Frequent haunters of Horsingdon’s burying grounds, local folklore holds that the it is the role of the region’s corvidae to bring to the graveside messages for the dead - although it is never made clear in these tales from whence or whom these spectral missives come, or what strange purpose such communiques serve…
The sudden and accidental discovery of a barely-perceptible semi-circular stone structure covered by ivy and undergrowth, hidden deep within Horsingdon Wood.
There is no sign or indication of its age; its origin and purpose thus remain obscure - but this is all the more reason (as all right-minded Horsingdon folk know) to leave such findings be, lest something best left undisturbed is woken.
Winter in Horsingdon brings with it a raw, killing cold. Family, friends and neighbours always do what they can to ensure the safety of the elderly and infirm - those who, these days, are seen as marginal and unproductive - whilst the wealthy enjoy the warmth and comfort of their homes in indolent disregard at the suffering around them.
Yet it is Horsingdon’s monied classes who always seem to suffer the worst of the season’s biting chill, as spirits of the frozen dead rise from the land to pass sentence upon those who, through their indifference and lack of largesse, have failed to learn the lessons of their callous ancestors.
Horsingdon winters are notoriously unpredictable: at dawn or dusk during the season, a thick mist can settle on the platform of Northwich Park Station suddenly and unexpectedly. Every year a small (yet statistically-significant) number of passengers who set out on their journeys from the station under such conditions fail to arrive at their destinations and, indeed, are never seen again.
This partial image is the only known photograph of the taciturn individual - and local conspiracy theorist - who goes by the curious nom de plume ‘COLD’. An occasional interlocutor of mine - who I have never actually met in person - COLD recently contacted me via e-mail regarding this previous post, intimating in the all-too-succint electronic missive forthcoming revelations concerning the mysterious event in question. I will, of course, provide further information as and when the enigmatic COLD deigns to supply it.
The Guardians of the Black Bowers mark with their thresholds those places where the wall of the world wears thin against the endless clawing of the abyss. Not even the most sacred or godly of Horsingdon’s sites are exempt from the stain of such portals, and offer no protection against the monstrous intrusions which, thankfully, irrupt into our world through them only infrequently.
These gates protect a deserted MoD site in Trentford near the Ebury Way - rumoured to be the location of an otherworldly or extraterrestrial visitation in the 1980s, details of which remain vague and inconclusive to this day. In any case, soon after the supposed occurrence of this speculated event, the site apparently closed down.
Today, the area remains off-limits to the public, and heavy steel fencing and barbed wire enclose the locale which, it is alleged, continues to be haunted by the contaminating reverberations of whatever strange event caused the site’s closure.
Bridges are liminal: transitional zones between recognised points of terminus, they are non-places. In Horsingdon, it is said that there are some bridges - almost always sites of local tragedy, or where some monstrous but half-forgotten atrocity was once committed - which on occasion become uncoupled from their original, worldly destinations. Any wayward traveller crossing such a bridge at the moment of its translation between this world and the absolute elsewhere is, therefore, likely to find themselves the permanent and unwelcome inhabitant of a strange and terrifyingly unfamiliar country…
Horsingdon’s socially-uncolonised spaces - such as this long-deserted and derelict burying ground - are more often than not the breeding grounds of praeternatural ferality.
Apocalyptic tracts such as the one above (which was slipped through my letterbox earlier today) are not uncommon theological fare in the borough of Horsingdon - perhaps unsurprisingly so, given the folkore and legendry which pervade and suffuse the region's haunted topographies.
Even so, there are those who take such matters very seriously, and who find such attempts at fearful proselytisation - especially if they are pursued in a particularly insistent manner - not only a bothersome intrusion, but a call to arms. There are more than a few tales which tell of a local cunning man - or even one of the Guardians of the Black Bowers - engaging in a very direct and maledictive course of action in response to the pious arrogance of tub-thumping god-botherers. Needless to say, the outcome of such vexatious 'knacking' (the local vernacular for hexing or cursing) results in a very personal apocalypse being visited up the unfortunate victims who, in the last, terrible instance, are likely left in a state of awestruck wonderment as they finally come face-to-face with a god - but in all likelihood not the one they were expecting...
