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.