The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.3: The Way Through The Woods

 

A path through the woods on the slope of Horsingdon Hill leading to its crown. This same pathway is said to have been witness to the ritual processions of the Horsingdon coven to their sacred grove atop the Hill, until the cessation of their activities sometime in the late 18th century. 

Locals often avoid such ‘witch roads’ on account of their being residually haunted by the lingering aftermath of whatever awful rites were once enacted in their vicinity. Indeed, occasional reports still surface concerning the disappearance of casual hikers - invariably visitors from outside the region - last seen traversing one of Horsingdon’s witch roads en route to a terminally unexpected destination.

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.2: Edgeland Broadcasts

Beyond the periphery of Horsingdon’s farthest suburbs, one encounters desolate edgelands comprised primarily of deserted, overgrown industrial estates; however, these zones of abandonment occasionally reveal the rewilded brutalist architecture of an ominously-vacant and derelict state installation - some dread-infused relic of the Cold War. The image above was taken at one such site: a transmitter array entangled by and partially subsumed within the unrestrained verdant growth engendered by Horsingdon’s cursed soil. 

Yet despite the site’s current condition of apparent neglect and disuse, the array - so I am told - continues to broadcast an uncanny and indecipherable signal. 

But to whom and for what purpose?

The Horsingdon Transmissions 2025, No.1: Keep Out!

 

One of the vacant and dilapidated premises which dot the uncanny suburban topography of Horsingdon. Its state of abandonment may, of course, be due to any number of reasons. However, in the social imaginaries of long-term inhabitants of the borough, the fact that the building is fenced in and clearly marked with a ‘Keep Out’ sign speaks (albeit obliquely) to a somewhat more sinister history behind this forsaken habitation: for local residents, such cautionary signs warn not only of the impropriety of seeking admittance on account of likely physical dangers posed by the property’s structural instability - they are also deterrent to encounters with…less tangible perils; in this latter regard, the remonstrance to “Keep Out!” is as much about the containment of any malefic forces bound within the building’s confines as it is apotropaic to those seeking forbidden ingress, across an uncertain threshold, to a malignly haunted space.