I suppose lots of people are familiar with the blues guitarist Robert Johnson’s tale of supposedly selling his soul to the Devil at the crossroads in return for some half decent voodoo riffs, but there are other tales of the crossroads that are equally as interesting and otherworldly - I have one of my own and a theory to go with it (of course).
As I said in another post, there used to be a railway line at the back of my mum’s house when I was a teenager. We moved there in ’78 from the silence of the Shropshire countryside to the sound of trains grating and clanking below the living room and my bedroom window.
It was supposed to be a temporary move. The lease having almost run out on the previous home, my mum had to find a place fairly quick and the new place was nearer to her parent’s side of the family, which explains the not ideal location.
From our upstairs flat the railway lines below were sandwiched between two grassy embankments. There were small communal gardens below each flat with a high concrete wall screening off the ugliness behind - mind you the flats themselves weren’t very pretty either.
If you forgot the railway was there and just maintained a level gaze out the rear facing windows, the scene wasn’t too bad: large back gardens, loads of greenery, red tiled roofs peeping through the foliage, trees receding into the distance, the poplars spiking up here and there like drunken old men wobbling in the breeze.
But that was the other side of tracks – literally.
I’ve always found railway cuttings sinister; they’re like dead zones, transit channels with their own very peculiar negative energy. Even motorways for example, don’t emanate that vibe for me - they still belong to the upper world, the land of the living. Motor vehicles have individuality and freedom of choice; they can swerve or stop relatively quickly.
There’s an ominous silence and tension that glistens like a cheese-wire on a railway line. The pregnant pause between the sudden roaring inevitable unstoppableness of that gleaming projectile as it fires down the barrel of its gun.
I guess that why this hidden firing range attracts the curious kids, the teenage daredevils, and of course the suicides.
It took me a long, long time to get used to the rattling freight trains that shunted below my bedroom window deep into the night; such a melancholy sound, so industrial, unforgiving and insensitive.
The bellowing of the horn would always give me a start too, like some Viking call to arms.
The flat resonated with bad mojo from the off. It always felt and looked temporary, shabby, haunted by unquiet spirits. Both me and my sister became somewhat agoraphobic, sleepless, tormented by odd psychedelic and precognitive dreams.
My mum was still lost in her post divorce anger fugue over my dad and his family. The trauma of moving again in such a short time affected us all of course, but this seemed to be a particularly bad move all round. We’d brought our own depressed, anxious psyche’s to feed the beast’s insatiable hunger for pure negativity – whoever and whatever ‘the beast’ was… and is.
There was a tiny platform and shelter across the tracks to the left as you looked through my bedroom window. A long steep strip of tarmac led to the road above, or should I say the crossroads – the convergence of four roads in this case.
Underneath the road was the railway tunnel: a sooty, black-bricked yawning mouth, through which an identical platform and shelter appeared on the opposite side of the line.
Okay we’ve got a mega crossroads thing going on here! Of course I didn’t understand this at the time, I just saw and heard the ugliness and inconvenience of it all.
Never mind, soon be out of here eh? Yeah right.
We’d been there around a year, and I remember it was about 1 o’clock in the morning when I heard the electrical hum, and scrunching of gravel. It was a school night so I’d been sleeping since about elevenish. My first thought was ‘track maintenance’, so I rolled over and tried to get back to sleep. But something kept tickling the back of my mind, something made me get up and look through the window.
To my right I could see very bright lights through the small embankment trees that screened off the railway line at that point. I realised the hum was probably a generator for the lights. Okay so far, I was right, its just British Rail polishing the ties or whatever it is they do.
I still felt compelled in some weird way to finally identify the source of my insomnia, so I moved to the lounge for a better view. I still couldn’t see anything and thought bollocks, this is ridiculous GO TO SLEEP!
As I turned away I heard heavy crunching footsteps on gravel heading in my direction towards the dark, deserted station platform.
I stood tensed and transfixed on the point where the tree screen ended - that little patch of dulled glinting rail, gravel and grass banking. I was like a little kid awaiting the actors to take the stage at the local pantomime.
I had a feeling I was likely to be disappointed, but some sixth sense kept me there; so odd looking back, but I guess the darker, voyeuristic side of my laddish nature suspected the opportunistic glimpse of a taboo.
