Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdn, No.122: The Architecture of the Uncanny

It is not only Horsingdon’s external topographies which are enweirded: its internal landscapes are also marked by an architecture of the uncanny - one whose long, lonely corridors extend infinitely towards the unreverberate blackness of the abyss.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.121: The Enveloping Darkness of Unseen Things

An ominous, shadowy pall hangs over the cupola of one of James Boreham’s former residences in this old photograph. It is unclear as to what produced this curious effect: a slip of the hand, perhaps - or flaw in the film itself.

Or the enveloping darkness of unseen things which cluster about a greater darkness which draws them to itself.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.120: Neighbourhood Watch

A dilapidated Neighbourhood Watch sign announcing Horsingdon Wood as ‘a safer community area’: one of the attempts by Horsingdon Borough Council to address the ominous reputation which clusters about the Wood. The irony of this programme has not been lost on local residents who have, for generations, avoided entering the Wood.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.119: Static from the Sylvan Depths

A tall, skeletal transmitter mast arises from one of the denser, more forbidding parts of Horsingdon Wood, broadcasting a soft, susurrate hiss of meaningless static. The residents hereabouts will not speak of the circumstances surrounding the transmitter’s construction - but they will warn that, when walking in the woods, you should never stray too close to its location.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.118: The Priory Hill Hanging Trees

Priory Hill. A low rise not far from Hallowmere Road, and once the site of a medieval cloister housing a rather peculiar and insular religious order.

In 1763, the line of trees atop the Hill was used to hang five witches, all of who claimed sorority with the Horsingdon Coven. The region’s witchlore holds that the revenants of the five executed beldams continue to haunt the locale, such that on certain nights their wan, spectral forms can be spied hanging silently from the branches of the ancient trees - five dead white faces staring with a horrid, mindless intensity from without the ghostly nooses which ended their corporeal existence.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.117: A Warning in the Woods

A sign posted by Horsingdon Borough Council within Horsingdon Wood. Whilst the warning of poison is an almost certainly spurious one, the sign’s cautionary intent is nonetheless best heeded - delineating as it does the outer boundary of an especially notorious zone with the Wood: rumoured to have once been the focal point of the Horsingdon coven’s monstrous ritual activities, the site is reportedly one within which a significant number of unsettling events and mysterious disappearances have occurred.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.116: A Quiet Voice Beckons

One of the entrances to Horsingdon Bunker. It is said that, on occasion, a low, soft voice can be heard from the other side of the heavy, locked steel door: a voice begging anyone who will listen to free it from its prison - offering the revelation of all manner of strange secrets in exchange.

No one has yet responded to such requests - in part because those who have heard the voice claim that its otherwise melodious, child-like tones are intertwined with a curious, buzzing, alien rhythm.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No. 115: An Abandoned Lock-Up

An abandoned lock-up near Horsingdon Hill. No one - not even Horsingdon Borough Council - retains any records concerning its ownership. The ghost of some grafitti lingers on the left wall: the faded shadow of some swirling glyph-like tag.

It is said that if one is able to decode the meaning of the symbol, another will appear further down the wall, slightly clearer than the last; and should the seeker be sble to interpret the meaning of this symbol, yet another will appear beside it, and so on. Accordingly, the once clearly-defined interior dimensions of the lock-up thus appear transfigured, stretching further and further into the depths of an infinite darkness...

It is also said that, somewhere within the seemingly-endless abyss of the lock-up, the patient seeker will eventually be rewarded with some ultimate, terminal revelation. Whether anyone has succeeded in this occult task, no one can say. In any case, if anyone has attempted this strange act of non-Euclidean decipherment, no one has yet returned to disclose what secrets were eventually revealed.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.114: Grave-Looting Spawn of the Stars

The following image appeared in my e-mail inbox this morning: another digital artefact forwarded by that strange individual going by the name of ‘Cold’ - the occasional (but always inscrutable) interlocuter in online debates concerning the curious events which afflict Horsingdon. 

The photograph supposedly depicts a large object, tightly-bound in sheets of black plastic, which appeared in the fenced-off area towards the northerly end of Hallowmere Playing Fields late yesterday evening. According to Cold, the object was approximately the size and shape of a human body; in his brief (but untraceable) e-mail Cold further asserts that soon after the appearance of the anomalous throbbing light which manifested above Hallowmere Playing Fields yesterday evening, the black-swathed item depicted here was observed to have mysteriously disapppeared.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.113: Return to the Uncanny Parish

This curious, pulsing light appeared above Hallowmere Playing Fields last night - yet one more of the many enigmatic mysteries which have, for as long as anyone can remember (and as far back as the folklore of the region stretches) plagued the uncanny parish of Horsingon.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.112: Scream and Scream Again

Few people realise that Screaming Lord Sutch has long associations with Horsingdon and its surrounding environs, having long resided near Harlow. After sadly taking his own life in 1999, Sutch was buried in Pinner (a suburb of Harlow), where to this day his grave remains a site of pilgrimage for politically-disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the outsiders, and for all those who feel their interior life is fundamentally alien to the fabric of this world, such that that they are unable to countenance its nature.

