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.

Malign Frequencies No.102 - Harlow Hill Field Report 8: Praeternatural Radiation:

The cemetery attached to St. Mary’s Church is somewhat unusual as the majority of the graves have been dug on the incline of the Hill, on its densely-wooded Northerly slope; close by is the appropriately-named exclusive gated community of Lychgate Manor. As noted in yesterday’s post, a number of Harlow and Horsingdon’s famed occult practitioners - including members of the Boreham family - have their final resting place in the cemetery.

The overgrown hillside burying ground is also notable for a number of curious, cylindrical, coffin-shaped gravetop monuments - all of which sit atop graves whose markers bear no names or dates. Rumour has it that these stone cylinders are not, in fact, ornamental in nature, but are in actuality squat stone sarcophagi within which certain remains were once interred; stranger still is the claim that the stonemason whose services were employed in the construction of such bizarre stone coffins was also requested to line them with lead. It is difficult to fathom who - or what - might be inhumed within these incongrous tombs - or indeed what abnormally praeternatural radiations their lead lining might prove an apotropaic barrier against...

Malign Frequencies No.101 - Harlow Hill Field Report 7: The Thing in the Steeple

St.Mary-on-the-Hill is the site of a number of alleged paranormal phenomena (including visitations by a huge, spectral, crimson-eyed black dog), the steeple of which is said to been the site of a monstrous conjuration by one of Harlow University’s Masters in the 1790s. Rumour persists that the ectoplasmic residue of whatever nameless thing was called forth still haunts the spire - and that on certain night the thing can be heard fumbling against the walls of its lightless prison, perhaps seeking egress from that benighted space into our world.

Notably, a number of the region’s occult luminaries have been buried in the graveyard attached to the church.

Malign Frequencies No.100 - Harlow Hill Field Report 6: Boreham’s Room

This large window in one of the Harlow University’s oldest buildings looks out from one of the rooms which formed part of James Boreham’s apartment during the time he was an undergraduate studying medieval metaphysics at the institution.

Boreham’s shadow hangs heavy over Horsingdon and Harlow and, whilst there remain longstanding historical links between the Boreham family and the witchlore of the region, rumour has it that it was during his time at Harlow University that James Boreham attained mastery of the occult arts and sciences. Exactly how he achieved this whilst under the protection and guidance of such a prestigious academic establishment remains open to question.

Malign Frequencies No.99 - Harlow Field Report 5: Physics and Folklore

Yet more of Harlow Hill’s monolithic remains, arrayed about - of all places - Harlow University’s Department of Physics. The cutting-edge (and virtually inconceivably) mathematics which underlie black holes and Einstein-Rosen bridges here collide with the archaic remnants of Horsingdon’s metaphysical and symbolic topography. Thus do secular science, primordial rite, and half-forgotten folklore involving witchery and strange pacts intersect and rub coarse against the walls of the real at the peculiar edgeland of this site - but to what sinister purpose?

Malign Frequencies No 98 - Harlow Hill Field Report 4: Old Stones

An ancient monolith stands outside one of Harlow University’s administrative buildings - one of the neolithic stones which once ringed the top of Harlow Hill. Other of the stones are scattered about the campus, seemingly in a random manner; there are those, however, who claim that the repositioning of the stones constitutes an act of esoteric pattern-breaking and resignification - one meant to unbind, for some inconceivable purpose, whatever monstrous powers the old stone circle once sought to contain.

Malign Frequencies No.97 - Harlow Hill Field Report No.3: The Black Gate

An old black iron gate marks the boundary - midway up Harlow Hill - between land which was once legally constituted as commons, and the upper part of the hill belonging to Harlow University. It is said that since 1657, when Sir John Hargreaves wrested the crown of the Hill from the local people of the parish of Harlow, a black gate has always stood here: erected by the Folk of the Black Bowers To delineate the cursed statement of intent: that the upper part of the Hill should henceforth be subject to the maleficarum of both those Folk and of the Horsingdon Coven - as would any of those who would cross the black gate’s threshold.

