The Horsingdon Transmissions No.75: The Old Lodge

The Old Lodge: one of James Boreham's holdings, located on the outskirts of the Nortwich Park district. The house had undergone significant renovation in the 1970s, changing its character radically; by the 1990s the property was deemed unsaleable in the wake of a number of mysterious deaths on the premises. In 1998, the Old Lodge was entirely destroyed by fire. In the aftermath of the conflagration, a series of collapsed tunnels were discovered beneath the ruins. These were quickly filled in by the emergency services who attended the incident.

The photo above dates from around 1900, and depicts the Old Lodge in its pristine state. The young girl in the photo is supposedly James Boreham's daughter. Careful analysis of the photograph has revealed that the girl apparently has no face; a rugose, shapeless form also seems to be partially visible through the lattice window.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.74: The Windermere

The Windermere Public House stands at the edge of the Northwich line, only a short distance from Northwich Park Station itself. The pub has a wonderful art deco interior which has remained relatively unchanged since the building's completion in the 1930s.

The Windermere became the favoured watering hole of James Boreham who, back in the day, was regularly seen here in the company of some of occult luminaries of the time, including - on one occasion - Aleister Crowley. Indeed, many of Horsingdon's esoteric and Theosophical groups made regular use of the pub's function room during this period - including the local branch of the Society for Psychical Research, which famously held a disastrous seance there in 1935 (during which one of the participants mysteriously and inexplicable disappeared).

That the pub is haunted goes without saying, for its nooks and snugs are aswarm with the echo of occult secrets, once furtively whispered in surroundings redolant of convivial sociality, by those forlorn and desolate souls who otherwise traversed the darkness alone.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.73: Squibbs & Partners

The people of Horsingdon have long been resistant to the architectural intrusions of modernity, such that in the area any structure dating from the early 1970s is considered a 'new build'. Thus one can still find a significant number of these faded brick adverts - some of which date back to the 1930s - dotted throughout the borough. The above example (on the side of a building which stands next to Eastcote Station) dates to the 1950s. Whilst the rather Dickensian-sounding Squibbs & Partners no longer appear to be in business, between the late 1890s and the early 1900s they acted on behalf of James Boreham in acquiring certain properties in and around Northwich Park and Horsingdon Hill - many of which cluster around key points on the Horsingdon Pentagram.

It is unclear as to what Boreham sought to achieve through the purchase of these properties; strategically-situated as they were in relation to the occult topography of the district, one rumour nonetheless holds that he intended a particularly sinister operation involving the alchemical manipulation of the subtle energies of Horsingdon's extramundane landscape - an operation of such power and magnitude that it would facilitate Boreham's transition into an entirely new, non-human and effectively immortal mode of being; it is also said that he was successful in this aim, and the transmuted thing which was once James Boreham haunts the hidden lattices and praeternatural flows of Horsingdon's occult geomteries to this day - or that he otherwise continues to traverse the region in undead form using a vast network of hidden subterrenean byways and tunnels which supposedly connect all of his previous properties.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.72: Signal to Noise

This apparently abandoned building - situated within an industrial estate that sits alongside the Northwich Park line (and not far from the Warehouse) - hosts another of the incongruous antennae or transmitter arrays which tarnish the Horsingdon skyline.

There has been something of a slump in property prices in the vicinity of the industrial estate in which the building stands - and (if the records made public by Northwich Park Hospital are to be believed) local residents have been afflicted by an unusually high incidence of mental health issues - in recent years. Exactly why this is the case remains unclear; however, an associate of mine who lived in the area observed the following in his diary shortly before taking his own life:

This is a place which forces you listen to sounds which you cannot unhear; sounds which rupture space, and which distort and derange the very tissue of reality into perplexing new configurations; here those men from the Ministry tap into the psychic residuum produced by Those Who Wait as They roll aimlessly in Their deathless slumber through unlighted chambers beyond the ordered universe, thence broadcasting the maddening sonic echo of that mindless dreamstuff - for knows what purpose (or perhaps for no purpose at all?) - directly into the oneiric awareness of Horsingdon's sleeping populace.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.71: The Warehouse

This bunker-like structure - repurposed as the freight depot which now services the local Northwich rail lines - was at one time utilised by the Ministry during their period of involvement (which some maintain continues to this day) with the mysteries of the Horsingdon Triangle.

The original purpose of the building remains unclear, although local residents refer to it as 'the Warehouse'; in relation to which, what might appear to the casual observer as traditional mason's marks (etched throughout the brickwork across the circumference of the building) in fact constitute elements of a complex system of obscure occult symbology - one which delineates a set of non-Euclidean and hyperdimensional relations - supposedly used for binding and containing praeternatural intrusions into this world.

The building certainly has acquired something of an uncanny reputation over the years, primarily as as a result of the strange sounds that would sometimes issue from its interior; indeed, one can still hear tales - occasionally whispered by the rail workers who frequent the numerous nearby hostelries - concerning encounters with a 'nameless mist' or 'formless thing' which continues to haunt the edifice to this day.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.70: A Scar in the Sky

Earlier this evening, the above curious phenomenon appeared in the skies above Horsingdon, which lasted for the better part of half-an-hour. March 11th marks one of the Ember Days of the Catholic liturgical calendar: a time of prayer and penitance in preparation for Easter; English folkloric traditions also hold that such 'Ember Days' are oracular in nature: a time when local cunning folk would make prognostications regarding the coming months - prognostications divined from meteorological conditions as they manifested on the day in question. It is, however, said that this tradition took a very particularistic turn as it presented itself within local culture of Horsingdon, where the guardians of the Black Bowers would augury whether the season had arrived when Those Who Wait would finally awake from their deathless sleep to reclaim the world...

