WYRD FICTIONS 007 – 009
A selection of cuttings, correspondence and research notes designed as hypersigilised world building for my Keelian godform project. Truth or otherwise is subjective, though perhaps when it comes to the Wyrd Fictions banner the clue as to the overall authenticity of the quoted entries below is in the name. Not that such a distinction matters when twisting language space towards real world desire, of course, so it should be an interesting experiment either way. This selection has an email from an old friend, relics from a bygone message board, and some very swampy horrors.
Hiya Foxy,
Have I got a Samhain present for you, bro. Remember Fort Britannia?
Well I found the disks I was on about with a chunk of the HTML from right around when it was closing. Took a month to get a working third party floppy drive sourced but yeah, all done and backed up now too.
I mean, I know you were still lurking after your row with that Dante asshole, so you saw the site implode first hand. Then the admins began deleting shit - I got in early but there's still gaps from what I can tell.
Ended up with mixed results to be honest - all pictures are missing and most of the hyperlinks are fucked. Pages don't connect together properly neither. But there's enough there to remind you just how weird things were around the time those Hounds of Tindalos tossers rocked up, if you're willing to dig for it that is.
The stuff on the group summoning is definitely missing, but the regular black dog stories are still in there somewhere for sure. Like I said though, indexing is crap and I wasn't up for sorting a couple thousand pages, so you're on your own with that shit.
Yeah, I know, I'm still a data hoarder - Regular Bob bloody Monkhouse. Never got around to writing that Owlman novel from it, but there's plenty of the old message board stuff on there that you can reference now you're a 'famous author'. Still got no idea how you swung that book deal dude, but you know I'm happy for you, right?
I've sorted a Drive link so it should be easy enough to rip yourself a copy. If that don't work I can shoot you over a USB snail mail. Rather not have it eaten by rabid sheep in transit though - why the fuck did you move to Wales again?
Stay hidden or run fast my friend.
Corvus [7]
Faerie_Dance - New Member - 1998-05-16 02:46
Hi everyone. First post. So I have been looking at the folklore section of the forum and was really surprised to see my great uncle's encounter with a Will o' the Wisp out on Hornchurch Marshes on here. Didn't realise Carnegie had wrote it up in one of his books, or that he got the main part so wrong.
Thing is, my great uncle did see a glowing light tracking him through the marsh. That bit is right. But Carnegie left out the most important detail. Maybe he had heard it third hand or something, because I don't think we ever discussed the event outside of family. It wasn't swamp gas. It was an eye. One single, glowing, strobing eye, bright enough to light my great uncle's path through the middle of a - when you've just lost a milk cow and got caught without a lantern after sunset a few days after New Year's while searching for it - very dangerous bog.
So bright it burned to look at. And it wasn't a threat. It seemingly wanted to help him. Some kind of wolf he said. Maybe a big dog. Didn't seem bothered by the water either way, didn't sink while crossing over it either. Sort of glided.
I am now left really wondering how many more of Carnegie's stories are missing bits too, and questioning why he is held in such great esteem by everyone here. I know folklore is an oral tradition, but if the people telling those stories are telling them wrong, then how do we learn anything at all?
Dante_Infernus - Admin - 1998-05-16 02:59
Hello Faerie_Dance. We prefer if first posts are in the meet and greet forum. I will be locking this thread now and caution you to post over there. First warning issued, two warnings will equal a ban. Read the rules. [8]
... maggot ridden corpse and a very rusty bell.
That said the barren expanse of green outside of the central city, where the Thames oozes along like the bile choked lava flow emanating from a volcano of roaring sewage, has horrors to share too.
And My lady Mire of Rainham Marsh, said to drift like a swirling mist across the sodden mud in the muted winter moonlight, is as good an example as any of this unique type of bog and bone related folklore.
Ann Holland was a low level servant in the household of one Dr. Coyl, once a naval surgeon and a man who operated a medical practice of sorts dedicated to offering what help he could to the inhabitants of the rookeries and slums that still littered the East End in the early years of the 20th Century.
Considered by most to be a stoic, if old fashioned, gentleman, he had made the papers some years before when he was accosted by a vigilance committee during the high point of Jack The Ripper's bloody rampage. Coyl was arrested of course (after a sound beating by the thugs who had apprehended him), but quickly exonerated when it was proven that he was serving upon HMS Warspite until mid September 1888, and barely back in the capitol for a week before the Stride/Eddowes double event which had whipped the local toughs into such a frenzy in the first place.
Over two decades later those old rumours would resurface in light of the discovery of Ann Holland's body on Boxing day of 1909, face down in a particularly treacherous stretch of Rainham Marsh. It appeared to the military personnel that found her that she had been callously discarded within the sickly weeds and chemical run off from the businesses that sat perched upon the banks of the Thames, a silver sixpence held vicelike in her by then blueing hand.
Foul play was obvious, because not only was almost every bone in her body broken but the very last drop of blood had been drained from what remained of her unusually twisted and knotted frame, the only visible wound being a deep puncture towards the base of her spine. A receipt for boot polish in her dress pocket was eventually used to narrow down the identity of a girl who the papers of the time had taken to calling My Lady Mire, and a clerk at the relevant store soon pointed investigators towards the doctor's home.
Again the authorities came to take the good doctor away, and this time his alibi was weak enough that a trial date was set. Not that he would ever stand before a judge. Coyl died six weeks later in custody, mere hours before his appointed day in court, his head so badly bludgeoned that the skull was crushed, according to the Times of February 7th, 1910 'like rail yard ballast trod underfoot'.
Soon after rumours began circulating of an undulating, luminous figure drifting across the pools and hollows of Rainham Marsh, it's limbs moving in an awkward, broken gait as it sometimes walked, often crawled towards the sodden hollow where Ann Holland's body was found. Here My Lady Mire would quietly lay down among the reeds and tough grasses again, before slowly fading from view.
The matter of Dr. Coyl's mysteriously brutal death is still ... [9]
[7] CorvusMortis, Personal Correspondence By Email, Received Sunday 14th October 2025.
[8] Faerie_Dance and Dante_Infernus, Fort Britannia Message Board, Saturday 16th May 1998.
[9] Joshua Carnegie PhD, Outside of City Bounds, Self Published, 1989, Page 52 - 53.