A doyen of 1960s rock n roll sonic horror (whose early work was recorded by Joe Meek, no less), it is easy to understand what drew Screaming Lord Sutch to the area; as leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party, he was also, perhaps, the only politician in the entirety of British history who maintained any integrity whatsoever.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.111: Voorish Domes

These curious domes can be spied from the Ebury Way at the point where, for a few hundred yards,  it runs parallel to the River Trent. Whilst the function or purpose of these curious structures is unclear, what is known is that they have been built upon acreage owned by the MoD since the 1950s. More speculative still have been those attempts to bind these odd buildings to local scraps of folklore: vague, and incomplete narratives which hint at this very same locale as the place where once ‘Voorish Domes’ had been been raised, and about which certain primordial rites - referred to only as ‘The Scarlet Ceremonies’ in those deficiently fragmentary fables - were once performed...

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmssions from Horsingdon, No.110: The Ancient Track (Redux)

Partially tracing the contour of the base of Horsingdon Hill, this neolithic track meanders its way northward, edging past the ancient ritual site of Harlow Hill toward Trentford.

Even up until the early years of the Twentieth Century, travellers along this archaic path would regularly recount strange tales concerning the spectral manifestations - and other, less comprehensible, praeternatural disclosures - which would be vouchsafed to them during their journeyings, producing rich and diverse folkways of the phantasmagorical and the supernatural.

Whilst the parish of Horsingdon continues to be afflicted by intrusions both monstrous and otherworldly, there is a definite sense (at least amongst the older inhabitants of the region) that these have increasingly affected a more secular, technologised cast - that the old tales of the uncanny have given way to a new kind of industrialised modernist weird. 

Now the only ghosts haunting these ancient tracks are, it seems the memorialised folk-spectres of their own imagined past.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.109: The Lost Tower

The Lost Tower stands somewhere within an industrial estate out on the northerly edgelands of Horsingdon. Many photographs exist of the structure, all of which depict its rising up from behind other buildings and warehouses - but never its base or foundation; indeed, no one has yet been able to find or verify its actual location within the dilapidated industrial estate. And some of those who have gone in search of it have never returned.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon No.108: Haunted Portakabins

This makeshift office - a once-temporary structure forged from convenient portakabins, and which which long ago transitioned to a state of permanence - sits in the foreyard of one of Horsingdon’s haulage firms.

It has, however, sat empty for the last few years on account of it being haunted.

No one is quite sure what is doing the haunting, or indeed how this spectral state of affairs came into being; nonetheless, speculation has been rife amongst the drivers (none of which seem to remain at the firm for longer than a few months) that something may have secretly hitched a lift on one of their lorries: something unnatural, which most likely crept or crawled from within one of the curious Ministry sites the drivers occasionally pass whilst out on their deliveries.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.107: Horsingdon Asylum

Reeking of an uncanny aura of abject abandonment, the dilapidated shell of Horsingdon Asylum is notable for the fact that, soon after the institution was decommissioned as a site for he cure of distraught souls and disordered minds, every one of its windows was bricked up. There are few alive now who recall the reasons for this - but those who do refuse to speak about the matter.

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.106: Howling Tower

It is said that this transmitter array on the parish boundary between Harlow and Horsingdon was once part of a secret Ministry initiative, whose aim was the detection of non-human intrusions into terrestrial airspace, focusing on certain regional locales which ere reputed UFO hotspots

Scant days after it became operational, the array was disconnected from its power source - on account of the discovery of its broadcasting a continuous, dissonant howl along cryptic wavebands. It was later ascertained by Ministry radio astronomers that this discordant signal was emanating from beyond the furthermost rim of our galaxy.

Rumour holds that, despite attempts at terminating the signal, the transmitter array continues to mysteriously relay its cacophanous broadcast to this very day - even in the face of no discernable source of power...

Malign Frequencies - Further Transmissions from Horsingdon No.105: Sleeping Giants.

Enclosed behind steel palisade fencing crowned with barbed wire, this anonymous, windowless facility is fed an endless supply of power: the cryptic thrum of inscrutable energies, forcibly extracted from the landscape by means of proscribed technologies, thence channeled along thick reams of heavy cabling whose outer casing is indented with strange sigils.

An aura of alien unease permeates the site - as if one is transgressing some hidden, unspoken threshold and, in that act of transgression, entering into the presence of a malevolent, sleeping giant.

Malign Fequencies 104 - Harlow Hill Field Report 10: The Lychgate

The Lychgate is a narrow path which leads north out of St.Mary’s crooked, hillside cemetery towards the pedestrian, urbanise modernity of Harlow town centre. Demarcating the threshold between the temporal and the incorporeal, the Lychgate evidences more than its fair share of spectral inhabitants who exist between worlds - and whose hauntological state is the due of all those who fully understand what it is to really dwell within Horsingdon’s strange topography: existing within the narrow corridor where worlds overlap, participating in a kind of ghostly, ephemeral half-life within that twilight fringe between two realms, but never truly belonging to either.

Malign Frequencies No.103 - Harlow Hill Field Report 9: Star Stone

This strange, tentacular star-shaped icon sits atop a roughly hewn tombstone, overlapping a carved scroll upon which are inscribed curious and unintelligible symbols. As with others of its ilk found within the cemetery of St. Mary-on-the-Hill, it is said that this nameless grave hides monstrous secrets fallen from the stars, long since forgotten, and best left undisturbed.