Whilst the original boundaries of the cemetery attached to St. Mary’s Church were originally set within the level ground atop Harlow Hill, the dead who form its principal inhabitants have - over the years - slowly and insidiously colonised more and more of the tor’s steep slope. Thus do the dead ever encroach on the domain of the living.
A bitter cold has fallen across Horsingdon. Times are hard and it is likely that, this year, Winter will make ghosts of more than a few of the populace - especially amongst the old, the infirm, and the lonely.
Whilst many wish for signs of an early Spring as the herald of warmer climes, others - especially the more avaricious amongst Horsingdon’s monied classes, unaffected by the politics of austerity - will soon wish differently: that they had been kinder, more caring, more neighbourly during the Winter months - or at least this will become the case as their consciences are nightly haunted by the spectres of those taken by the cold.
On certain nights in the depths of winter, star winds filter down from the depths of infinite space, bearing upon their ineffable currents strange portents from the unreverberate blackness of the abyss - portents which infect the dreams of the more psychically-sensitive of Horsingdon’s populace to produce phantasmagoric visions both marvellous and nightmarish which will haunt the percipients for years to come - portents which further taint the parish’s already-impure soil with their star-spawned contagion.
The generally accepted definition of a crisis apparition is where the spectre of a recently deceased person manifests to a friend or close relative, usually around the very time of death and often when the percipient is unaware of that person’s passing.
In Horsingdon, the term takes on another, more sinister meaning: there are periods in the borough’s occulted history when some seemingly terminal - yet often hidden - moment of metaphysical catastrophe threatens; such times invariably coincide with increased reports of encounters with the restless dead - typically in and around local cemeteries and churchyards - who augur either in word or by virtue of their very presence the proximity of some dreadful occurrence which imperils the life, sanity and reason of the local populace.
In this manner the dead of Horsingdon, long lost to memory yet irrevocably tied in some strange and inexplicable way to its cursed soil, remain the most stalwart defenders of the parish - and of those guilty of such forgetting.
As a curious addendum to yesterday’s entry, it is worth noting that the witchlore of Horsingdon is replete with stories of unseen things haunting the region’s woodlands, offering to make terrible pacts with local coven members. The wooded slopes of Horsingdon Hill being especially associated with such tales.
Typical elements of these stories include the following: strange lights witnessed in the sky above the Hill, which would pulse and change colour; a sound as of great flapping wings pushing against the air; and then the voices: hoarse, buzzing whispers issuing from strange presences which remain concealed within the woods - whispers communicating a monstrous arcana to any who would listen. Witches who were recipients of those hoarsely-whispered words were, it is said, often left awestruck by what they had heard, thereafter refusing ever to speak of that which had been imparted to them - even when subject to the most unendurable of tortures at the hands of local witchfinders.
The fact that similar elements appear in contemporary yarns concerning things supposedly spied and heard in the skies and woods of Horsingdon speaks to the pervasive and enduring power of folklore to inform the cultural imaginaries of the present - for surely that can be the only reasonable explanation behind the narrative and thematic consistency and uniformity of tales whose telling is separated by centuries…
St. Joseph’s Church on Horsingdon Lane is instructive of the disappearance of the religious traditionalism which once dominated the region, and its replacement by stranger faiths. Once a stalwart bulwark of Anglicanism, the now derelict Church became, about a decade ago, home to the Ministry of the Whispering Void, whose congregants espoused a New Age and Ufologically-inflected spirituality.
The tenets of this unusual faith held that unseen extraterrestrial forces would communicate a body of secret knowledge - concerning the hidden history of our world and the true nature of reality - to the chosen amongst believers. However, the mystagogic dissemination of such arcana would only occur under very specific conditions: the entities in question would only manifest in wilderness places, and only after certain words had been spoken and the appropriate rites had been howled through by members of the Ministry and, although their apparent materialization would be accompanied by strange, multicolored glowing lights in the sky, the entities never made themselves visible, but would only speak from the shadowy undergrowth in hoarse, buzzing whispers - and of their origin, they would say only that they came from ‘Beyond the Wells of Night and the Gulfs of Space’.
The nature of the peculiar gnosis transmitted by these secretive beings was, I am told, along the following lines: that those who adhered strictly to the key tenets of their teaching - involving ritual and meditative practices devised to facilitate the utter annihilation of the ego - would achieve an apotheosis in the flesh, and be taken bodily by the invisible entities to very same nameless void ‘Beyond the Wells of Night and the Gulfs of Space’ from whence they came, where the ascended would dwell in wonder and glory for all eternity.
In any case, the Ministry of the Whispering Void are long gone - no one knows where - and St. Joseph’s Church remains abandoned…unless one gives credence to the tales of hoarse, buzzing whispers said to sometimes emanate from within its locked and shuttered walls.
A transmitter array spied from the Ebury Way - the rural pathway which links Horsingdon to Trentford - rising above the tree-line from the Royal Air Force base near Croxley Moor. During the Cold War era, this location was operational as a listening station, and remains today a constant reminder of the latent, unthinkable nuclear horrors which lurk, ever present, at the edge of consciousness.
In recent years, curious signals have been detected emanating from the base, broadcast into the singular, empty blackness of infinite space; equally strange clusters of pulsing lights have been sighted in the skies above this location. Whether there is any correspondence between these activities, one can only speculate - but one cannot help but wonder whether the base has turned its attention from the monitoring of terrestrial horrors to the calling forth of those of a more unearthly aspect.
The above image being a case in point. This device, I am reliably informed, is but one component of a glyph belonging to the pre-human Nacaal language: a glyph also constituent of a greater ritual invocation which, when performed in its totality, possesses the power to unravel the world through illocutionary alien grammars of negation and undoing.
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.
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?
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.
