Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.59: Outbuildings

Dilapidated sheds and outbuildings are a common feature of the long-untenanted farms one encounters throughout the more rural outskirts of Trentford. Much of the farmland thereabouts was once owned by the Boreham family; but with the agricultural recession which afflicted the region toward then end of the 19th Century, many of the Boreham’s tenants were forced to abandon their leaseholds. In the aftermath of this mass desertion, it is rumoured that James Boreham relocated the more dangerous and outre of his occult experiments to these demenses, concealing many monstrous and hideous things in the forsaken buildings which sat crumbling on these estates - things whch may lurk still in the forgotten and decrepit corners of rural Trentford.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.58: Haunted Signals

Peering over the roofs of houses in a certain Horsingdon suburb, this transmitter array broadcastsc its inscrutable signal.

Whilst the people of Horsingdon are no strangers to phantasmal manifestations, ghostly intrusions, and spectral portents, since the construction of the transmitter array the homes within this particular suburb seem to be afflicted by more than their fair share of praeternatural phenomena: nocturnal rappings, unearthly apports, and even monstrous ectoplasmic extrusions have provided the subject matter of a steady stream of reports helpfully provided by local residents.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.57: The Devil’s Stamping Ground

The Devil’s Signpost stands at the corner of The Devil’s Stamping Ground: a great sloping patch of land which runs through the woods on the crown of Burn Hill all the way to its base. This strip of land - bare of vegetation now, except for the the tough grass which carpets it - was the prodct of the events of the May Eve of 1876 when (or so it is claimed) something was called forth atop the Hill to be loosed upon the unsuspecting local populace, its vast, invisble bulk cutting a devestating swathe through the then-dense forest

There is no one left alive from that time to verify these wild tales and, unsurprisingly, Horsingdon’s newspaper archives remain silent as far as such rumours are concerned, preferring instead to explain the events of that May Eve  as the result of an especially violent thunderstorm.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.56: The Devil’s Signpost

Struck by lightning in 1876 - an event which appears to have precipitated a night of horror during which nine people died - the corpse of this tree standing near the crown of Burn Hill has since become known as ‘The Devil’s Signpost’. There are none left now who recall the events of that night which lead to the tree’s naming; however, rumour has it that one of the Boreham family was responsible for calling forth something from the unnameable gulfs which grind against the walls of this world - something which ravaged the surrounding area until it was finally cast back from whence it came.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.55: Significations of the Absolute Effacement of All Things

This curious ritual structure - found alongside a path running through the dense woods atop Burn Hill  - is a sure sign that the Folk of the Black Bowers have been about their work. Whilst the signficance of such assemblages is known only to those versed in the esoteric language of those Folk, for other local residents their appearance is a cause of dread and anxiety, portending as they typically do some terrible calamity (the body of a neighbor found hanging in the woods; the disappearance of a child; a beloved pet found mutilated in a ritualistic fashion).

The Folk of the Black Bowers, however, are possessed of such foresight that they understand these tragedies as parochial: nothing but a necessay part of the symbolic grammar of the spell they weave - a spell whose completion will lend itself to a final unravelling of the world, and thus to the absolute and irreversible cessation and erasure of all things.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.54: The Abyssal Tower

This towering transmitter array stands amidst a vast tract of suburban wasteland, located at the outermost edges of Horsingdon. The entire site is surrounded by forbidding black iron fencing, enclosing within its baleful embrace a desolate and unholy post-industrial landscape: a terrain whose character of utter, ontological vacancy is, it seems, the cloacal byproduct of whatever abyssal and inhuman signals are broadcast ceaselessly by the monstrous tower which sits at its centre.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.53: The Hidden Paths

The hidden paths of the Folk of the Black Bowers are both manifold and liminal: one crosses them often in Horsingdon, although they are usual hidden from ordinary sight, constituting an invisible topography coexistent with its corporeal counterpart, and tracing routes to places no sane human would dare to visit.

On occasion, however - usually whilst one is treading some obscure path or lane through wood and field - one realises, in a manner which often defies clear, verbal expression - or perhaps a feeling of inexpressible dread - that this occult interpenetration of things has somhow become manfest. At such times, it is best to turn around and head home, for to continue with one’s journey is to risk the possibility of arrival at a destination from which there may be no returning.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.52: Urban Monoliths

A number of great, blocky redbrick monoliths exist in and around Horsingdon; no one seems to recall who built them, but it is generally agrees that the structures first appeared during the early years of the Cold War. The parcels of land upon which these edifices were built have since been subject to compulsory purchase orders, and the monoliths are now surrounded by high, industrial-grade steel palisades topped with barbed-wire.

