“And there were other rocks that were like animals, creeping, horrible animals, putting out their tongues, and others were like words I could not say, and others like dead people lying on the grass. I went on among them, though they frightened me, and my heart was full of wicked song they put into it; and I wanted to make faces and twist myself about the way they did, and I went on and on a long way till at last I liked the rocks and they didn’t frighten me any more.”
- Arthur Machen

For the last few years, the good chaps at Ghost Box have been responsible for a series of phantasmal transmissions that for those lucky enough to have heard them, have functioned as mysterious maps to faded places hidden away on this haunted island of ours, where the spirits of the natural world forever mourning the death of the trees and all their traditions, still linger over ominous valleys whose characters shift with the movements of the clouds, and who have come to awkwardly coalesce with the concrete and wire spectres of the technology of yesteryear’s tomorrow, phantoms of a future that died with the minds of mad dreamers. These places may or may not have ever actually existed, but may have instead come to be as fragments of dusty memory, misty recollections of the terrors of dark and lonely water, dew eyed, satanic pornography, and The Tomorrow People, and even foggier reminiscences of Arthur Machen folklore, ancient monolithic ritual, and occult superstition combining to create locales where slowly decaying polytechnics stripped of former hopes and glories become ballrooms for translucent nymphs, who emerge from the surrounding hills at night to dance for Pan.

With the Owl’s Map, Belbury Poly took us on a fascinating, fantastical tour of a town uneasily immersed as much in legend as it was in modernism, where a Neolithic stone circle and the striking Community Fellowship Church were just a few of the attractions we encountered along the way. Ever the curious explorers, Belbury Poly have now taken us somewhere far outside the realms of the townships, to a place where nothing can be seen for miles, except for the lone presence of a derelict house on a hill, surrounded by large stones. Folks have been warned never to venture too near to the house mired in a terrifying tale of fever dreams that inexplicably came to life to torment two unfortunate children who apparently were forced to flee, and were never seen again. Local people claim it was the stones that did it, and that they possessed some kind of awful power. Legend has it they were never erected to surround the house, but that they gradually closed in on it. Wanderers at night have claimed to have heard the stones whisper and moan terrible things, a few have even sworn that the stones have eyes that have momentarily fixed them dead to the ground with soulless, calculating glares. Of course as brave as we are, we daren’t ignore the advice of others, so we keep our distance, but listening to the electronic throb of Belbury Poly’s vintage Cluster synths as programmed by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop create the sound of a more intensely hallucinogenic version of Giorgio Moroder’s ‘Chase Theme’ made for the Mystics, we can imagine all too vividly what the stones did to the children to know we never want to go to that house.

Belbury Poly – The Hidden Door

Two characters who undoubtedly have been a big influence on Ghost Box are Sidney Sager and Vernon Elliot, and chances are if you’re parents were children growing up in England in the sixties or the seventies, Mr Sager and Mr Elliot probably played integral roles in scaring them half to death. In a time when children’s television would routinely terrify in a way that couldn’t even be contemplated of the loud mouthed, numb-skulled product endorsements that pass for kiddies entertainment today, both men were responsible for creating some of the eeriest, and most unsettling music to ever soundtrack scenes of forests populated by creatures made of fuzzy felt and pipe cleaners, and the endlessly speculative discussion of magical relics surrounded by dodgy set designs of museums that only ever appeared to house one or two objects.

Trying to find material by Sidney Sager is almost as hard as trying to figure out what some of the programmes he worked on were all about. Deeply underrated, the man needs more love especially in this neck of the woods where we wholly embrace the sounds that make us look over our shoulders from time to time, and await for fateful nights when we know with an encompassing dread that if we look out of windows at night our gaze with be met by the menacing glow of two red eyes looking out from the darkness. Into The Labyrinth and Children Of The Stones were two of the programmes Sager laced with disturbing occult choir melodies and Morricone compositions by way of Cheddar Gorge. The Children Of The Stone’s theme in particular should manage to send a chill down the spine of anyone breathing, the backwards chants and moans evoking Goblin’s psychotic wailing hymnal to the Witch.

Sidney Sager – Into The Labyrinth Theme

Sidney Sager – Children Of The Stones Theme

Speaking of witches, the inhabitants of Pogle’s Wood had a witch of its own to contend with, one that would skulk through the dead leaves with unblinking, manic eyes looking for a long lost magical crown she believed belonged to her, and who would rattle to death any unfortunate soul that happened to get in her way. She was deemed to be such a menace that children were banned from ever setting a foot in amongst the trees that she would so often be seen leering out from behind, as the sound of her rotten, twig fingers scraping at the bark would fill the air as a kind of warning. It wasn’t until the beady eyed crone and her creaking wooden voice was banished from the woodlands, and she was turned quite literally in to nothing that children were allowed to return to play in the woods, but afterwards every now and again they would hear the faintest sound of her deathly chamber folly waft through the small spaces between the leaves, and her wicked waltz of cat screech fiddle and dying brass would remind them all that evil never really dies, it merely seeps in to the soil beneath us.

The Vernon Elliot Ensemble – Witch’s Theme

Epilogue -
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