Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.55 - The Shadow over Boreham

An image I received via e-mail earlier today: the shadow of ‘COLD’, at the dilapidated grave of a member of the Boreham family who - I am reliably informed - was involved in the founding of MI6 in the early years of the 20th Century. 

Unfortunately, the inscrutable ‘COLD’is never forthright where the content of his missives is concerned: undoubtedly some elusive nugget of information - presumably relating to the ‘incident’ at the decommissioned MoD site near the Ebury Way, with which my mysterious informant currently seems obsessed - is encoded in this peculiar image. Certainly, the close association of a member of the sorcerous Boreham clan with the British intelligence services is a singularly curious. Although perhaps not quite as surprising as one might initially infer, given the interest shown by various agencies in Horsingdon’s praeternatural topographies and the rich but hidden heritage of arcane lore which remain the region’s unseen and terrible legacies.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.54 - Saplings

 

Though not entirely clear from the above photograph, rows of recently planted saplings are housed behind the black iron railings, which separate them from the churchyard of St Osmund’s - though no doubt in time, as their roots begin to spread, they will find the adjacent burying ground a source of peculiar sustenance. It is ever the way of things in Horsingdon, where the dead sustain and give life to strange new forms.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.53 - The White Tower

A transmitter array atop the decommissioned MoD building known locally as ‘The White Tower’ - a few miles south of the installation which my informant ‘COLD’ claims was the location of an extremely strange event or visitation in the 1980s. According to ‘COLD’, The White Tower was operational at that time, scanning the airwaves as part of a cryptic military intelligence gathering programme. However, on the night of the event in question, a short but cacophonous burst of static - which was broadcast by way of a very curious frequency - disrupted these secretive activities for short while, and sent three radio operators who were on duty at the time stark, staring mad.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.52: Haunted Lockups

A strange hovering light - like a single, sinister glowing eye - is caught on camera at a local Horsingdon storage unit. The photographer, I am reliably told, felt compelled to take the photo after experiencing a creeping unease whilst walking down this darkened corridor. This strange beacon was not visible to photographer at the time.

A crumbling castle in the midst of a storm-wracked forest. A dilapidated house at the very edge of town on a fog-shrouded night. These are the kinds of locations which, typically, evoke in us anticipations of the ghostly. But sites of the spectral may take many forms, and the socially-uncolonised hinterlands of metropolitan modernity spawn their own unique - and terrible - hauntings.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.51 - Priory Hill at Night

Priory Hill at night: supposedly once the home of an obscure monastic order devoted to Saint Osmund. It is rumoured that, on the very darkest of winter nights, robed and hooded figures of a phantasmal cast may sometimes be spied at the crown of the hill, where the Priory of Saint Osmund is said to have stood until its destruction by fire - figures which for a time stare silently and terribly into the utmost blackness of the gulfs between the stars, before fading slowly into nothingness.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.50 - Eldritch Graffiti

A simple graffito tag? Or symbol from some obscure or hitherto-unknown body of arcana? In either case, the Horsingdon’s street sorcerers and urban cunning folk are known to employ their weird cryptonomicons to hex the metropolitan flow of capital, delineate zones of vampiric commerce with their strange signs, and, through creative sigilisations, fashion powerful apotropaic wards to obstruct unthinking and parasitic mind-viruses which, with the aid of iniquitous corporate conjurations, seek entry into our world.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.49 - Corporate Horror

One of the seemingly-untenanted corporate premises - leased by some nameless organisation engaged in some anonymous enterprise - which one finds scattered through the desolate business estates which constitute Horsingdon’s new edgelands.

In such occulted sites, it is said one may, on occasion, spy through the grimy windows of these buildings the vague outline of grotesque, malformed shapes, mindlessly labouring through a Byzantine bureaucracy: insensate, monstrous puppets engaged in the unthinking performance of a vast and complex ritual process - one encoded in perplexing and convoluted protocols and set in motion by…what? Perhaps something vast and inconceivable which has forced enough of its ineffable substance through the walls of our world to enact its vacuous schemes.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.48 - 6.30pm, St Osmund’s Lychgate.