As with so much else within the borough, the origin and purpose of the monoliths remains a mystery - although rumours occasionally surface of military trucks parked in their vicinity, of curious lights observed hovering above them at midnight, and of black-robed figures seen encircling these modern megaliths at twilight, all the while chanting the words of an incomprehensible catechism.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.51: Spectral Invasions

A transmitter array near Eastcote Station. Here the air is charged with a thick galvanic hum and the numbing tang of ozone. It is said that, on some nights, strange, wraithlike figures can be observed clustering around the base of the transmitter; drawn to it’s signal, perhaps these terrible inhabitants from another world see the technological beacon as the means of entering our world from their own, spectral dimension...

But to what purpose?

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.50: The Witches of Wealdstone Brook

Wealdstone Brook eventually feeds into the Trentford River, which runs parallel to the Ebury Way up to and beyond the village of Dedham. The Brook itself, marking through part of its journey the old parish boundary between Horsingdon and Harlow, has a doleful history associated with the region’s witchlore: suspected witches were once hanged from the bridge where the above photo was taken, allowing their fleeing, monstrous souls to be carried off by the Brook’s purifying current, so that those malign spirits might never again trouble the good people of Horsingdon.

The rationale behind this practice did, however, Reveal,itself to be flawed: one particular infamous witch trial in the January of 1752 saw twenty-three women hanged from the bridge in a single day; within a year, the three witch hunters who presided over that shocking tribunal were dead to a man - each of them later discovered to have mysteriously drowned at various locations along the sodden banks of Wealdstone Brook.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.49: The Door in the Tower.

A utilitaran wrought-iron staircase leads to a single doorway - the building’s only visible point of ingress or egress - at the top of a monolithic, redbrick windowless tower, which forms part of an abandoned Ministry installation. Though no longer operational, this site remains off-limits to Horsingdon’s citizenry.

Some doorways, it seems, are best kept permanently closed.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.48: Phantasmal Transmitter

A spectral structure, witnessed in the early hours of this morning from Harlow Station. By all accounts, the thing stretched for miles into the upper atmosphere, and in many particulars was the visionary analogue of the many corporeal transmitter arrays which haunt the region.

Rumours currently abound that, for the few minutes during which this phantasmal transmitter was visible, local radio broadcasts were interrupted by a strange and unearthly signal from an as-yet unknown source. Some Harlow residents have apprently reported hearing the voices of deceased friends and family emanating from their radio sets during this period of disruption. One can only imagine the horror of such a thing: dead, familiar whispers, quietly uttering sinister secrets and unspeakable truths into the ears of their awestruck and affrighted percipients.

Malign Fequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.47: Houses of the Unholy

In a small garden on the border of Horsingdon Woods stand a number of curious, roughly-hewn stone pillars or monoliths, marking this out as the habitation of one of the Guardians of the Black Bowers - or even possibly (and a worse proposition by far) that of one of the surviving members of the Horsingdon Coven.

Even though such dwellings, ramshackle as they invariably are, often offer the appearance of having been long abandoned, this is rarely the case; certainly the older residents of Horsingdon have a care to avoid these places, and will warn you never, ever, to approach them - for those who have, by some means, attained ingress to such houses with a view to seeking the counsel of the strange individuals who dwell within, are rarely ever seen again.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.46: Below Boreham Park

In a quiet corner of Boreham Park, inset into the earth, is a great granite slab - long overgrown and about which are arrayed heavy stones inscribed with curious sigils. Rumour has it that the slab hides a stone stairwell which burrows deep into the earth, connecting with a nework of tunnels which were once linked with the cellars of Boreham Mansion. Other rumours maintain that the slab was put in place not so much to hide this subterrenean realm from prying eyes, but rather to ensure that whatever James Boreham called up from that benighted zone of abject horror was never loosed upon the world...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.45: Black Goat

The Guardians of the Black Bowers observe the Feast of St. Valentine’s in their own unique and terrible manner - through the sacrifice of a black goat: symbol of unbridled fecundity, and the esoteric signifier of the unruly and monstrous transfigurations which Those Who Wait are expected to inflict upon the cosmos when, on their return, they murder it and remake it in their image.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.44: The Horsingdon Horrorhouse

At the end of Hallowmere Road, opposite some disused tennis courts, stands the Horsingdon Horrorhouse - at least, that is what it has long been refered to by generations of children, who have perennially dared one another to play ‘knock down Ginger’ on the front door of the now-untenanted building. 

