RAF Bempton

The Aghori see everything in world as created by Shiva and therefore as beautiful, whether it be flowers, shit, the living or dead human body or any other creation that exists. They live in on the outskirts of society beside the Ganges river in the charnel fields and partake in all that is forbidden in conventional Hindu culture. I became interested in their practices in relation to the spaces we consider taboo or frightening, such as derelict buildings, sites of murders or atrocity and ritual spaces. The female Aghori in this clip laughs when she tells the interviewer that some of the dead bodies which she consumes during cannibalistic rituals get up and attack her. To face the unheimlich with humor, to seek out the frightening and to understand why it was fearful to me became a motif in my personal activities for a time.





When we lose everything of worth to us then we start to realise the beauty in things we were formerly ignorant of, the world becomes born again and bears fruit of which we never could have imagined. To say we only have one life is a fallacy, we live many lives which run concurrent with each other, lives of imagined pasts, futures, dreams and after-lives.  James Hillman suggests in Dream and the Underworld  that 'the scene in a dream' is a metaphorical version of waking life and 'those players of yesterday have now deepened and entered my soul'. My name in Anglo-Saxon would be Twyla or twilight, perhaps I am destined in some way to seek the space between.





Seeking out the literal liminal spaces between the overworld and the underworld can be a tumultuous pastime. I recall the day we walked through the metaphorically loaded blast proof doors of RAF Bempton's cold war bunker, designed much more to keep something terrible in than to hold the nuclear war out so it seemed.




To enter the depths we were to brave asbestos particles which prompted us to wear flimsy paper suits and P3 filter masks to keep mesothelioma at bay. The closeness to death and destruction was hellishly portrayed around us in painted murals, horned demons fornicating with buxom women, hermaphroditic pornography from hell - supposedly painted by a satanic coven in the 1970s who, it is said, squatted the then moth-balled bunker before being evicted.



 The floor did not exist, we trod thin planks of wood over burnt and rotten cable ducts, the huge space where the generator lay was a gaping black hole.




We spent probably less than an hour underground, slowly moving from blackened room to room, the blackness made any details bar the graffiti hard to distinguish and the conditions seemed so treacherous that it was hard not to panic.



As we drove back from the coast homewards we stopped in York for some food. I got a phone call from my Ma telling me that my estranged father had collapsed at home with a ruptured aorta and had lain for many hours alone, unable to reach help until it arrived completely by chance. His chances of surviving the emergency surgery he was about to undergo were very slim, less than 10% at least. It threw our exploration of the imagined underworld into strange perspective, as if I had been acting out some kind of journey into Hades to retrieve him with no knowledge of his real life peril.



The shaft of daylight that had shone down from the disintegrated emergency exit had seemed most surreal of all, having stepped down through the decoy bungalow, down the stairs, down a long sloping tunnel, through an antechamber and past the huge armored doors, the many seals upon this chamber seemed to separate us from the world almost absolutely but then the furthest point into its depths threw on us a mocking beam of bright sunshine, illuminating the rusted skeletal remains of a staircase.

A few years after our visit, a young man vanished after apparently visiting the bunker. His disappearance and apparent death has been linked to an 'occult' (great unintentional pun!) by his parents, as if the paintings and history of the walls of the bunker could have come alive and claimed him. Whether or not the bunker was inhabited by satanists or witches seems debatable, I have seen no proof but the myth alone seems to hold enough power to make it truth in people's minds.


What do we seek from communication with the dead? What secrets do they hold for us? The lives and character of people we know does not cease from the last point we spoke to them, even in dreams they evolve and change, reacting and commenting on new situations in surprising and enlightening ways. To communicate past the point of passing shows that consciousness does not end at that point and our awareness of the afterlife can awaken from slumber, those who are no longer with us return again.

The things I came to fear most were the stifling negative attitudes to a lifestyle free from conventional taboos, often from those who fetishised the notion of abandoning them themselves. My own inelegant attempts to live my life in a more honest way were readily abused by individuals who wanted to gain power over me, since it seemed to them I must be weak-minded and mentally ill for wanting to invoke change at all. I was all too eager to accept counsel from an image of enlightenment with no practice to back it up. I am thankful for the circle of true friends I have that saved me from myself on so many an occasion, as well as mourning deeply for those that I lost, though they live on in so many ways.

Liverpool William Mackenzie Pyramid Tomb

With the sinister myth of Mackenzie's debt to the devil, the pyramid in St. Andrew's churchyard is a stark contrast with the uptight Georgian streets around it. The church is a desolate shell of a building, currently surrounded in fences and 'danger' signs.

