Thursday, April 06, 2017

The Horsingdon Transmissions No.96: Of Faceless Ghosts and Non-Places



This refurbished and partially-rebuilt gameskeeper's lodge on the edge of Horsingdon Woods still retains vestiges of its charming original roof, but remains untenanted despite its renovation; this may  be on account of it being the last recorded dwelling place of Judith Boreham - James and Miriam Boreham's daughter.

There appears to be no record of Judith's death, although it is generally believed that she passed away at some point during the early 1950s. Since then, the lodge and surrounding woods have acquired a reputation for being haunted by a particularly horrible apparition of faceless demeanor; according to local legend, this spectral being would 'steal the faces' of those unwary interlopers into its uncanny domain - presumably to make up for its own lack of visage. Indeed, rumour holds that the last owner of the lodge was not only found dead within the confines of that squat building, but was also discovered to have been rendered featureless in a spectacularly horrible fashion. In relation to these tales of the phantasmal erasure of identity, it is perhaps significant that the interior of the lodge possesses a curiously unnerving atmosphere of absolute absence: as if whoever - or whatever - once dwelt within had somehow effected a total, metaphyicial effacement of the very existential tissue of the place, producing instead something approaching a pure state of Non-Being.


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