No one quite remember how the house got its sinister name - at least that is what the more elderly residents of the region claim; but when asked about the house, these individuals invariably betray their discomfort. Thus there are those that surmise that something did once happened at the house - something so, inconceivably terrible that the locals now seek to utterly erase all knowledge and memory of that event...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.43: Uncanny Machines

The gutted shell of a Ministry hanger, at the edge of a fenced-off compound in a secluded, heavily wooded area near Trentford. It is unclear as to what kind of vehicle or device might have been secured in the hanger when it was in use - although there are rumours of other, secret underground installations spread throughout the region within which remarkable machineries of occult or non-human provenance are stored; even so, whilst seemingly abandoned, this woodland facility is resonant with a sense of the uncanny: the hauntological outline or echo of whatever praeternatural technologies once occupied this desolate place.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.42: Ministry of the New Dawn

The building next to St. Osmund’s Church  - once a local community centre - was recently purchased by an American evangelical organisation known as the Ministry of the New Dawn; now transformed into a place of worship, the old community centre is also currently the place of residence of Pastor Ezekiel Boreham-Sand, who claims a genealogical bond with the Boreham familiy.

Whilst it has boldly set itself up as a spiritual rival to the more traditionalist St. Osmund’s, the Ministry of the New Dawn does not, by all accounts, adhere to a typically doctrinal interpretation of Christianity, instead preferring to preach a more heterodox, gnostic and apocalyptic creed - one premised on the notion that God - the hidden and awful singularity at the heart of all things - will soon herald a new dawn for humanity upon Its awakening from the forgetfulness of Its cosmic slumber, finally opening Its single, monstrous eye to irradiate and cleanse the world with the mindless power of Its terrible, inmost light.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.41: The Horsingdon Witch Pool

The Witch Pool can be found at the Northeast edge of Horsingdon Wood. It is here that the Horsingdon Coven supposedly met in order to scry into the murky, algae-ridden depths of the pool to effect certain, cryptic prognostications.

Whilst there are no known written records concerning the content of the Coven’s oracular declarations, the rich storehouse of Horsingdon witchlore uniformly holds that their divinations invariably foretold the occurance of various dire events which would afflict the region (all of them having thusfar apparently come to pass) - events whose occurance are, to ths day, believed by some Horsingdon folk to augur the imminent return of Those Who Wait...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.40: Electric Barrow

An isolated, overgrown barrow on the very borders of Trentford, not far from the village of Dedham. Overhead power lines are the only visible signifier of the ancient burial mound’s proximity to modernity.

The air around the barrow reeks of ozone and stale time, and it is said that whatever was interred within has since been disturbed from its long, deathly slumber by the eddies and currents of electricity produced by the nearby pylon, to conjur terrifying neolithic ghosts formed from the white noise of televisual static.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.39: The Vanishing Stone

A globular, pulsing mass of light hovers above a clearing in Horsingdon Wood, irradiating the landscape with its strange illuminesence. The morning after this phenomenon was witnessed, three sets of clothing were discovered: neatly folded, and carefully arranged in a symmetrical pattern around a large angular stone - etched with ancient glyphs, worn and rendered inscrutable by the ages - near the edge of the clearing. 

As yet, there has been neither sight nor sound of the bodies to which the clothing presumably once belonged...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.38: Vortical Disinternments

Vortical detritus in the vicinity of a disused Ministry installation which, according to some Horsingdon conspiracy theorists, was once a research centre dedicated to the investigation of certain esoteric technologies which had been recovered from sites in Poland and Germany during the final stages of World War 2. These technologies supposedly utilised hypergeometric vorticle principles developed earlier in the century by the mystic and scientist Viktor Schauberger, and possessed the capacity - or so it is rumoured - to tear apart the very fabric of reality...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.37: Ancient Tracks

There are many old, straight tracks worn into the Horsingdon countryside, delineating the ancient, ritual geometries which were once used to draw power from out the region’s hidden, praeternatural topography.