Such traditions run deep through the psycohistorical tissue of Horsingdon: soon after this strange aerial phenomenon appeared, my neighbours made me thoroughly aware of their many fearful theories and fancies as to what it might portend: was it some kind of ectoplasmic plume vomited forth from out the troubled topography of this place? A scar in the sky signifying some partially-successful ritual which sought to rend the veil between worlds, and call forth Those Who Wait? Chemtrails spewed from the exhaust of some secret Ministry aircraft as part of a sinister experiment?

Perhaps a parochial expression of those wider anxieties which seem to charcterise our times, it seems that more than a few of the inhabitants of Horsingdon are currently pondering the precise nature of the transformations and transmutations that such a vapourous harbinger might foreshadow in the coming days...

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.69: Eastcote Lane Underpass

The bridge which links the Northwich Park Station line to other major Underground routes leading into central London crosses over Eastcote Lane, creating something of an underpass midway between Eastcote Station and Horsingdon Civic Centre.

Socially-peripheral sites such as this, lit only intermittently by the flickering sodium haze of malfunctioning streetlights, demarcate the extremities of the actual. Yet the residents of Nortwich tacitly acknowledge the significance of such places in the very act of avoiding them, for these territories also function as steadfast bastions against the infinite number of terrible worlds which ceasely grind against our own, ever threatening to overwhelm it; they are boundary markers, inhabited only by the marginal and the disaffected: the homeless, the addicted, and the alcoholic, whose precarious existence in close proximity to the Outside by necessity leads them to become seers and mystagogues of the highest order -  but whose transendent wisdom is so often eclipsed by the madness which precedes it.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.68: The Glade of the Goat

A meandering path through Horsingdon Wood, not far from the wych elm, and leading to a clearing where - as local legend declaims - a stone pillar once stood surmounted by the crudely-carved bust of a monstrous, three-eyed goat. A favoured site of the region's witches, the repercussions of the obscene rites once enacted here in honour of nameless gods continue to reverberate down the ages, such that a sense of panic is almost palpable at the site. The grotesque idol was either hammered to dust by witch hunters or, according to one rumour, was somehow spirited away before the last witch who made obeisance here was arrested and hanged - later making its way into the collection of James Boreham.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.67: The Dweller in the Lake

The above photo shows the base of Welkin's Folly situated not far from Northwich Lake. The lake itself no longer exists, having been drained in the late 1910s during a wave of extensive urban development. The existence of a quaint wooden bridge in the above image across the small inlet that fed the lake marks an early phase of the domestication of the Horsingdon landscape- although such attempts to tame and contraint the ancient and malign topography of the region have only ever met with partial success: soon after the laying of the foundations of Welkin's Folly, locals began to report occurances of a strange, dark shape seen disturbing the waters of the lake; these were soon followed by accounts of a number of dogs having mysteriously disappeared in the vicinity of the lake, often in sight of their owners.

In sny case, subsequent to the start of The construction of Welkin's Folly, it was generally accepted by the local populace that an ancient power was stirring in the depths of the lake. Knowledgeable occultists laid the blame at the feet of James Boreham, claiming that he was conversant in a certain, secretive body of ancient and prehuman lore - lore which he had used in the building of Welkin's Folly, and which he meant to direct toward a terrible purpose; to that end he had used the incomplete base of the tower as some kind of arcane summoning lattice for conjuring something into the lake - or had roused to wakefulness that which had long lain dormant beneath its surface. Indeed, the folklore of the region implied that a presence had dwelt within the lake since time immemorial, and that in the past locals had made regular sacrifice to propitiate the thing.

The eventual draining of the lake offered some indication of the truth of the matter: a large slab of black stone, inscribed with curious sigils of archaic design, was discovered close to the centre of the lake bed. When attempts by workmen to shift the slab using physical force came to nothing, dynamite was employed to greater effect...but whatever was uncovered on that fateful day appears to have been  expunged from memory and history, as the lake bed was quickly concreted over - although not before two men mysteriously lost their lives in what local press unconvincingly reported as an unfortunate accident.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.66: Welkin's Folly

Welkin's Folly represents something of a lost episode in Northwich and Horsingdon's history. Samuel Welkin was an entrepreneur, Member of Parliament, and Theosophist who, in the late 1890s, devised a scheme - under the advisement of his close friend James Boreham - to build an iron lattice structure whose height was intended to exceed that of the Eiffel Tower, at the then-largely rural region of Northwich Park. Boreham additionally agreed to partially underwrite the project with the proviso that the structure incorporate certain design features to his specification - features which, somewhat remarkably, Boreham had derived from the plans for some kind of transmitter produced (at Boreham's behest) by none other than Nikola Tesla.

Welkin died in 1901 when only the base of the tower had been completed, after which his heirs refused to continue financing the costly build. Whilst possessing considerable wealth, James Boreham was unable to support the project alone, and failed to secure the additional investment required to complete the undertaking. The base of the tower was eventually demolished in 1907 to faciltate the further urban development of the region.

The foundations of the tower were, however, found to harbour perplexing designs and glyphs of presumed occult provenance, but were nonetheless left intact and used much later as the foundations for Northwich Park Hospital  - no doubt partially explaining why that particular building seems beset by many uncanny and praeternatural events.

During his time in Horsingdon, Roland Franklyn apparently managed to unearth a significant amount of additional information regarding the tower's development and purpose. Whilst Franklyn never revealed the exact nature of his findings, he does note in one of his letters that, had the tower ever been completed, it would have come to represent 'a dire threat to the continued safety and sanity of humanity and, indeed, to the very existence of the cosmos of which we form the least, most insignificant part.'

