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…