Whilst many of the Old Ways remain forgotten outside of mysterious cabals such as the Guardians of the Black Bowers, these ancient tracks sometimes retain spectral memories of the wonders and terrors which they once conjoured from out of the landscape: a tall, spindly and inhuman figure might be spied briefly at the point where an old path approaches its vanishing point; a strange mauve mist might appear suddenly along another of these archaic avenues, only to dissipate just as swiftly - after which a disoriented walking party discover that one of their number has mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again; along the forested borders of another such track, a great black dog with eyes like glowing coals is seen pacing hungrily...

Indeed, one should take care not to step too lightly upon such paths, for fear they might lead the unwary traveller on an unwarranted journey to a wholly unexpected destination.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.36: Where The River Meets The Moor

The River Weir flows sluggishly through Trentford, forming one of the boundaries to the bleak expanse of Croxley Moor.

This intersection of river and moor is a site considered sacred by the Guardians of the Black Bowers who, it is rumoured, still gather here on astronomically-auspicious nights to observe their secret and terrible sacrements - for it is said that this is one of the places where the Words of Power had been spoken in epochs past, and where unspeakable rites had been howled through at certain seasons: a place where Those Who Wait broke through of old to walk the Earth unseen and foul, and where They shall break through again.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.35:: Sounds With Which To Rend The World Apart

The monolithic architecture of what was once Northwich Polytechnic’s Radiophonic Workshop; built in the early 1960s, its construction was allegedly funded by the Ministry of Defence, for reasons which remain obscure. The lack of windows is a consequence of the extreme lengths to which the soundproofing of the internal studio spaces was taken - it apparently being deemed necessary that there absolutely no sonic bleed-through into the external world was allowed from whatever was being recorded within.

Though currently abandoned, there are those who claim that the building continues to be haunted by the shocking aural echoes of sounds which were once produced with the intention of tearing the world apart.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.34: Broadcasts from the Abyss

The neolithic old straight track of the Ebury Way runs from Trentford to the medieval village of Dedham, passing close to Croxley Moor as it traces its ancient and mysterious trajectory through the region’s landscape. From the point at which the Ebury Way abrades against the harsh and uncompromisng boundaries of the Moor, one can see, rising from behind a nearby hill, the doleful, minimalist scaffold of a transmitter array - beyond which the prohibited latitudes wherein the ominous Ministry installation mentioned in yesterday’s post may be found.

Here the air thrums with insensate power, resonant with the numb indifference of the adjacent, dead landscape; the signal from the skeletal tower is broadcast along vectors both unknown, unrecognised, and inconceivable to its terrestrial audience: a dull, resonant throb whose transmission streams through ancient and glacial frequencies - frequencies which form the ontological echo of that mindless, abyssal, and primordial singularity which mistakenly birthed the universe...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.33: Cyclopean Primordialist Inhumanism

The archaic and hypergeometric principles of a cyclopean, primodialist inhumanism were somehow synthesised with 1950s architectural Brutalism to produce this chillingly unsettling Ministry installation, constructed at the furthest edges of Croxley Common Moor during the early stages of the Cold War. It goes without saying that there exist virtually no records regarding the site (which remains out of bounds to the general public to this day), what its purpose was, or indeed of what horrors must have undoubtedly been witnessed within its benighted walls.

And perhaps, at least as far as the peace of mind of the residents of Horsingdon, Harlow, and Trentford are concerned, that is for the best.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.32: Strange Auguries

As the Winter’s first snow falls upon Horsingdon’s silent and sinister topography, strange signs and portents have been sighted throughout the region: through the nocturnal flurry above Horsingdon Hill, one of the local residents photographed this curious congeries of glowing orbs, which subsequently traced strange designs against the darkness before vanishing as suddenly as they had appeared.

Scant minutes ago someone else - a neighbour of mine, in fact - reported hearing an inhuman voice echoing through the darkness of Hallowmere Fields as she was walking home: though barely a whisper, the creaking, gutteral voice nonetheless remained clear and distinct, saying something so terrible that my neighbour could not bear to hear it - something so monstrous (or so she claimed) that it could never bear repeating.

Earlier in the evening, patrons enjoying a quiet pint in the Black Shuck claimed to have spied the phantom shape of a faceless, bat-winged thing lurking in the cemetary of St. Osmunds opposite the pub: a thing that squatted, for a while, on the tombstone of a long-dead women rumoured to have once been the leader of the Horsingdon Coven, before silently taking flight and disappearing into the snow-filled blackness of the night sky.

Strange times indeed for Horsingdon...