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.65: Feldon Avenue

This ancient tree stands before a small green hillock or mound at the corner of Feldon Avenue and Eastcote Lane. It is speculated that the the name of Feldon Avenue is derived from the Old English term Fae Don meaning something like 'fairy fort' or 'fairy castle'. Machen claims that the term 'fairy' itself derives from the concept of 'the fair folk' - an honorific used by a fearful populace to both designate and appease a squat, mishappen and troglodytic people who supposedly once haunted the Neolithic European landscape.

Coincidentally, at the beginning of October 1975, the mound was partially excavated when the Water Board sought to fix a burst pipe. During the dig, a strange black stone - marked with curious indentations or scratches - was apparently uncovered and removed from the site. Soon after, residents of Feldon Avenue began reporting regular, nightly disturbances caused by what were described to the police as 'ugly' and 'uncouth' children. These reports were not taken seriously until, on the night of October 31st, a newborn baby girl was seemingly abducted from a house in Feldon Avenue. The child was never found, although immediately after her disappearance the disturbances which had so afflicted the unforunate residents of the neighbourhood suddenly and unexpectedly ceased.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.64: The Ministry

From the 1950s until the tail end of the 1990s, this building (not far from North Horsingdon Lane) was reputedly the base of operations of the government agency known locally as 'The Ministry'. Ostensibly tasked to investigate and monitor transmissions deemed to be potential threats to national security during the Cold War (the numbers stations which appeared to be operating out of Horsingdon being a case in point), The Ministry also purportedly demonstrated a singular interest in the significant number of UFO sightings that clustered around the region (especially Horsingdon Hill) - and n particular their speculated relationship to the high incidence of occult and paranormal phenomena recorded throughout the borough's history.

One very curious rumour I have heard regarding The Ministry concerns their investigations into the UFOlogical research group established by Dr David Noyes (mentioned in yesterday's entry). Apparently Ministry staff retrieved some quite remarkable documentation from Dr Noyes' home shortly after his mysterious disappearance. These documents apparently functioned as some kind of very basic primer for a linguistic or symbolic system of entirely alien or praeternatural provenance  - one that was not only largely beyond the comprehension of the Ministry's research team but, insofar as its basic contours could be apprehended, was suggestive of a radically new - and horrifying - understanding of physics, of mathematics, and of the fundamental structure of reality itself.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.63: The Church with the Windowless Spire

Along Eastcote Lane, not far from Horsingdon Civic Centre, stands an unused church, of relatively recent build (a blocky, red-brick building whose design seems typical of late 60s - early 70s architectural modernism) and notable for its squat, monolithic spire. The spire is windowless and featureless - aside from the vents close to the apex which, despite the church's apparent lack of occupancy, have sometimes be seen to exude a strange, sweet-smelling vapour with a curious violet hue.

There are those who claim to have been afflicted by strange visions when in the vicinity of those fumes: visions of a black planet drifting insensately along an irregular orbit at the utmost rim of our solar system, upon which unlighted obsidian towers perch precariously at the edges of great rivers - rivers whose floes of frozen black pitch meander sluggisly through steep gorges of jagged black rock...

Investigations into the history of the church have thusfar revealed very little: apparently the relevant records reside somewhere in the council archives located in Boreham Park, and there has been some difficulty retrieving them. I am, however, aware that the church hall was used throughout 1998 by one Dr David Noyes, an American psychiatrist hailing from Vermont. Apparently Noyes convened weekly meetings at the hall of what appears to have been some kind of quasi-religious UFO research group, whose members claimed to be in communication - via occult means - with a group of strange extraterrestrial intelligences. Around the same time, the local area was apparently plagued by a kind of clairaudient phenomena: typically, percipients (who were often walking alone late at night) reported hearing the sound of strange buzzing whispers emerging from some dark street corner or alley - although always within close vicinity of the church.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.62: Secret Holdings

This building was erected on the Boreham Park estate by James Boreham a few years prior to his death; when Horsingdon Borough Council took over the management of Boreham Park, it was initially repurposed as a cafe, then later converted to an archival storage facility. Despite its rather unassuming exterior, Boreham excavated extensive cellars benath the structure within which to conduct his alchemical researches - a recurrent motif, so it seems, where James Boreham's renovations are concerned. In any case, the vaults beneath the edifice also apparently connect to the cellars and tunnels below Boreham Park Library, all of which are now used to store decades' worth of the council's administrative records.

Or so it is alleged. Other rumours hold that these subterrenean facilities contain another, more secret archive: a clandestine repository of the various proscribed occult texts and praeternatural artefacts which have been unearthed throughout Horsingdon's history, and which subsequently came to the attention of the likes of James Boreham, the upper eschalons of Horsingdon Borough Council, as well as - according to some sources - the mysterious and unnamed government 'Ministry' which appears to have involved itself rather deeply in local affairs since the 1950s

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.61: Light and Sound

Seemingly taking their lead from the Church of the Throne of Light (with whom they form part of an ecumenical federation), the similarly-titled Eastcote Fraternity of Light have also recently added a quite remarkable stained glass window to their place of worship. Whilst foregrounding a rather understated example of conventional Christian iconography, the surrounding nimbus is composed of a dizzying chromatic display of scintillating shards of light. The effect is even more pronounced at night, when the window is backlit by a spotlight, the colour of whose light alternates at irregular intervals.

Whatever their doctrinal affiliations, the Fraternity of Light certainly seem to adhere to nonconformist liturgical practices: on certain nights a low, discordant hum can be heard emanating from the church hall, accompanied by the sound of muted chanting in no known human tongue - both eerily co-ordinated with the rhythm of an unearthly and atonal music, which in turn weaves its strange sonic pattern in time with the unpredictable shifting light of the stained glass window.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.60: The Boarding House

The Boarding House is one of the largest buildings on Oldborough Road, off Eastcoate Lane -  as well as one of the most haunted in Northwich. Indeed, its current state of disrepair speaks eloquently to its spectrally-beleaguered status. The place is largely-uninhabited now, except for the landlady and the couple of old alcoholics she has been managed to convince to remain in the place.

