlow Hill’s monolithic remains, arrayed about - of all places - Harlow University’s Department of Physics. The cutting-edge (and virtually inconceivably) mathematics which underlie black holes and Einstein-Rosen bridges here collide with the archaic remnants of Horsingdon’s metaphysical and symbolic topography. Thus do secular science, primordial rite, and half-forgotten folklore involving witchery and strange pacts intersect and rub coarse against the walls of the real at the peculiar edgeland of this site - but to what sinister purpose?

Malign Frequencies No 98 - Harlow Hill Field Report 4: Old Stones

An ancient monolith stands outside one of Harlow University’s administrative buildings - one of the neolithic stones which once ringed the top of Harlow Hill. Other of the stones are scattered about the campus, seemingly in a random manner; there are those, however, who claim that the repositioning of the stones constitutes an act of esoteric pattern-breaking and resignification - one meant to unbind, for some inconceivable purpose, whatever monstrous powers the old stone circle once sought to contain.

Malign Frequencies No.97 - Harlow Hill Field Report No.3: The Black Gate

An old black iron gate marks the boundary - midway up Harlow Hill - between land which was once legally constituted as commons, and the upper part of the hill belonging to Harlow University. It is said that since 1657, when Sir John Hargreaves wrested the crown of the Hill from the local people of the parish of Harlow, a black gate has always stood here: erected by the Folk of the Black Bowers To delineate the cursed statement of intent: that the upper part of the Hill should henceforth be subject to the maleficarum of both those Folk and of the Horsingdon Coven - as would any of those who would cross the black gate’s threshold.

Malign Frequencies No.96 - Harlow Hill Field Report 2: The Path Beside the Witching Tree

The public footpath toward the crown of Harlow Hill passes by the Witching Tree (as it is known locally), upon which a coven of witches (said to be an offshoot of the Horsingdon Coven) was hanged in 1672, under the direction of local magistrate and landowner Sir John Hargreaves. Notably, the mass hanging occured a scant few hours after Hargreaves had ceremonially laid, atop the Hill, the foundation stone to what was to become Harlow School and later, Harlow University. 

The remains of the thirteen witches are said to have been interred in a secret crypt somewhere deep below Harlow University, forming (according to some of the more outre conspiracy theories which cluster about the place), a hidden vortex of praeternatural energy - a source of monstrous, unearthly power used to fuel the secret initiation rites by which certain of the student body are inducted into the exclusive fraternal Houses for which the elite, world-renown University is known.

Malign Frequencies No.95 - Harlow Hill Field Report 1: Encampment

In the shadow of Harlow Hill itself, and not far from Northwich Park Hospital, a public footpath traverses a small but densely wooded zone, within which sits a peculiar encampment which speaks to the presence of one of the Folk of the Black Bowers.

Indeed, legend holds that, for untold centuries, one of those Folk has always kept watch over Harlow Hill on account of the monstrous praeternatural powers said to lurk within and about that place.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.94: Monstrous Internments

The bricked up doors and windows of a Horsingdon outbuilding may hide an aggregate of secrets; there is, however, a recurrent narrative thread which winds through the local folklore clustering about such sealed premises: a hidden genealogical history linked to the witchlore of the region; a resultant family calamity by way of a blighted birth; then, later, the unexplained disappearances; finally the need to inter something brought into this world (and of questionsble parentage) which should not be - something which, by necessity, must be locked away and forever hidden from sight.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.93: Spectral Structured

On occasion - usually at dusk - one can sometimes spy the flat, monolithic rooftop of some blocky piece of Brutalist architecture rising above the canopy of Horsingdon Wood - yet other than the entrance to Horsingdon Bunker, the ancient woodland contains no such buildings. Any attempt to locate these spectral structures inevitably leads to one of two outcomes: the abject failure to discover their location or - more often than not - the inexplicable disappearance of thse who go in search of these unearthly buildings.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.92: Singular Machineries

Singular industrial-scale machineries located on a plot of MoD-owned land, not far from the Ebury Way. Whilst these apparatus remain inactive and silent throughout the hours of daylight, once darkness falls, the internal workings of their hardware thrum and pulse with with strange and enigmatic energies.

Whilst the purpose of these esoteric technologies remains unclear, lights (fearfully portentous and awash with dirty, luminous, signification) are sometimes spied in the benighted skies directly above the curious machines - which carry on about their inscrutable business regardless.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.91: Residual Haunting

Long gone are many of the old pubs of Horsingdon; yet they are never entirely forgotten: their spectres linger on as residual ghosts, dead but dreaming, haunting collective memory as one-time hubs of storytelling and worldbuilding (long before that term acquired the fashionable literary currency it has today). Here a local encounter with some unearthly revenant or manifestation of the monstrous would weave its way into the fabric of the region’s folklore and, in some intangible way, into the texture of the landscape itself. Thus, despite their closure, the creaking, ramshackle shells of these local watering holes have often withstood redevelopment or gentrification as, over time, they themselves have become part of the very folklore whose inception they once witnessed: after many strange and unnerving incidents surround such spaces, developers have abandoned attempts to transform them into eidolons of gleaming, metropolitan modernity; thus they remain exemplars of the true heart of Horsingdon: fearful sites of ghostly horror, haunted by the vengeful dead souls whose living tenements these old pubs once harboured.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmssions from Horsintdon, No.90: Benighted Depths