It might be supposed that the witching hour of 3am is when the unfortunate late-night traveller through Horsingdon’s lesser known byways is most likely to be waylaid by some dreadful apparition or frightful, phantasmal force. Here, the clock upon the Lychgate of St Osmund’s Church is showing just before 6.30pm: in the winter months, even this is not too premature an hour for horrifying spectral presences to disclose themselves - especially to those lone, unwary commuters who, in taking a hurried shortcut through an old graveyard in the early evening, trespass unwittingly into territories over which borough’s restless dead hold dominion.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.47 - A Geography of Evil

The vale of Horsingdon by night, viewed atop Burn Hill. From the panoramic crown of that witch-haunted place, one can survey the borough in its totality.

A malignant topography. 

A spectral landscape.

A geography of evil.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.46 - Dead Line

There is said to be a telephone box somewhere in Horsingdon which will ring three times and three times only at a certain hour on a certain night each year. No one has yet answered, and so the phone will continue to ring three times at the appointed time once every year until the intended recipient of that call picks up the receiver, and listens as a dry, hollow voice intones a message meant only for them.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.45 - Strange Provender

The remains of Horsingdon’s unquiet dead provide strange provender to the flora of the borough’s burying grounds, and the tomb of a long-dead sorcerer will often invite the embrace of abnormal verdure which seeks to siphon the illicit power contained within back into the land from which it was torn.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.44 - The Music of the Spheres

The old music rooms of Harlow School: no longer in use since the late 1960s when the School’s Head of Music hanged himself in the upper room shown here. An amateur radio enthusiast, this tragic event occurred in the aftermath of said individual - an amateur radio enthusiast - claiming to have attuned one of his home-made radio sets to a certain, haunted frequency which gave him access to ‘the Music of the Spheres’.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.43 - Lychgate Alley

 

This alley in Lower Harlow follows the old lychway to St Mary’s Church, and runs past a new upmarket housing project which the developers - presumably with little understanding of the provenance or significance of the nomenclature they have employed - have named ‘Lychgate Manor’. More of this in a later post. For now it is enough to know that the alleyway which meanders past the Lychgate Manor development has a reputation for being the haunt of ghostly apparitions, and site of spectral manifestations, of various kinds. This is, perhaps, unremarkable given the history which underlies the alley; indeed, those residents of Harlow Hill who have lived in the area for the better part of their lives - and are respectful of the antiquity and traditions of the locale - have largely remained undisturbed by the odd things occasionally seen or heard in and around the site. For their part, whatever phantasmal presences make claim to this territory seem not to exhibit any malign intent towards the long-term inhabitants of Lower Harlow; their intentions towards the perceived interlopers of the Lychgate Manor development may, however, be a very different matter.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.42 - Dead Futurities

 

This partially-hidden building on MoD land was, apparently, once the analytical hub for various listening stations during the Cold War, where military cryptolinguists sought to decipher those signals and coded messages, each a potential harbinger of a moment of pure, existential horror wherein the commencement of a world-ending nuclear conflagration might have been terminally announced. Fortunately, that scenario did not and still has not come to pass - at least not yet. Even so, it is rumoured that the pressure and trauma of this work caused a number of analysts to take their own lives during prolonged postings at the site.

Although now abandoned, the installation remains an alluring challenge for urban explorers, some of who have reported seeing silent, spectral figures staring awestruck or with a look of profound horror on their pale, dead faces, out of a window from the building’s upper floor - perhaps viewing an indescribable future which even the act of self-immolation could not prevent them from witnessing.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.41 - “I will no longer countenance the presence of this or any other possible world”

 

The burying ground of St. Mary’s Church on a Harlow Hill marks the resting place of a number of the borough’s notables, eccentrics - and worse. This curious tomb belongs to Bartholomew Plarr - a mathematician and one-time master at Harlow school, who also dabbled in astronomy. It is the latter which, oddly enough, led him to espouse an occult-inflected early variant of antinatalist philosophy, claiming that the mass of humanity were “nobodies dwelling in an abysmal nowhere within a swirling cesspit universe of crepuscular nothingness”. Not only did this earn him some small degree of notoriety amongst the Harlow intellectuals of the time, but caused him to lose his position at Harlow school. 