Like other such haunted residences in the area, the phantasmal visitants who are prone to disturb the peace of this particular house conform to none of the quotidian ghostly typologies one finds in the standard parapsychological literature; rather, this place is beset by praeternatural entities of highly atypical configuration: aetheric beasts forged by alien geometries into inconceivably twisted forms; black, crawling shadows which reveal unspeakable horrors in their abysmal depths; a great phospherescent worm-like phantom sometimes encountered in the cellar; the amorphous congeries of sickly-glowing spheres which has, on occasion, been encountered in the attic...

It may come as no surprise to regular readers that the Boarding House was once owned by James Boreham and, as with so many of the things over which that notable has cast his long and sinister shadow, it is also perhaps no surprise that the hollow echo of the Outside and the reverberation of worlds more terrible than our own resonate so readily throughout its decrepit and derelict hallways.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.59: The Men From The Ministry

This squat brick building, enclosed with fencing marked 'No Entry', was apparently one of the 'listening posts' built by the Ministry of Defence (mentioned in an earlier post) at various sites in and around Horsingdon at the start of the Cold War. The purpose of these buildings  - in terms of exactly what they were listening for or how they were to complete this task - has never been disclosed.

This being Horsingdon, rumours nonetheless abound, one of which involves the claim that a strange low hum emanates from the buildings at certain times - and that this phenomenon appears to align with the occurance of other notable praeternatural events in the region; another holds that the government agency responsible for erecting the buildings was not, in fact, the Ministry of Defence, but another, far more secretive group only ever refered to by its representatives as 'The Ministry'.

Encounters with these Men From The Ministry were, it seems, typically marked by a distictly strange and sinister quality: one informant recounted an incident when two such individuals not only threatened to end his life should he ever reveal publicly any details of something he should not have seen, but subsequently made an even more disturbing and distressing threat of (what he described as) 'an existential character'. This individual, who died a few years ago, never did disclose what it was he had witnessed which so provoked the ire of the Men From The Ministry; nor would he ever elaborate on the exact nature of the peculiar threat that had terrified him so.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.58: Northwich Business Park

Northwich Business Park: all that remains are crumbling, deserted high-rise office buildings, haunted by the hollow ghosts of all the businesses which rented space here only to fail and go into receivership.

The lower portions of the buildings are covered in the alien script of an indecipherable graffiti, and in one of the edifices mannequins (the type which one would typically find in the display of a local high street shop) have been positioned so that they are staring vacuously through broken windows in the direction of Horsingdon Hill. Close inspection of the mannequins over time has indicated that someone has regularly been changing their positions, as if using them to act out some complex ritual circuit.

Multiple attempts to regenerate the area have proven unsuccessful, and have largely been abandoned by Horsingdon Council after a group of council workers, who entered one of the buildings to undertake a standard safety check in preparation for another planned phase of renewal, disappeared without trace. Even so, a few years back the council sent in another team to install some kind of antennae or transmitter on the roof of one the buildings.

Some locals claim that the collapse and urban decay that has so afflicted the area is a consequence of the site resting on a spot sacred to Those Who Wait (rumour has it that robed figures can be spied in the vicinity of the park on certain auspicious nights of the year); or perhaps the Horsingdon landscape itself has refused to countenance such a large-scale intrusion of modernity within its bounds, reclaiming and reshaping bare concrete and shattered glass as part of its own bleak and despondent topography.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.57: The Bunker

Locally known as 'the bunker', this curious building stands opposite the intersection between Eastcote Lane and Hallowmere Road.

The structure contains no windows, and only a single, unnumbered door. Whilst sounds are occasionally heard emanating from within the house, for years no one has ever been seen entering or leaving the building. My own investigations indicate that the house is owned by the Boreham estate, and that at one time it was the residence of Richard Boreham, James Boreham's one-and-only child - who, it is said, was born severely disfigured and of an unknown mother. At the time the latter fact apparently led to no end of speculation amongst the local populace as to Richard's parentage on his mother's side, eliciting sinister undertones regarding the possible involvement of Those Who Wait, or someother praeternatural agency, where his matrilineal line of descent was concerned. Whilst Richard Boreham's birth certificate - listing his mother as 'unknown' - is a matter of public record, I have yet to locate any documentation concerning his death or burial.

In his published letters, Roland Franklyn briefly alludes to the fact that, during his time in Horsingdon, he was able to secure an interview with the occupant of this building. There then follows a pause of about two weeks in his letter-writing, during which time he was in fact being treated at the psychiatric ward of Northwich Park Hospital for a severe case of (what at the time was referred to as) 'nervous shock'.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.56: Shortcuts and Alleyways

This alleyway lies off a back street near Eastcote Lane. Something terrible happened here once - so terrible that the locals refuse to speak about the matter.

This story and variants thereof are told throughout the borough regarding all such socially -uncolonised spaces; sometimes the tales even offer unambiguous particulars: like Shanklin Alley, they may be haunted by the inhabitants of monstrous otherwolds which intersect with ours, or by the vicissitudes of their own blighted histories. Some folklorists might attribute the use of familiar elements of the local landscape - and the counter-intuitive character of praeternatural events associated with them - to social processes of memorialisation: a means of collectively recollecting the otherwise banal (but nonetheless culturally-significant) aspects of local history and identity, enabling the ready transmission of these socially-significant narratives through ostension and retelling.

This is rarely the case in the Horsingdon Triangle.