What I saw was by far the eeriest site I have ever seen in my life.
Two men in dark suits were pushing a silvery steel coffin-like casket on a gurney along the trackside towards the platform ramp in front of me.
Oh My God! I was frozen. I suddenly felt guilty, ashamed of myself for looking, but I couldn’t move a muscle.
This was Twilight zone stuff, terrifying in its rawness, but it also had a Hammer horror movie quality about it too.
I felt like I had been privy to some secret tribal ritual, which in a sense I had.
I watched the two figures and their uncanny load trundle along the platform and up the narrow path to the crossroads above.
I had a fleeting thought of some poor wayfarer slinking over the crossroads after a night on the tiles and seeing two undertakers wheeling a casket out of that little entrance on to the pavement.
Pretty symbolic when I look back now.
I thought about waking my mum and sister, but why? It would only creep them out and add to the distress already bubbling away.
Anyway they found out the next night when it was on the local news, and they were a bit freaked it had been so close – I didn’t say I’d witnessed the sinister ‘ceremony’ of body retrieval.
According to the telly, some poor middle aged woman had travelled the 3 miles from another local village in her car, parked up around the corner, and decided to end her ‘long-term depression’ at this particular spot.
I’ve developed a deep interest in psychogeography over the last decade or so, and I do believe many places have a psychic resonance, a specific energy – good and bad – that can be tapped into when the self is sensitised, and open to the signs.
If you know how and where to look, the psychic accretions and mythologies of places and spaces can be read like the scribbled layers of a palimpsest, the graffiti of time leaving its runes to be deciphered by the initiated or chosen ones.
This ‘sensitivity’ though can be caused by depression, anxiety and frustration too. A person can be too open and permeable (vulnerable) to the darker forces that may cling to the brick, soil and stone of a place.
The ‘crossroads’ - according to the standard folklore accounts from around the world - was a place where criminals were buried and particularly suicides; those who’d committed sins outside holy and secular law. The diverging paths were thought to confuse the spirits of the dead: a punishment in the afterlife.
The ‘crossroads’ is mythologized in folklore as the place that is ‘neither here nor there’, ‘betwixt and between’ worlds, a nexus of paranormal phenomena, a rent in the fabric veiling other realities.
The phrase also has the literal meaning of course: ‘undecided’, a ‘terminus’, ‘watershed’ – an important stage in life.
A couple of years later there was another suicide on the line, this one had taken place over the other side of the tunnel; I know because I was sailing past on the bus to work one cold winter morning, and on my left I saw the huddled lump beneath a pale blue blanket and two coppers poking around with sticks. It was confirmed a few days later in the local rag.
I know that I can be accused of being melodramatic, my imagination working overtime when me and my family were going through a particularly difficult time over those years, but there was something strange and almost evil about that place, I can’t describe it in any other way, it seemed to suck the energy out of everyone.
My mum bless her, never did escape. She became something of a mad cat lady (literally) living on her own and getting more and more paranoid about the outside world.
She hated the place, but the outside world seemed even bigger and more frightening in the end.
One year before she herself died, she threw open the curtains of the living room window one Saturday morning…to be confronted with the recent aftermath of another railway suicide. I remember her telling me in a bit of a distracted daze, “And you know what, I saw this policeman pick something up, all white and lumpy…and I swear it was an ARM!”
I felt like I wanted to cry, I felt so sorry for her and angry at the suicide victim somehow - what a fucking sight to witness at her age.
I’m not sure of the ‘statistical clustering’ of these type of things around certain areas (I suppose 3 in 20 years or so isn’t that rare really, although there could have been more I didn’t know about) and to be honest I don’t want to know anymore, I’ve had my fill of this stuff, and all I can talk about is how that place made me feel from my own experience.
There was a palpable negative energy, and if I’d have never have lived through it I wouldn’t have believed it. That was just my family’s experience. Maybe it was just us that had tapped into something at that particular crossroads in our lives when we moved there.
I was only many years later that the combination of the railway cutting and the crossroads above came to my attention, and made me ponder on the more paranormal explanations of that horrible period and my mothers seemingly spiritual and physical imprisonment.
Maybe I’m just trying to find a suitable narrative to come to terms with the pain and loss myself though.
Still, a very curious and strange episode in my life.
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