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Maps of the Lost

@mapsofthelost.com

470 followers 310 following 150 posts

The maps to the lost places and the secret histories. Be cautious: if you follow them, you may become lost yourself. stories/newsletter/podcast https://linktr.ee/mapsofthelost

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · 11h

Somewhere in Cumbria there is a disused railway platform that served a line that no longer runs. It appears on a few maps, but probably none that you would have access to.

You can only reach it by following fox tracks through the morning mist, and if you arrive there at the right time you might see a train that passes without stopping. It only has one passenger, and he will turn to watch you as the train goes by. You'll not quite make out his face, but that's probably for the best.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · 5d

Walk down a Manchester street in the late evening, and you might pass a closed down shop between another selling phone cards on the one side, and a scruffy travel agent on the other. There’s a flat above it, lit up, the sounds of a party coming from open windows, and the door to the street is ajar. It sounds as if everyone is having a grand time, and you may be tempted to go in, and to climb the stairs to the party.⁣
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Don’t.⁣
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A few days later you may be glad of this advice, when your work happens to take you down that same street, and there it is, between a shop selling phone card on one side, and a scruffy travel agent on the other, just a gap like a mouth with a tooth missing where a building once was, old foundations overgrown with weeds.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · 6d

If you ever are in town - and who is in town these days - you may notice a vape shop which hardly had any customers inside it at the best of times.

You might wonder how they pay the rent, and speculate about whether it’s a front, for drugs or money laundering.

You’re right, but only partly. It is indeed a front, but the two bored looking staff who look out from behind the counter are no criminals, they are people who have been raised from infancy to a life’s work of spotting and destroying the things that you might walk past unknowing, because they look just like people in town, wandering the streets.

There is a war going on, and you do not know it. Only seventeen people are alive who do.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · 22d

If the weather is right and you are one of a particular group of people who don’t know that they are one of a particular group of people, you might be tuning an analogue radio and find a particular broadcast. Most will miss it, but you might dial past, hesitate, move the dial back a little because maybe you did hear something faint. And so you did.

It sounds like sighing at first, or the waves, and maybe you move the dial on or maybe you leave it where it is because it’s soothing, like white noise. After a while though, you turn up the volume and you listen intently, your ear close to the speaker. What you are hearing is a chorus of voices whispering, coming and going, overlapping. Much to your frustration, you can’t quite make it out. If you ask anyone else, they’ll listen, close their eyes as if it helps them listen better, and and then they’ll shake their head and tell you that there’s nothing there.

When you next turn on the radio, it’s gone, and you cannot find it again. The whispers stay in your mind, like a face you can’t quite put a name to, or something you once knew well but have forgotten apart from knowing that it exists. It annoys and frustrates you, and everyone around you thinks you are in a bad mood for days.

Sometimes though, you wake from a dream and you know - as strongly as you have ever known anything in your life - that in your dream you heard it, you understood what the whispering was saying. But as soon as you wake, it’s gone, just out of reach no matter how hard you try, like holding out your hand and trying to catch the fog between your fingers.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · 28d

A woman in Skelmersdale has seen a vision of the end of the world. She cannot tell when it will happen, but her vision of how it will happen is the truth.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Sep 15

At the top of a hill in the Lake District, is a trig point marking the highest part of the hill. It’s an unexceptional part of the Lakeland Fells, with no real challenge in the ascent and one of the least impressive views. You may well find yourself the only person up there.

But if the wind is coming from the north-east, and the day is one of the two equinoxes, then pause at the top. After a while, you will hear voices coming on the wind, and those voices will tell you secrets that mean that the person who goes down the hill will not be the person who went up it. What they tell you is a hard burden to bear, but you will be able to make a difference to the future course of the world, before in time you are gone and your voice will join the chorus on those particular days, on that particular hill, when the wind is from the north-east.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Sep 14

oh my god that's so disturbing

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Sep 14

Sometimes there is a shimmering. When it stops every single thing in your house has been replaced by an identical object in exactly the same place.

Apart from one, which is not. If you look at it closely it might show you what's on the other side of the shimmering.

Good luck finding it.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Sep 14

Well, this is nice.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Sep 14

Last weekend, the UK tested its emergency alert system. At 3pm, a loud series of tones sounded on all mobile phones that weren’t switched off. It’s intended to warn of chemical or radiological leaks, weather that causes risk to life, or attack by a foreign power.

Or rather, the UK tested its *public* emergency alert system. There’s another, which only plays a series of quiet chimes, on the phones of one hundred and forty-seven serious, haunted-looking men and women around the country. It doesn’t warn of a military attack, or industrial pollution that might risk lives. It’s more serious than that.