In the Horsingdon Triangle, such tales often turn out to be true.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.55: Pathways

Amongst other things, Boreham Park is notable for its landscaped gardens. Formerly part of the Boreham Mansion estate, paved pathways wind around the gardens in what seems a straightfoward and easily navigable fashion; however, many a casual flaneur anticipating a pleasant stroll on a calm Sunday afternoon has found themselves confused - gripped, even, by a vertiginous anxiety - as the twists of the landscape seem to produce a sudden, unexpected topographical disarray, or strangely jumbled geomorphological entanglements that speak of a terrain born of a realm wholly unlike our own.

Supposedly created by James Boreham according to some unearthly and diabolic design, no one has been able to produce an accurate map of the pathways through the gardens - or at least no two maps produced of the area have yet managed to depict precisely the same cartography.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.54: Blackbirds

Blackbird Hill - also known variously as the witch-haunted Burn Hill and Crow Hill - has long been the habitation of a colony of crows, and is one of the points on both the Horsingdon Triangle as well as the recently-discovered Horsingdon Pentagram. Legend holds that the crows arrived soon after the ill-fated witch-burning of 1678, and that they now protect the local population from the powers that have subsequently come to haunt the hill. In return, it is said that the crows demand only that the soul of an innocent be offered up to them once each year on All Hallows Eve, so that they might renew their watch.

Local ornithologists, who have diligently documented the avian population of Blackbird Hill over the last two decades, have noted that the size of the colony has expanded by exactly one bird annually during this period.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.53: Overdue Books

Eastcote Lane Public Library. Along with Boreham Park Library, this once contained a very fine and extensive collection of esoterica, much of it detailing the occult history of Northwich and Horsingdon. The library was refurbished in the late 1970s, at which point said collection was removed to parts unknown for storage. The books were never returned after the completion of the renovations, and at the time a spokesperson for Horsingdon Council claimed that they had been misplaced due to an administrative error, and that their disappearance was 'pending investigation'. Needless to say, the collection failed to ever reappear.

Some have suggested that this formed part of a wider campaign involving the wilful erasure from public scrutiny of occult materials - especially those pertaining to the history of the borough - by Horsingdon Council itself. If that was indeed the case, it is cause for speculation as to exactly why the Council would feel the need to aggressively pursue such a course of action.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.52: Insensate Static

Curious aerials and transmitters populate the murky Horsingdon skyline, many of which appear to be without function, or are otherwise a hangover from the early Cold War period when the Ministry of Defense apparently established a number of listening posts in and around Horsingdon. If true, their purpose for doing so remains - like so much else about the region - vague and unclear.

That the landscape hereabouts is possessed of its own signal is, for most inhabitants of the Horsingdon Triangle, a given; but exactly what is being broadcast, and why, is a mystery. For my part, the soft static fry which laps gently at the borders of consciousness each night, like the comforting purr of a telephone bereft of its receiver, speaks of the insensate sound of a universe in which no-one and nothing is listening anymore.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.51: Chapel Perilous

A while back I mentioned that the police had been called to St. Osmund's Church after the discovery that one or more of the graves in the surrounding cemetary had been disturbed. On a return visit at dusk this evening, I discovered that the entire church had bern sealed off. The official explanation is that, due to subsidence, the entire church building has been rendered unsafe. The unofficial rumours hold that, during earlier police  enquiries, something was discovered in the basement of the church, and the building has been closed to the public pending further investigations by the police and Horsingdon Borough Council.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.50: Pareidolia

Another view of the Witching Tree on Hallowmere playing fields, framed against the Horsingdon skyline. There appears to be a spherical object to the right of the photo which I don't recall seeing when the picture was taken, as well as the faint image of spectral plumes rising from the landscape. Perhaps more chillingly, just below the branches on the lower left-hand side of the image, one can just make out what seems to see the vague impression of what looks to be the tortuously-stretched likeness of the eyes, nose and mouth of a human face.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.49: The Old Ways

Evidence of ritualistic activities discovered during a recent visit to Horsingdon Woods, in the vicinity of the wych elm; indeed, modernity’s incursions into the region have had little or no impact upon the practice of witchcraft and the keeping of the Old Ways amongst some sectors of the population.  

Note the intersection of the logs into a cross-like shape. Certain traditions hold that, during the Christian era, the cross or crucifix was typically trampled upon as part of the rites of witchcraft. This was less an embrasure of the Devil and all His works, and more a political act: the rejection of a false teleological futurity which welcomed apocalypse in favour of a timeless, traditionalistic primordialism (equally problematic in its own way). Either way, these are the artificial ways and doctrines of a species which mistakenly thinks itself significant in relation to topographies which are, in fact, wholly indifferent. As far as humanity is concerned, there are no ideological victors when it comes to the Horsingdon landscape, or to the Powers that inhabit it, or to the infinite worlds with which it intersects.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.48: The (Other) Wych Elm

My attempt to take a photo of the wych elm in Horsingdon Woods from which Mrs Bennett was hanged: the tree appears to be framed by an aura of strange light, and it seems as if the background of the photo is fragmenting or collapsing into some sort of constellation of fuzzy fractals - as if this tree and its clearing is a point of intersection with some other, terrifying unreality.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.47: The Wych Elm Pub

Haunt of dissident ufologists, heterodox folklorists, apostate ley-hunters, renegade psychogeographers, and other disreputable types, the Wych Elm pub sits along Horsingdon Lane at the foot of Horsingdon Hill - a stones throw from both the ruins of Whitton Green and Horsingdon Woods themselves, wherein stands the actual wych elm from which Mrs Bennett was hanged.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.46: Witch Steps

The name of the witch responsible for the blighting of Whitton Green is recorded as one Mrs Bennett who, it is said, made obseisance to Those Who Wait and other ancient powers at the wych elm that stands to this day in the nearby Horsingdon Woods; it is also said that grotesque clay figurines depicting such powers decorated the interior of her cottage in the days before the hamlet met its demise.

