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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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...
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Near the crown of Horsingdon Hill there stands an ancient and withered tree, known locally as ‘The Hanging Tree’. Tradition has it that during the time of the witch hunts, the tree was used as a place of execution for those poor and marginalised women falsely convicted of the crime of maleficarum - and whose revenants are said to haunt the site to this day.
Sturdy new iron railing has recently been installed around the small Boreham family plot in the cemetery of St. Osmund’s Church on Southcote Lane.
The reasons for the railing’s installation remain unclear, and no explanation has been forthcoming from either Horsingdon Borough Council or the episcopate body which has jurisdiction over the diocese. There certainly haven’t been any reported desecrations in the old burying ground for decades.
However, those intimately acquainted with the witchlore of the region have noted the apotropaic character of the material used in the railing’s construction, and the significance of this with regard to long-standing rumours of the Boreham family’s participation in the Horsingdon and Burn Hill covens. This has lead to speculation that, rather than providing an impediment to ingress to the parts of the churchyard it seemingly protects, the iron railing instead acts as ward against something within the enclosed area which seeks trespass into our world…
It is rumoured that the steeples and belfries of the some of the old and disused churches scattered throughout the parish of Horsingdon are haunted by things far older and more terrible than bats.
Even in the best-kept and most estimable of Horsingdon’s boneyards, you are likely to encounter some unkempt, rewilded corner where a few graves lie overgrown and untended. Curiously, with a small number of these plots one may discover that, on closer inspection, their cracked and crooked headstones have surfaces worn clean, such that they possess no inscription or other visible signifier as to the precise identity of whose resting place they designate. Curiouser still is the fact that such erasures are not the always the product of time and the elements: for some of these gravestones, it is clear that the names of the departed have been intentionally effaced.
An abandoned transmitter array overlooks a graveyard located in a lonely corner of Marsh End in the semi-rural district of Trentford. Constructed as part of a secretive Ministry project in the early 1960s, the array was decommissioned towards the end of the Cold War; however, it is rumoured amongst some of the older residents of Marsh End that the array remains operational: that if one tunes a radio to a certain frequency, one may discern the trace of faint, spectral voices; that if one listens carefully, those voices will disclose in whispered, awestruck tones hints of the vast, unspeakable things and forbidden secrets which await revelation in those nameless spaces which lie beyond the threshold of the grave.