The one hundred and forty-seven men and women will stop what they are doing, leave their houses, and go as fast as they can to where the breach is happening. It is unlikely all of them will return.

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Reposted by Maps of the Lost

Carnyx Press @carnyxpress.co.uk · Jul 11

Our anthology call-out for writers in the North of England is open. We're delighted to have received a few submissions already!

There's plenty of time to submit until the deadline at the end of September, so get scribbling - we'd love to read your words.

We're accepting short stories for our first anthology, on the theme of FOLKLORE, from now until the end of September. We're looking for stories of 2,000-10,000 words, from writers living in the North of England.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Aug 30

a missing page in every book, a corridor with yellowing white walls, a light in the night, wet footprints and the seventh heron. New stories and old in Maps newsletter 27.

Maps of the Lost 27

...from a reed-shrouded pond.

mapsofthelost.substack.com

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Aug 8

and the restless flicker of a purple aurora on the darkest of nights. Never look in through the windows from the outside when you’re staying there though: you will see yourself in the cottage, and only one of you will emerge from that encounter and it might not be the you who is looking in. (2/2)

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Aug 8

In a coastal village on the east coast of Scotland, the windows of one cottage sometimes look out on weather that is not what you would see and feel if you step out of the door. You’ll see snow on a sunny day, rain sliding down the window in the middle of a dry spell, (1/2)

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Aug 6

A group of small children can be found in an alley in Doncaster, playing an elaborate game with pebbles, spirals chalked on concrete, and strings criss-crossing the alley. If asked they'll say if you interrupt the game, the king of all the birds dies. No one else knows what that means. But they do.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 26

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 18

the night sky even though it's day time, and if you know your constellations, you can't recognise a single one. Worse still, look long enough you will see the stars wink out as a black shape moves across the night sky, and even worse still is the moment it opens its eye and looks at you. (2/2)

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 18

There’s a dip in Rathcarbery Road as it runs through the Armagh countryside, and after heavy rain its lowest point is a shallow, dark pool. If you are walking along the road, shuffling along the verge to avoid the puddle, keep your gaze on the hedges. Look into the pool and you will see (1/1)

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 13

No one has realised this yet other than one woman called Elaine, but there's a man who appears in the background of wedding photographs taken outside a certain church in County Durham. There’s nothing odd about him, he just stands at a distance, smiling. No one who looks at the photos recognise him, and everyone just assumes he was accompanying someone else, or maybe just a passer-by.

Elaine had noticed him, but thought nothing of it until she was clearing her mother’s house after her death. Elaine found her parents’ old wedding album, and sat down on the stairs for a moment to flip through it. Her dad had died just after their golden wedding celebration, and her mum just a few months later.

After a few pages she closed it and drove straight home, and took out her own wedding album. When she found the man there, smiling, just like in her mum’s, she closed the album and put it away. Now, if it’s not a registry office wedding she says she can’t go, she’s not well.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 5

In a supermarket car park in Lincolnshire, on the 15th May 1995 at 2pm, the radio in every parked car turned on and loudly recited five words, five times, and then fell silent.

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 5

Thank you!

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 5

voices on a radio station that doesn’t exist, bright torches in dark woods, the wriggle of a finger, the magic of the gaps, moss on your wheels, the ninth church, and a troubling car journey. This and more in the latest Maps of the Lost newsletter

Maps of the Lost 26

...from a gap you might step through

open.substack.com

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jul 4

(you can read the story in the alt text if the image text is too small, or you use a screen reader)

CRATEDIGGER

In a particular record shop in Manchester, you might be flipping through the racks of vinyl and come across an album that comes in a plain sleeve in a slightly unsettling green. There’s no track listing on the sleeve, no artist name, no label. If you slide it out, the same is true on the record itself. The vinyl is black, the label a queasy green.

You speak to the man behind the counter who is busy adding up numbers with a piece of paper and a calculator. He frowns, looks at the record in the same way that you did, then shrugs. It’s only priced at four quid, so you buy it just in case, because you fancy yourself as something of a crate-digger.

When you play it though, there’s nothing but static, although if you listen to it long enough you can almost imagine that you can hear voices, distant, as if in another room a long way down a corridor. When it finishes, you end up crying uncontrollably and you have no idea why.

You don’t play it again. You give it to a charity shop because you have an unreasonable fear of just smashing it, which you can’t articulate, and if you ever come across the sound of static again, you switch off, leave the room, walk away.

Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jun 29

...If you hang around the pretty village green for a while, you will see that none of the locals sit there, and that no matter what time of day it is, the bench always appears to be in shadow...

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Maps of the Lost @mapsofthelost.com · Jun 22

Read on, at Substack.

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