The lid of Plarr’s tomb is inscribed with what was apparently a self-penned epitaph, which the gloomy philosopher-mathematician prepared in advance of his demise. It reads:

“I will no longer countenance the presence of this or any other possible world”

Many have taken this statement to mean that, in death, Plarr believed he would no longer suffer the anguish or ignominy of existence - corporeal or otherwise. Those familiar with the more esoteric dimensions of Plarr’s mathematical, astronomical and philosophical investigations into the nature of the world and being have, however, chosen to interpret it - somewhat chillingly - as a threat.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.40 - Entombment

 

An unmarked gravestone built into the wall of St. Mary’s Church on Harlow Hill. No one is entirely sure as to why the nameless headstone was incorporated into the structure of the church in this way. 

One particularly dark rumour, however, holds that it was placed there to mark the location of some poor unfortunate who, according to ancient custom, would have been walled up alive during the building of the church as the means of sanctifying the edifice. Were this true, one might ponder why, in times past, the good Christian folk of Harlow Hill (if that was indeed what they were) would contemplate such an act of bloody heathenry and - indeed - the exact nature and form of divinity which might require such sacrifice as an act of dedication.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.39: A Door Best Left Unopened

 

The door to the northerly porch of St. Mary’s Church atop Harlow Hill remains permanently locked. No one knows why - although some residents claim to have sometimes heard the faint sound of scratching against the other side of door, or a quiet voice coming from within the hollow of the barred porchway which conveys in murmured tones something no listener has ever cared to reveal…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.38 - The Whispering Dead

St. Mary’s burying ground is unusual in that it extends from the carefully sculpted and landscaped grounds of the churchyard itself down through the unkempt wooded incline of Harlow Hill itself. If those interned within the orderly graves of the main churchyard lie still, calm and quiet, it is not so with the deceased inhabitants of the lower ground; for a power older by far than the church upon its crown inheres within the Hill’s neglected, rewilded slopes - a power from which flows a strange vitality; and if one listens very carefully to a sound easily mistaken for the whisper of leaves in the wind in that place, one may discern within that soft hiss and crackle words unspoken by any living voice.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.37 - Wards and Barriers

An outlying building on MoD land which is the location of the alleged event which lead to the closure of the site. In a recent communique, ‘COLD’ informed me that, shortly before the event in question, those who worked in the building began reporting anomalous sounds and apparitions, all of which seemed to emanate from the extensive basement complex below it’s foundations. According to ‘COLD’, one particularly incredulous tale concerns a report logged by two terrified members of the RAF - who had been temporarily stationed at the site on special duty in relation to a highly secretive project - regarding the manifestation and subsequent disappearance of a monstrous worm-like entity, which they witnessed in one of the building’s sub-levels.

The windows have since been bricked up. There are also further rumours of other, arcane apotropaic wards and barriers within the structure - wards and barriers whose purpose is not so much to prevent ingress to the building of those who wish to divine its secrets, but to bind and constrain whatever may lurk within its unlighted and windowless halls from gaining access to the outside world.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.36 - Resurrection of the Flesh

 

An unmarked grave sits in the burying ground of St. Mary’s Church on Harlow Hill - also the location of Horsingdon’s famed private school, and the borough’s most affluent neighbourhood. St. Mary’s has, therefore, never been one of the more affordable sites for a final resting place. The lack of a name or marker, and the unusually squat proportions of the tomb (suggesting that whoever - or whatever - was once interred within was possessed of anomalous anatomical properties) are also curious in this regard. 

Taken together, these facts might point to the tomb as housing the remains of a scion of the Boreham lineage - a notion supported by obscure regional legendry and witchlore, which maintains that not only did the Boreham family have a long history of involvement in sorcerous practices, but that they also trafficked with monstrous and unwholesome powers from Outside, whose essence became intermingled with the Boreham bloodline as a consequence of the terrible pacts made by the family. Local tales thus tell of members of the Boreham line who, presumably as a result of their praeternatural heredity, were never seen in public and who, on their passing, were buried secretly in unmarked graves - albeit at sites known to have considerable significance in relation to the unearthly and occult properties of region’s topography (and St. Mary’s church is said to be one such site). 