Supposedly the man is sat clutching a hand of cards sat up above ground in the pyramid to cheat the devil of his soul should his body be committed to the ground, although this seems to be a discredit to the character of the man in order to suitably embellish a book about local ghost stories, the pyramid was built over his grave some 16 years past his burial and similar myths float around other pyramid tombs, such as that of Mad Jack Fuller. We can presume its construction was inspired by some grand tour undertaken by his younger brother after William left him his railway building fortune.

A soundwork was recently installed in the graveyard, continuing the myth.

Druid's Temple, Ilton

Druid's Temple is a folly contrived to evoke the pagan temple of Stonehenge, huge trilithons set in an oval with a sheltered cave and a sinister block altar. Pine woods surround it, enclosing an artificial ritual landscape of dolmens and balanced pillars of stone, suggesting natural temples such as Brimham Rocks and the Cheesewring up on Dartmoor.






Its an impressive place to visit and with no restrictions on opening it has become slightly notorious for its modern, unofficial ritual use.

My second visit to Druid's Temple was at night, in the midst of a turbulent period of my life. I was angry before I got there, and sad that it was in the circumstances that it was. The misplaced pine woods seemed colder and more alien than ever, discordant against the surrounding landscape. I thought that viewing it in the dark would bring some kind of significance to the place, which had seemed cold and soulless to me in daylight. I usually have a boundless, if hugely irritating, enthusiasm for going to unusual places repeatedly. This time I didn't want to get there or leave the car once we arrived.

Walking towards the stones past a pile of felled trees, I felt as though something was watching us from the top of the folly. I fully expected us to bump into a group of equally jittery people, perhaps up to no good, and us both leave sheepishly. When we got nearer, the quiet became oppressive, the air slightly scented with freshly felled pine but thick with something less tangible. I started to see movement in my peripheral vision, something not unusual for me as a migraine sufferer but this time less prescribed and more sudden. I thought I saw glimpses of a huge black creature, wolf-like and immaterial. I could taste a metallic taste, as if blood had been split. Every step towards the encirclement of the stones brought the creature more vividly to my senses, and I started to panic.

Once we stood within the stones, I could not keep my fear under control any longer, and I started to babble about the demon stalking us. As I stood there, it was as if I could see the beast circling us along the top of the stones, waiting for me to be deprived of my only exit before it ripped me apart. I stopped being able to focus or concentrate on reality. Wild images of demonic dogs chased before me, darker than the shadows we stood in, dripping with some kind of unearthly gore that I could smell and feel the heat of. It seemed to me that if I approached the altar, all hope would be lost.

I was completely lost in this vision, it felt like an age before I was able to leave or talk but eventually I remember begging to be allowed to go back to the car. I think I ran. Not an experience I would have shared at first consideration, but as I sorted through old photos I came across my disinterested snaps from my first visit, and wanted to juxtapose the two contrasting events in a post. I guess a blog on the fateful and strange places I visit should include the unpleasant, uncanny aspects of visiting England too. The experience was formative in my current situation and self knowledge, it made me consider how strong emotions seem to arise from something residing in locations I visit that seem beyond the places themselves. The genii locorum of Druid's Temple were roused by something in me that evening, and I genuinely felt as though the place would devour me, or at least a part of me.

Labyrinths

The maze-like corridor systems of asylums for the mentally ill remind me of the twists and angles of a labyrinth, ultimately the patients entered through the same grandiose administration blocks, with the repeated clock towers' eye recording the moment, and mostly they stayed there till death, living out the same daily patterns, a series of monotonous movements designed to instill a sense of quiet unquestioning confusion.

Once at High Royds asylum, I climbed through a broken window while my friend waited outside. As I stood inside the corridor waiting for her to step through the sash window slid upwards of its own accord. We carried on regardless, she stepped through the portal as if nothing had happened, although a fear lay inside me of what would happen if the sash flew back down with some kind of supernatural force.

I have wandered those corridors for many hours looking for a mirror that shows me who I really am. The way we search in each other's souls for a deeper truth than we see in our own, a sentence more poignant for its distance from our own hand. Those we have lost we immortalise in moments that are tied to these places. Upon returning to the ever-decreasing maze of passageways left at the hospital I recalled conversations, episodes of time which replay in my mind as I walked through thorn-littered hallways. The ghosts lost in a dream High Royds are very familiar, the place I know in my sleep has windows which close behind us and never let us leave, trapped together in a comic tableaux of our own creation. We left a stain on the slab which cannot be washed clean.