Malign Frequencies No.96 - Harlow Hill Field Report 2: The Path Beside the Witching Tree

The public footpath toward the crown of Harlow Hill passes by the Witching Tree (as it is known locally), upon which a coven of witches (said to be an offshoot of the Horsingdon Coven) was hanged in 1672, under the direction of local magistrate and landowner Sir John Hargreaves. Notably, the mass hanging occured a scant few hours after Hargreaves had ceremonially laid, atop the Hill, the foundation stone to what was to become Harlow School and later, Harlow University. 

The remains of the thirteen witches are said to have been interred in a secret crypt somewhere deep below Harlow University, forming (according to some of the more outre conspiracy theories which cluster about the place), a hidden vortex of praeternatural energy - a source of monstrous, unearthly power used to fuel the secret initiation rites by which certain of the student body are inducted into the exclusive fraternal Houses for which the elite, world-renown University is known.

Malign Frequencies No.95 - Harlow Hill Field Report 1: Encampment

In the shadow of Harlow Hill itself, and not far from Northwich Park Hospital, a public footpath traverses a small but densely wooded zone, within which sits a peculiar encampment which speaks to the presence of one of the Folk of the Black Bowers.

Indeed, legend holds that, for untold centuries, one of those Folk has always kept watch over Harlow Hill on account of the monstrous praeternatural powers said to lurk within and about that place.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.94: Monstrous Internments

The bricked up doors and windows of a Horsingdon outbuilding may hide an aggregate of secrets; there is, however, a recurrent narrative thread which winds through the local folklore clustering about such sealed premises: a hidden genealogical history linked to the witchlore of the region; a resultant family calamity by way of a blighted birth; then, later, the unexplained disappearances; finally the need to inter something brought into this world (and of questionsble parentage) which should not be - something which, by necessity, must be locked away and forever hidden from sight.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.93: Spectral Structured

On occasion - usually at dusk - one can sometimes spy the flat, monolithic rooftop of some blocky piece of Brutalist architecture rising above the canopy of Horsingdon Wood - yet other than the entrance to Horsingdon Bunker, the ancient woodland contains no such buildings. Any attempt to locate these spectral structures inevitably leads to one of two outcomes: the abject failure to discover their location or - more often than not - the inexplicable disappearance of thse who go in search of these unearthly buildings.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.92: Singular Machineries

Singular industrial-scale machineries located on a plot of MoD-owned land, not far from the Ebury Way. Whilst these apparatus remain inactive and silent throughout the hours of daylight, once darkness falls, the internal workings of their hardware thrum and pulse with with strange and enigmatic energies.

Whilst the purpose of these esoteric technologies remains unclear, lights (fearfully portentous and awash with dirty, luminous, signification) are sometimes spied in the benighted skies directly above the curious machines - which carry on about their inscrutable business regardless.

Malign Frequencies: Further Transmissions from Horsingdon, No.91: Residual Haunting

Long gone are many of the old pubs of Horsingdon; yet they are never entirely forgotten: their spectres linger on as residual ghosts, dead but dreaming, haunting collective memory as one-time hubs of storytelling and worldbuilding (long before that term acquired the fashionable literary currency it has today). Here a local encounter with some unearthly revenant or manifestation of the monstrous would weave its way into the fabric of the region’s folklore and, in some intangible way, into the texture of the landscape itself. Thus, despite their closure, the creaking, ramshackle shells of these local watering holes have often withstood redevelopment or gentrification as, over time, they themselves have become part of the very folklore whose inception they once witnessed: after many strange and unnerving incidents surround such spaces, developers have abandoned attempts to transform them into eidolons of gleaming, metropolitan modernity; thus they remain exemplars of the true heart of Horsingdon: fearful sites of ghostly horror, haunted by the vengeful dead souls whose living tenements these old pubs once harboured.