The reason for this latter practice is not explained in the region’s folklore - though in relation to what seems to be the partially-disturbed condition of this particular tomb, one might hope that it’s positioning upon such lines of power was not meant to affect some strange and horrible resurrection…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023 - Better Left Unread

Boreham Library: a private subscription library established in 1904 by James Boreham (the last known scion of that strange and cursed lineage). The library supposedly remains in operation to this day, despite not having accepted new subscribers for over three decades. It’s doors have not been open to members of the public for just as long. This may be just as well, as it is said that amongst the curious tomes and manuscripts which populate its shelves there are those which remain better left unread.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.34 - Evening Mist

 

A fine mist falls upon Boreham Gardens in the early evening. Those out for a casual stroll may pause for a moment before huddling into their overcoats as the mist brings with it an unpleasantly damp chill; but then - with a forced air of casualness which belies a sudden, panicked urgency - they slowly but purposefully make their way out of the park.

Long-term residents of the borough know well enough that the sudden appearance of a soft wet mist within the precincts of the Boreham estate is an ill portent, and a clear sign that this is not an evening for lingering in and about the otherwise pleasant environs of the Gardens.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.33: Lost Souls.

A section of the Ebury Way, not far from the locations spoken of recently by my informant ‘COLD’. A place where, if you are unlucky, you may encounter a strange and sourceless thrumming in the air, and taste the metallic tang of ionisation at the sudden coalescing of storm clouds. 

Inevitably, these are heralds of a mysterious disappearance: a party of hikers suddenly realise one of their number - who went to relieve themselves behind a nearby tree - has not returned; a lone walker, spied in the distance by a family out for the day, is lost from sight after following a brief curve in the path - but as the family soon edge round that same slight turn, they see only a long, lonely, empty stretch of track ahead of them. Needless to say, these poor lost souls are never seen again.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.32: The Trentford Henge Redux

The enigmatic ‘COLD’ has been in contact once more, informing me that, if I wish to learn more about the mysterious events which transpired at an MoD installation near the Ebury Way in the early 1980s, I should turn my attention to the Trentford Henge (shown above, and located on MoD property adjacent to the abandoned installation in question). 

Local UFO enthusiasts and conspiracy theorists have noted that the Trentford Henge bears an unsettling similarity to a concrete structure erected near Wenceslaus mine in Poland between 1943-1944, and associated with Die Glocke - a top secret technological device or weapon supposedly being developed by Nazi scientists towards the end of WWII, and which employed in its construction forbidden occult sciences, or extraterrestrial technologies - or perhaps some unwholesome combination of the two. In any case, rumours abound that, soon after the fall of Berlin, Die Glocke - or documents and materials relating to its construction and purpose - ended up in the hands of the Allies…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.31: Corvidae

 

Frequent haunters of Horsingdon’s burying grounds, local folklore holds that the it is the role of the region’s corvidae to bring to the graveside messages for the dead - although it is never made clear in these tales from whence or whom these spectral missives come, or what strange purpose such communiques serve…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.30: Stones in the Woods

The sudden and accidental discovery of a barely-perceptible semi-circular stone structure covered by ivy and undergrowth, hidden deep within Horsingdon Wood. 

There is no sign or indication of its age; its origin and purpose thus remain obscure - but this is all the more reason (as all right-minded Horsingdon folk know) to leave such findings be, lest something best left undisturbed is woken.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.29: A Winter’s Wish

 

Winter in Horsingdon brings with it a raw, killing cold. Family, friends and neighbours always do what they can to ensure the safety of the elderly and infirm - those who, these days, are seen as marginal and unproductive - whilst the wealthy enjoy the warmth and comfort of their homes in indolent disregard at the suffering around them. 

Yet it is Horsingdon’s monied classes who always seem to suffer the worst of the season’s biting chill, as spirits of the frozen dead rise from the land to pass sentence upon those who, through their indifference and lack of largesse, have failed to learn the lessons of their callous ancestors.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No. 28 - Station Platforms

Horsingdon winters are notoriously unpredictable: at dawn or dusk during the season, a thick mist can settle on the platform of Northwich Park Station suddenly and unexpectedly. Every year a small (yet statistically-significant) number of passengers who set out on their journeys from the station under such conditions fail to arrive at their destinations and, indeed, are never seen again.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.27 - COLD.

