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.
No comments:
Post a Comment