Elderly and widowed, and all of her children already gone to an early grave, Mrs Bennett had increasingly become dependent upon the charity of her neighbours. Wider social and economic changes had been sweeping through England at the time, and the hamlet itself had prospered, with most of its inhabitants pursuing opporunities to participate in new and profitable forms of mercantilism; the incursions of capitalism - even in its incipient forms - into the then-rural life of the region had, however, increasingly led to a re-evaluation of the social status quo which proved less than beneficial to the more needy inhabitants, resulting in a rash of witchcraft accusations levelled at those who were seen as a burden and a barrier to economic growth.

Where once the redistribution of goods was seen as both a moral duty and necessity, reciprocated via the less-tangible reward of affirming community solidarity, the desire to participate in the new, acquisitive economic modernity and increase one's capital (and thereby one's status) by selling surplus at the local market day had became too much of a temptation for the emergent middle classes in places like Whitton Green. In any case, accusations of witchcraft were made, the righteous indignation of the inhabitants of the hamlet was roused, and justice was swiftly and irrevocably enacted as Mrs Bennett was hanged from the highest branch of the wych elm in Horsingdon Woods.

That same night a great storm lashed the area, the fury of which causing great distress and significant damage to property in and around Horsingdon. More alarming was the fact that, the following morning, Whitton Green was discovered to be deserted. Every single member of the small community had, it seems, disappeared overnight.

Indeed, the question as to whether the demise of Mrs Bennett fully erased her baleful presence from the area remains unresolved: there is a series of steps leading from the crown of Horsingdon Hill to the clearing in Horsingdon Woods where the wych elm stands, along which a cloaked, bent and wizened old woman has often been spied, croaking evil words in an unknown language as she passes.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.45: Of Witchcraft and Whitton Green

Borders and boundaries operate according to fuzzy, uncertain logics. It is a dangerous business building at such places, incurring as it does certain debts and obligations to the landscape - and the powers which lurk therein - which are not easily fulfilled. Such was the fate of Whitton Green, a small hamlet built at the foot of Horsingdon Hill in 1751. Blighted by witchcraft, Whitton Green was soon reclaimed by the powers of the Hill; now all that remains are some old stone steps leading nowhere.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.44: Spiritual Warfare

Despite the wide doctrinal variance between many of the churches in Horsingdon, All Hallows Church in Northwich Park has remained a stalwart of Anglican traditionalism within the borough. Between 1964 and 1969, All Hallows thrived under the guidance of the charismatic Reverend John Broadham.

Of an evangelical bent, Broadham firmly believed that Northwich and Horsingdon were the the nexus of a very real spiritual conflict; quite literally embodying the priniciple of 'muscular Christianity', he brought a rather heavy-handed approach to the matter: not only being a vocal opponent of what he considered to be the impure and demonological doctrines espoused at other places of worship within the diocese, Broadham on occasion also became embroiled in physical altercations with those ministers and ecclesiasts whose credos he deemed an offence against nature and an offence against God. Apparently Roland Franklyn narrowly avoided a drubbing at Broadham's hands.

It didn't help matters that Broadham had been in the Royal Marine Corps, and had won a number of boxing tournaments during this time in the services. Rumour has it that his religious calling also came about as a consequence of his encounters with forces of a praeternatural variety which Broadham experienced during his participation in certain covert operations whilst in the military, and that his posting to Northwich Park may not have been entirely coincidental. In any case, the spiritual warfare Broadham was engaged in quickly turned both temporal and corporeal when, in 1969 after publicly criticising The Church of Starry Wisdom, All Hallows was destroyed in a fire. Broadham was believed to be in the building at the time of the conflagration, although no body was recovered. The church was rebuilt the following year, and dedicated to the memory of Broadham.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.43: Invisible Horses

Near the summit of Horsingden Hill at dusk, reputedly the final resting place of the Saxon king Horsa, and supposedly haunted by the spectre of his horse which legend holds was buried alongside him. Other tales tell of a herd of ghostly black horses with glowing red eyes, a monstrous fire-breathing black dog (after which the Black Shuck pub next to St. Ormund's Church is named), and the sound of something approximating the neighing of a horse - but otherwise entirely alien and grotesque in character - as variously manifesting in the vicinity of the hill.

Whatever the case, the hill has a long and tragic history, being the site of numerous murders and inexplicable disappearances, such that the locals tend to avoid the area at night.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.42: UAP over Boreham House

A luminous globule (the small spherical object towards the right-hand edge the image) photographed over Boreham House, near the boundary of Boreham Park, a few nights ago. Patrons of the nearby Black Shuck pub (which overlooks the cemetary of St. Osmund's Church) who, after closing time, happened to be walking past Boreham House around the time that the photograph was taken, reported hearing a strange, ritualistic chanting emanating from the upper floor of that building.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.41: An Ecumenical Matter

The 1950s and 1960s marked a decline throughout England of traditional forms of religiousity, with the cosmopolitanism of the time having bred a burdgeoning interest in new religious movements and alternative spiritualities. Nowhere was this more noticeable than in the Horsingdon area. This is, perhaps, understandable: strange places are, afterall, prone to producing strange creeds. Horsingdon locals have, in any case, only ever offered lip-service to the more pedestrian forms of Christianity that have attached themselves to the region,

Even so, the recent religious history of Horsingdon encompasses something of a revitalization of Christianity (even if that history is one of doctrinal non-canonicity and rampant non-denominalationism), with a significant number of evangelical churches and congregations appearing throughout the district during the 1960s.