 

This partial image is the only known photograph of the taciturn individual - and local conspiracy theorist - who goes by the curious nom de plume ‘COLD’. An occasional interlocutor of mine - who I have never actually met in person - COLD recently contacted me via e-mail regarding this previous post, intimating in the all-too-succint electronic missive forthcoming revelations concerning the mysterious event in question. I will, of course, provide further information as and when the enigmatic COLD deigns to supply it.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.26 - Black Bowers Redux

 

The Guardians of the Black Bowers mark with their thresholds those places where the wall of the world wears thin against the endless clawing of the abyss. Not even the most sacred or godly of Horsingdon’s sites are exempt from the stain of such portals, and offer no protection against the monstrous intrusions which, thankfully, irrupt into our world through them only infrequently.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.25: Visitation

 

These gates protect a deserted MoD site in Trentford near the Ebury Way - rumoured to be the location of an otherworldly or extraterrestrial visitation in the 1980s, details of which remain vague and inconclusive to this day. In any case, soon after the supposed occurrence of this speculated event, the site apparently closed down. 

Today, the area remains off-limits to the public, and heavy steel fencing and barbed wire enclose the locale  which, it is alleged, continues to be haunted by the contaminating reverberations of whatever strange event caused the site’s closure.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions, 2023, No. 24: Bridges

 

Bridges are liminal: transitional zones between recognised points of terminus, they are non-places. In Horsingdon, it is said that there are some bridges - almost always sites of local tragedy, or where some monstrous but half-forgotten atrocity was once committed - which on occasion become uncoupled from their original, worldly destinations. Any wayward traveller crossing such a bridge at the moment of its translation between this world and the absolute elsewhere is, therefore, likely to find themselves the permanent and unwelcome inhabitant of a strange and terrifyingly unfamiliar country…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.23: Lost Cosmonauts

The rather morbid topic of ‘lost cosmonauts’ is not one about which many are familiar. This elusive body of conspiracy theory holds that, in the very early days of the space race, the Soviet Union launched a number of highly secretive manned rocket missions into and beyond the upper reaches of the atmosphere. None of these missions, it is alleged, were successful, and not a single one of them managed re-entry, leaving the occupying cosmonauts stranded with no hope of rescue, facing a slow and horrifying death alone in the cold and indifferent depths of space. 

Andrei Leonov - a Russian emigre with both an interest in radio astronomy and the occult sciences - claimed to have received signals from these cosmically-abandoned dead souls using specially-modified equipment whilst living in Horsingdon in the late 1970s. According to Leonov (who disappeared in mysterious circumstances not long after voicing his initial claims) these lost cosmonauts relayed to him, in awe-struck, static whispers, the terrible things (about which he refused to say anything further) their dead eyes had witnessed within the infinite blackness of space.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.22: Lychways

Whether ancient track lit by corpse lights, or tarmac path illumined by the sodium glare of street lamps, the lychways of Horsingdon do more than just carry the deceased to their final place or rest: they are beacons which shepherd the restless dead back to the grave after their nightly sojourns seeking an accounting of injustices long forgotten - or bloody vengeance against those who once did them wrong.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No. 21: Hunting Grounds Redux

 

Horsingdon’s socially-uncolonised spaces - such as this long-deserted and derelict burying ground - are more often than not the breeding grounds of praeternatural ferality.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.20: Hunting Grounds

I like to think I am pretty fearless in my meanderings and perambulations about the parish of Horsingdon. Yet the residual spectrality which sometimes irrupts unexpectedly into its already haunted landscapes still threatens to consume even those travellers habituated to the nascent wyrd of its lanes and fields, avenues and alleyways. Caution is always advised, and the seasoned explorer of the region’s stranger byways knows to pay heed to those peculiar, passing moments of intuitive dread, which signify the advent of something terrible yet unseen. 

Such was the case this evening, when I was about to take a detour down the rarely-travelled alleyway depicted above. Needless to say, I moved swiftly on to avoid the predatory, praeternatural ministrations of whatever had, if only for a short time, intruded upon that lonely ginnel to make of it a hunting ground.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmission 2023, No.19: Apocalyptic Tracts

Apocalyptic tracts such as the one above (which was slipped through my letterbox earlier today) are not uncommon theological fare in the borough of Horsingdon - perhaps unsurprisingly so, given the folkore and legendry which pervade and suffuse the region's haunted topographies. 