It is perhaps unsurprising that the inhabitants of Horsingdon often exhibit what could variously be described as a rather morbid sense of humour or a strangely melancholic sentimentality when naming the thoroughfares through their burying grounds. Needless to say, naming conventions such as this represent truisms - at least in the eyes of Horsingdon folk - with regard to the final destination to which all paths ultimately lead.
Traditionally, ledger stones were placed on the graves of those who were reasonably well-to-do - yet not affluent enough to afford the expense of a carven tomb or sepulchre. As well as markers of status, ledger stones also made the desecration or robbery of the grave upon which they were laid a much more arduous task.
However, Horsingdon folklore proposes a different purpose to these weighty stones, noting that such artefacts are more often than not found upon the resting places of the region’s less reputable dead, where they prevent from rising that which sleeps only fitfully within the restrictive confines of the grave.
Sometimes a series of stone steps in the woods leading nowhere is exactly that: an obscure and curious monument to history, purpose, or place long forgotten. In Horsingdon - at the proper season - they may aspire to something else: thresholds to other worlds, initiators which open pathways onto sacred mysteries, eldritch witchlore, or something much worse…
Horsingdon is somewhat notable on account of the number of trees which flourish in the gardens of its residents, most of who are rightly proud to share their living space with their arboreous cohabitants (especially if they are of the fruit-bearing capacity). Indeed, many of these trees are protected by preservation orders which the brough has been reluctant to rescind.
And for good reason, it seems: a few years ago a neighbour of mine - a retired City-type who had moved to Horsingdon for short time whilst awaiting the completion of renovations to his country pile somewhere in the Home Counties - had also somehow managed to persuade Horsingdon council to revoke the preservation order on two ancient willow trees in his spacious garden (on account of their ‘spoiling’ the view). In any case, a few days after the trees had been cut down said neighbour appears to to have disappeared suddenly and inexplicably - hasn’t been seen since.
On hearing this tale, those who have moved into the area in recent years have, understandably, discounted as a fanciful local superstition the claim that, at the time of his disappearance, curious tracks were found leading from the stumps of the hewn trees across the otherwise perfectly-mowed lawn of my neighbour toward the interior of his house.
Regardless of such scepticism, no one else in the neighbourhood has since sought to remove any inconvenient arborage from their garden.
Clerical intercessions into the haunting of various of Horsingdon’s churchyards have often - in an almost M. R. Jamesian sense - resulted in an unpleasant reversal of fortunes for the clergy involved.
Far from the spectral intrusions being exorcised or forcibly removed via other forms of spiritual or praeternatural coercion, in the majority of these cases, the tables have been turned on the intervening rectors: invariably, their puritanical and morally-upstanding (but oddly prurient) exteriors have been revealed (usually to the local press) as facades masking uncomfortable, scandalous or otherwise embarrassing facts regarding intimate aspects of their personal lives.
The inevitable outcome being that these sour, repressed individuals end up fleeing the borough under a cloud of shame - leaving the troublesome spectres to continue with their vexations. Which - as any folklorist worth their salt would agree - is exactly as it should be.
There is as much of the sublime about the spectral as there is the terrible - and certainly the tales surrounding this abandoned and deconsecrated church near Burn Hill attest to this: a strange chanting heard at midnight, emerging from its black and hollow depths; a bat-winged thing once seen squatting on the nave roof beneath a gibbous moon; the spectre of a faceless nun said to haunt the spire.
The terror inspired by this local lore - the accretion of centuries of tale-telling and myth-making - also evokes an awe which re-inscribes such sites with a profound sense of the sacred beyond the power of any priest to banish.