Roland Franklyn, however, raised concerns at the time regarding the spiritual 'authenticity' of many of these churches, claiming that the espoused Christianity of these institutions was, in fact, simply a veneer overlaying other, more disquieting beliefs: beliefs which had, in fact, an unimaginably vast history in the Horsingdon area, along with very deep roots in the culture and consciousness of its local communities.

One such church was the Church of Starry Wisdom, whose congregation ensconced itself in St. Ormunds; another was the Church of the Throne of Light, which (according to Franklyn) was closely affiliated with the Starry Wisdom congregation, and which prospered to such a degree that by the mid-1960s it was able to build a dedicated place of worship along Eastcote Lane (not far from Burn Hill). For the new construction, Church elders commissioned a stained-glass window in a spectacularly-ugly modernist style as a frontispiece to their worship. In his letters, Franklyn denounces criticisms that the window - apparently depicting the very 'Throne of Light' that was central to the Church's doctrine - was nothing more than a cynical appropriation of abstract art as a means of appealing to an increasingly jaded and secularised audience; instead, he claims it is a literal representation of the Throne of Light as congregants typically percieved it whilst in the throes of religious ecstasy: a crazed and crooked morass of angles and jarring colours, roiling within vast abyssal chambers normally hidden from human sight at the centre of all creation, and the seat of a  nameless and pandaemoniacal numinosity from which all things flow.

That a nominally Christian sect should conceive of their God in such a confusing and tumultuous fashion seems remarkable - although Franklyn draws parallels with far older, lesser-known mythological and cosmological systems concerning Those Who Wait. For my part, I lack the theological authority to comment on whether there genuinely exists a link between the Church of the Throne of Light (which continues to operate in Horsingdon to this day) and older forms of local religiousity; for that, as the saying goes, would be an ecumenical matter.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.40: Ectoplasmic Plumes

An aerial photograph of Northwich Park, circa 1932. Strange forces coalesce about the scurrying intrusions of modernity into the primal, glacial rhythms of the landscape: note the diaphanous, ectoplasmic plumes erupting from the-newly constituted housing developments along what will become Eastcote Lane; also the ominous presence of a small black sphere toward the top left-hand corner of the image.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.39: Sealed Portals

This sealed doorway down the side of Southcote Station apparently once opened in to a storage room. According to the accepted history of the station, the archway was bricked up due to concerns about the structural integrity of the building. Horsingdon and Northwich, however, have never been constrained by the need to conform to conventionalised histories. Indeed the non-canonical history of the station – which of course many of the local residents consider to be the authentic and authoritative one – holds to a wildly differing version of events. According to this account, workmen who were clearing out the storage space discovered a locked trapdoor beneath various pieces of rusting machinery which lay in the far corner of the room.

When no key could be found to fit the lock, it was quickly forced open, revealing a flight of relatively modern red brick stairs leading down to a cellar-like aperture of apparently far more ancient construction - and whose walls were scrawled with strange symbols. Leading off from this was a tunnel – although I have heard it described as being more akin to a burrow - which bored further downward into the darkness. This is where the events of the tale become somewhat fuzzy. It was growing late by the time of the cellar’s discovery; the workmen were also somewhat perturbed by what they had found, and so decided to finish-up there and then with a view to reporting the matter to their superiors the following morning. On returning the following day, however, they made a further, gruesome, discovery: the incomplete remains of the station’s night manager strewn around the storage room, with a set of strange, bloodied footprints leading in the direction of the trapdoor. The police were called, Horsingdon Coucil became involved, the archway was quickly sealed at the behest of a council official, and night manager's demise was recorded as an accidental death.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.38: The View From Southcote Station

Platform 2 of Southcote Station, served by both the London Underground and Overground, in the direction of Northwich Park Station. The line follows (some would say was purposely built upon) the occulted topographies of what some locals refer to as 'The Secret Alleys'. There have been at least two instances over the last decade of late-night communters having inexplicably gone missing whilst waiting on the platform for the last train. On one occasion, CCTV footage showed one individual walk unsteadily backwards from the edge of the platform - as if retreating from something - into a pool of shadow at an unlighted part of the station. Close examination of the footage seemed to indicate that they never actually reappeared out of the shadowy depths into which, apparently, they had fallen; in the second instance, a young man shown standing alone on the platform seemed to disappear mysteriously after a brief burst of static interference caused a break in the recording of the station's CCTV cameras. There have been additional reports by freight-train drivers of having to make emergency stops along the line (typically around 3am in the morning) on account of a hooded figure seen wandering about the tracks - a hooded figure which, according to one witness, possessed a glowing sphere of sickly-blue phosphorescent light where it's face should have been.

I have always found the eerie hum of the tracks along this part of the line profoundly unsettling: a resonance which, it seems to me, could only emanate from some other, more terrible world than this.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.37: The Witch House

The Witch House stands in an unassuming street in the electoral ward of Northwich Central: dirty, crumbling, and accreted with decades of dark rumour and witch-legend. Such houses linger long after their time, maintaining a tenuous foothold on existence as signifiers of those blemished places where the world wears thin; they are symptomatic of uncertain thresholds and blurred boundaries with the Outside - thresholds and boundaries indexed by strange histories of blood, madness and a long string of unaccountable disappearances. If one tarries too long in the shadow of such places, drawn by the disquieting enchantment of their decrepitude, a gaunt, pale face will eventually be seen peering with sinister intent through a gap in the worn and ragger curtains. Were one take up habitation in such a locale, one might expect to eventually endure - in a suitably grotesque and spectacular fashion - a transition into some horrible, new state of being.