Even so, there are those who take such matters very seriously, and who find such attempts at fearful proselytisation - especially if they are pursued in a particularly insistent manner - not only a bothersome intrusion, but a call to arms. There are more than a few tales which tell of a local cunning man - or even one of the Guardians of the Black Bowers - engaging in a very direct and maledictive course of action in response to the pious arrogance of tub-thumping god-botherers. Needless to say, the outcome of such vexatious 'knacking' (the local vernacular for hexing or cursing) results in a very personal apocalypse being visited up the unfortunate victims who, in the last, terrible instance, are likely left in a state of awestruck wonderment as they finally come face-to-face with a god - but in all likelihood not the one they were expecting...

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.18: Hemlock Avenue

 

It is perhaps unsurprising that the inhabitants of Horsingdon often exhibit what could variously be described as a rather morbid sense of humour or a strangely melancholic sentimentality when naming the thoroughfares through their burying grounds. Needless to say, naming conventions such as this represent truisms - at least in the eyes of Horsingdon folk - with regard to the final destination to which all paths ultimately lead.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmission 2023, No.17 - Ledger Stones

 

Traditionally, ledger stones were placed on the graves of those who were reasonably well-to-do - yet not affluent enough to afford the expense of a carven tomb or sepulchre. As well as markers of status, ledger stones also made the desecration or robbery of the grave upon which they were laid a much more arduous task.

However, Horsingdon folklore proposes a different purpose to these weighty stones, noting that such artefacts are more often than not found upon the resting places of the region’s less reputable dead, where they prevent from rising that which sleeps only fitfully within the restrictive confines of the grave.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.16: Steps

Sometimes a series of stone steps in the woods leading nowhere is exactly that: an obscure and curious monument to history, purpose, or place long forgotten. In Horsingdon - at the proper season - they may aspire to something else: thresholds to other worlds, initiators which open pathways onto sacred mysteries, eldritch witchlore, or something much worse…

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.15 - The Willows

Horsingdon is somewhat notable on account of the number of trees which flourish in the gardens of its residents, most of who are rightly proud to share their living space with their arboreous cohabitants (especially if they are of the fruit-bearing capacity). Indeed, many of these trees are protected by preservation orders which the brough has been reluctant to rescind.

And for good reason, it seems: a few years ago a neighbour of mine - a retired City-type who had moved to Horsingdon for short time whilst awaiting the completion of renovations to his country pile somewhere in the Home Counties - had also somehow managed to persuade Horsingdon council to revoke the preservation order on two ancient willow trees in his spacious garden (on account of their ‘spoiling’ the view). In any case, a few days after the trees had been cut down said neighbour appears to to have disappeared suddenly and inexplicably - hasn’t been seen since. 

On hearing this tale, those who have moved into the area in recent years have, understandably, discounted as a fanciful local superstition the claim that, at the time of his disappearance, curious tracks were found leading from the stumps of the hewn trees across the otherwise perfectly-mowed lawn of my neighbour toward the interior of his house. 

Regardless of such scepticism, no one else in the neighbourhood has since sought to remove any inconvenient arborage from their garden.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.14: “Spectre vs Rector” (Holy Terrors Redux)

Clerical intercessions into the haunting of various of Horsingdon’s churchyards have often - in an almost M. R. Jamesian sense - resulted in an unpleasant reversal of fortunes for the clergy involved. 

Far from the spectral intrusions being exorcised or forcibly removed via other forms of spiritual or praeternatural coercion, in the majority of these cases, the tables have been turned on the intervening rectors: invariably, their puritanical and morally-upstanding (but oddly prurient) exteriors have been revealed (usually to the local press) as facades masking uncomfortable, scandalous or otherwise embarrassing facts regarding intimate aspects of their personal lives. 