An outlier entrance to Horsingdon Bunker, whose locked doors once opened onto a stairwell providing access to the facility. Some years ago - after a spate of curious disappearances in the vicinity - a Ministry workforce filled the stairwell with concrete, forever blocking access to the Bunker’s interior - or denying egress from its forbidding depths by whatever now lurks within those benighted spaces.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.89: Sticks

Everyday perambulations throughout the borough of Horsingdon occasionally lead the casual walker to encounter intimations of the anomalous: on the crest of a low neolithic barrow, not far from Horsingdon Wood, rests a complex assemblage of sticks. Such artefacts typicallly evoke a parade of predictable questions: what does it ymbolise or signify? What is its meaning? Who could have constructed it? And for what purpose? But like the strange and shifting topographies upon which such ritual patterns and observances realise themselves, there exists no certitude or assurance - no surety of answer and no predetermined solution. 

How could there be? How could any place - always the product of hybrid histories and messy, mongrel narratives - ever be reduced to a simple, primordial and singular truth? Therein lies the path to a most perfidious form of occult-inflected ethno-nationalistic fascism: the kind which the true folk of Horsingdon - in all their diversity and glorious dissimilarity - have always resisted: with their malign and inhuman sorceries, with their extraterrestrial, polysexual and genderfluid witcheries - and with their monstrous and alien interminglings.

Horsingdon!

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.88: Disclosure

The cupola of one of the old Boreham family holdings overlooks Horsingdon Wood - pale light glowing eerily from its single window.

It is from the elevated domes and minarets and of this and other such demesnes that James Boreham once surveyed the glittering expanse of the night sky, perhaps in the hope of discerning the occult secrets hidden within the black gulfs of space - or of communing with the inhabitants of those gulfs who might, for the right price, be disposed to disclose such secrets.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.87: Signals from Witch Hollow

Yet another of the region’s mysterious transmtter arrays, located deep within Horsingdon Wood and not far from Witch Hollow: a site historically associated with the Horsingdon Coven (whose remaining members were executed in 1783), and a focal point of the borough’s witchlore.

The transmitter produces a constant stream of white noise, its static hiss overwhelming the airwaves hereabouts and drowning out all other signals: the temporal sonic fallout of abominable folk ceremonies, perhaps - somehow etched into the locale’s praternatural soundscape, and reverberate of whatever empty zone of mindless divinity the Horsingdon Coven communed with during the enactment of its abhorrent rites.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.86: Suburban SETI

The curious sight of radio telescopy occupies a quiet corner of Horsingdon. Though by no means as expansive as Jodrell Bank, this obscure Minstry installation - operational since the mid-1960s (around the time, incidentally, when Horsingdon witnessed its first UFO flap) - has supposedly been engaged in the radio-astronomical search for (and analysis of) anomalous signals emanating from outside our solar system. 

Stranger rumours hint at other kinds of research being undertaken at the facility: projects utilising the apocalyptic techno-occult arcana supposedly hothoused by both the axis and allies during the final, desparate months of World War II - esoteric technolgies designed to plumb the inconceivable abysses which lurk beyond the farthest depths of space and time, with a view to weaponising what might be encountered therein.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No. 85: Remote Realms 2

 

The underpass where the A40 (better known to the suburbanites inhabiting the Westerly edges of Greater London as The Western Avenue) intersects with North Horsingdon Lane. Much like the subject of yesterday’s post, this locale also has a history of inexplicable disappearances. 

Some say the underpass stands upon a point within the region’s praeternatural topography which was once sacred to either the Horsingdon Coven, or to the Folk of the Black Bowers (or perhaps both): a space wherein Those Who Wait were once conjured forth from the inaccesible, timeless gulfs which form their habitation, and made manifest - if only for a short time - in all their tangible awfulness. If true, the ancient rites enacted in this place - and the monstrous embodiments consummated by them - will have surely left a profound psychic wound upon the landscape: one which might, on an especially auspicious night, draw an unwary traveller through its yawning, hungering maw to some inconceivably remote and unknowable realm...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.84: Remote Realms 1

Long abandoned, Boreham Hall, which once housed the Temple of the Ascended Spirit - a spiritualist church whose small congregation disappeared suddenly and inexplicably one night in 1951 - stands opposite North Harlow Cemetary. Built by Joseph Boreham, strange lights and chanting were seen and heard emanating from the building’s interior shortly before it was discovered that the Temple’s membership had passed from view, seemingly collectively and en masse.

Not only did the Temple’s mediums assert the capacity to commune directly with the dead, they also claimed to possess a kind of spiritual sight whch allowed them to peer into the spaces beyond death, and espie the alien worlds which existed therein; indeed, central to the Temple’s theology was the eventual eschatological apotheosis of its congregation into those remote realms...

To this day, Boreham Hall remains closed to the public by order of Harlow County Council.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.83: The Windermere Arms Redux

The saloon bar of the Windermere Arms, not far from Eastcote Station. Worn but comforting in its shabby grandeur, both Aleister Crowley and Roland Franklyn supped here during their disparate investigations into the occult mysteries of Horsingdo

Sadly, like so many local hostelry’s these days, it remains largely empty and bereft of the cosy conviviality which once characterised so many of the borough’s pubs: a social analogue of the bleakness which, since the 1950s, has insinuated itself into the praeternatural topography of the region.