The house has remained tenantless for the last few years. No one is sure what happened to the last occupants.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.36: In Memoriam

Metropolitan modernity at the edges of desolation, as the eerie manifests at the foremost extremities of Greater London. Here, the rarely used A403 Southcote Road (by which one finds one's way to the villages of Dedham and Witchford in the county of Buckhinghamshire) intersects with the borders of Boreham Park: once the grounds of Boreham Mansion, now overgrown and in an advanced state decrepitude and ruination, and with a befuddled and strange history.

In his final book, Mark Fisher notes that the category of the eerie,

'Like the weird...is also fundamentally to do with the outside, and here we can understand  the outside in a straightforwardly empirical as well as a more abstract transcendental sense. A sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in  landscapes emptied of the human. What happened to produce these ruins, this disappearance?..,The eerie concerns the fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something? The unseeing eyes of the dead; the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac - these provoke a sense of the eerie, just as surely as an abandoned village or a stone circle do...The eerie also entails a disengagement from our current attachments...[a] detachment from the urgencies of the everyday. The perspective of the eerie can give us access to the forces which govern mundane reality but which are ordinarily obscured, just as it can give us access to spaces beyond mundane reality altogether.'

Such is nature of the eerie as it is all-too-often encountered in the borough of Horsingdon.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.35: Water Horses

The Grand Union Canal - perhaps the greatest of England's arterial waterways - runs directly along the foot of Horsingdon Hill. If one picks up the canal footpath here in the direction of Aylesbury and Berkhamstead, after a mile or so one finds an unusual sculpture: the head and elongated neck of what some claim is a plesiosaur or even the Loch Ness Monster, looming over a lofty and overgrown garden wall. Whilst of relatively recent manufacture, the origin and creator of this monstrous carving nevertheless remain unknown. The dilapidated house in whose garden it stands is unoccupied and has been for years.

The legendry of Horsingdon is, however, replete with tales regarding the strange inhabitants of its remaining streams and brooks. Indeed, whilst it is commonly believed that Horsingdon takes its name from the spectral black horses that supposedly haunt the hill, the guardians of the Black Bowers have intimated that the palaeolitic peoples who first colonised the hilltop named it after the monstrous wyrms and 'water horses' they once worshipped: entities which lurked in and around the lost meres and hidden waterways of the region, and which were said to be extrusions into our world of Those Who Wait. There are also tales of remarkable fossilised remains uncovered during the building of St. Ormund's Church which have long been secreted away in the archives of Horsingdon Council and, even today, one occasionally encounters odd and unnerving reports of something inexplicable seen floating or even writhing in the waters of that stretch of the canal which runs past Horsingdon Hill.

How little we suspect (and how terrified we would be), as we skim insect-like across the unimaginably fragile surface-tension of the present, of the teeming and unkowable depths of deep geologic time that roil and seethe constantly below us

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.34: Old Photographs, Unseen Epochs.

A photo of St. Ormund's Church from 1911, from the collection of Roland Franklyn. The figure in the background leaning languidly on a tombstone is purportedly James Boreham. If so, this is the only known photograph of that enigmatic figure. Coincidentally, the year in which this photo was taken marked the beginning of a spate of strange occurances at St. Ormund's -  including the desecration of a number of graves in the burying ground during the October of 1911.

I remain unsurprised that reports of recent events at the church eerily mirror those of over a century ago. Virtually any book of local history one can peruse at Boreham Park Library will tell you that St. Ormund's was built on a site whose praeternatural associations reach back into deep antiquity.
Soon after the Roman invasion of Britain, sacrifice was supposedly made to the god Nodens at a temple erected at the locale; ritual artefacts of Palaeolithic origin - which found their way into the collection of James Boreham - were discovered here when the foundations of St. Ormunds were first dug; there are also other records, of doubtful authenticity, which exist within the archives of Horsingdon Council - as well as the oral traditions of those who still observe the custom of the Black Bowers - which speak of nameless rites and awful conjurations having been performed at the locality in epochs more remote and less visible than those glimpsed briefly in an old photograph.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.33: The Politics of the Outside

Global flows destabilise both tradition and certainty in the same moment that they claim to produce the end of history, and gentrification erodes authenticity in the act of seeking to recreate it. The gardens of Boreham Mansion embody a similar tendency, where once the classicism of the Victorian era sought to obfuscate rapid and uncontrollable social change through its attempts to monumentally reinstantiate a rigidly hierarchical moral and social order.

Conversely, the pursuit of the kind of alien magics sought by the likes of James Boreham is impelled by an actively radicalising momentum: one in which the monstrous spectres of an incomprehensible past haunt the present with the possibility of a revolutionary reconceptualising of a dead-end future. This is not an attempt to establish a new kind of order out of chaos, but to refute and eradicate entirely and absolutely any further possibility of such limiting structural oppositions. This is the politics of absolute alterity, and of Those Who Wait; it is the politics embodied in the Horsingdon landscape: the politics of the Outside.

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.32: Return to St. Ormund's Church

I heard yesterday of further disturbing developments concerning St. Ormund's Church: a grave disturbed - apparently that of one of the Boreham family - and scrawled upon one of the church's exterior walls in red chalk the epithet 'grave-looting spawn of the stars'. I seem to recall that Roland Franklyn once made reference to a similar term in regard to his researches into the various occult agencies clustering around the Horsingdon area.

The Boreham family have cast a long shadow over Horsingdon and Northwich, and they have never easily or readily surrendered their dead; nor has the black loam of Horsingdon been typically disposed to offering up the secrets long-buried therein - at least not without sacrifice or a libation of blood...

When I visited the scene of the alleged vandalism late last night, the police had already cordened off parts of the church and graveyard pending their investigations; as a consequence, the above images were all I was able to collect by way of documenting the incident. Needless to say, I intend to investigating the matter further.