The inevitable outcome being that these sour, repressed individuals end up fleeing the borough under a cloud of shame - leaving the troublesome spectres to continue with their vexations. Which - as any folklorist worth their salt would agree - is exactly as it should be.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.13: The White Stone

This strange artefact sits in a cabinet in a darkened corner of Horsingdon’s Museum. Excavated at the site of the Neolithic settlement atop Horsingdon Hill, this luminous mass of smooth white stone is generally believed by geologists to be a natural - albeit highly unusual - geological formation.

Less credible claims hold that it is a product of human artifice at least 7000 years old - perhaps an attempt by one of Horsingdon Hill’s ancient inhabitants to carve into stone the likeness of something which the folk of that place once worshipped in antique and nameless rites…

 

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.12 - Holy Terrors

There is as much of the sublime about the spectral as there is the terrible - and certainly the tales surrounding this abandoned and deconsecrated church near Burn Hill attest to this: a strange chanting heard at midnight, emerging from its black and hollow depths; a bat-winged thing once seen squatting on the nave roof beneath a gibbous moon; the spectre of a faceless nun said to haunt the spire.

The terror inspired by this local lore - the accretion of centuries of tale-telling and myth-making - also evokes an awe which re-inscribes such sites with a profound sense of the sacred beyond the power of any priest to banish.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.11: Numbers Station

This shabby brick building stands next to a transmitter array in a secluded corner of Winscombe Wood. The rusted fenced gate has not been opened in years, and there have been no signs of human activity or habitation in or about the small, hut-like building for decades

Yet this is the rumoured location of a numbers station which, it is said, has broadcast a seemingly random spool of numerals - all read in the same hollow, electronically-modulated voice - unceasingly since the early 1950s. This being the case, what spectral tenants yet haunt the site in the maintenance of its operation? And to whom - or what - are they signalling?

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.10: Hollow Hills

Otherwise considered a naturally-occurring rock formation, those local to Winscombe Wood (which lies not far from the Ebury Way and sits on the boundary of Horsingdon and Trentford) refer to this curious woodland stone edifice as ‘the Fairy Hill’, and have avoided the place for decades. Local legendry also holds that somewhere within the structure lies a secret entrance to a network of caves or tunnels which burrow deep into the hidden places of the earth.

A particularly sinister body of lore surrounds the location, including the following account of an event which supposedly occurred in the mid-1920s: a young family, it is said, were enjoying a picnic at the base of the Fairy Hill one Summer’s day, when they were suddenly disturbed from their repast by the sound of stone scraping up stone, which ceased almost as abruptly as it started. At which point the assembled company realised that one of their number - a toddler around the age of two or three - was unaccountably missing. After a panicked search, a discovery was made within the hollow of the Fairy Hill…only it was not the missing child: what was found, instead, was a mewling, stunted, sallow and wizened thing dressed in the absent child’s clothing. 

What eventually became of the…changeling?…the tale does not tell. However, horrid legends such as this -  as well as the spate of actual disappearances of children in and around Winscombe Wood in the early 1970s - attest to why locals avoid the area.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.9 - A Way Through The Woods

One of the so-called ‘witchpaths’ through Horsingdon Wood, all of which lead to a grove supposedly used as the focal of the Horsingdon Coven’s rituals (until it’s members had mostly been hunted down and executed by zealous witchhunters by the first half of the 17th Century).

When walking these ancient tracks, one may, however, still encounter a residuum of the immemorial magicks evoked by the Horsingdon Coven: shadowy figures have sometimes been sighted along such paths before suddenly vanishing (leaving in their wake a faint whiff of sulphur); strange glowing lights have also been seen dancing in the air a short way from the edges of these paths, seemingly beckoning one deeper into the woods and away from the relative safety of the ancient trails; it is also said that, at certain seasons, one may encounter an unsettling and sourceless atonal piping whilst walking the witchpaths: an alien and discordant music which is said to evoke in the percipient a sense of nameless dread and burdgeoning panic - as if that dissonant sound were herald to a terrible and monstrous revelation.

Needless to say, the folklore of the region is replete with tales of those who made the decision to walk the witchpaths in search of knowledge or power - but who never returned from whatever ultimate destination their journeyings on these strange pathways led them.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.8 - The Other Signs

According to the Guardians of the Black Bowers (those hereditary custodians of Horsingdon’s witchlore), there are gods so immemorially old and terrible that their names have either been forgotten or purposely erased from the annals of the region - names now historied only in the form of curious and inscrutable sigils referred to by the folk of Horsingdon as ‘The Other Signs’.

These enigmatic glyphs, whilst rare, can nevertheless be found in the form of Neolithic etchings found on lonely spars and outcroppings of ancient bedrock scattered across Croxley moor and along the Ebury Way; their likeness may also be discerned in some of the images scrawled within the crumbling pages of a grimoire which once belonged to a local cunning man, but now resides in the Special Collections of Boreham Park Library; more recently, a motif not dissimilar to one of the Neolithic sigils found on Croxley Moor was daubed in goat’s blood upon a wall of the Northwich Park Station underpass.

For the most part, these sigils remain untranslated. Perhaps this is for the best, for the strange and disconcerting forms of The Other Signs hint at alien sounds, arrhythmic syncopations, and monstrously entropic grammars which could not possibly represent, signify, or correspond to - at least in a comprehensible and meaningful manner - any realm or zone of being comprehensible to the human mind.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.7 - ‘As A Foulness Shall Ye Know Them’

  

Amongst the claims of local conspiracy theorists, perhaps one of the strangest comes from the otherwise anonymous individual going by the online username of ‘Cold’. On multiple occasions ‘Cold’ has maintained that Horsingdon and its neighbouring parishes have long been afflicted by strange and uncanny signals oozing down from the stars - and from other nameless abysses and nebulous zones of being and entity which lurk at the hinterlands of human perception and comprehension. 

The mysterious ‘Cold’ has also averred first-hand knowledge of a programme of decoding and decipherment of said signals by Ministry listening stations such as the one depicted above, which has apparently been in existence since the early 1950s. Furthermore, ‘Cold’ insists that Ministry boffins have made use of a range of esoteric technologies (which the Axis powers initially sought to mobilise during the final years of World War II) to filter the anomalous broadcasts through syntactic structures of inhuman paralinguistic grammars, occult cryptographic algorithms, and hypergeometric computational matrices generated by an alien mathematics. According to ‘Cold’, despite the Ministry’s best efforts (which have also apparently resulted in multiple, mysterious and unaccountable instances of death and insanity amongst research staff involved in the project) it remains (thankfully) doubtful that these wholly-otherworldly transmissions have or will ever be persuaded to reveal their frightful secrets.

Nonetheless, ‘Cold’ continues to assert that the monstrous static bleed produced by these alien signals continues to contaminate the psychic topographies of Horsingdon with highly infectious memetic pathogens, such that the region has been accounted by some occultists as a Centre of Pestilence: a place where Those Who Wait broke through of old, to pollute the world with Their Foulness - and where They shall break through again at the appointed season.

Spectral Static: The Horsingdon Transmissions 2023, No.6 - Crooked Portals (The Tree at the Edge of the World Redux)

Hidden portals are scattered throughout Horsingdon's occult topography; however, the folklore of the region also maintains that these secret gateways sometimes become more or less conspicuous on account of the spectral demeanour of the landscape they inhabit: the Hanging Tree on Horsingdon Hill being a case in point.

But if that lore teaches us anything, it is the need to countenance the value of such places with a degree of circumspection: whilst the opening of these portals is viewed by some as an opportunity to transform and revivify a fallen and unclean present through a radical and utopian re-instantiation of the past, it is crucially important to remember that such endeavours inevitably prove deadly: for their pursuit always involves the violent imposition of some imagined moral, cultural or ethnic purity, usually seen as necessary to and constitutive of that equally fictive and imagined past. The vengeful spectres of those hanged as witches on Horsingdon Hill offer an object lesson on this account: it is often the powerless and the marginal who pay the price for such ideals - yet always their memory returns in an act of rebounding violence to haunt and desecrate those visions of purity and order with their filthy and uncomfortable truths, returning the world to the disorderly, mongrel and hybrid condition which is its rightful estate.

Thus the tree in Boreham Park depicted above represents a point of division between our world and the many others which cojoin it; yet the realms and universes to which it offers ingress are not the delightful, enchanted and perfect kingdoms encountered in our more rapturous imaginings; rather, they constitute monstrous and entropic spheres of being as degenerate, twisted, crooked, and creaking as our own.