Essex

(This feature first published in Fortean Times No 460, dated August 2025)

BEYOND THE VEIL

Hit new podcast Broken Veil explores decidedly Fortean themes in the creepiest liminal corners of Essex. Creators WILL MACLEAN and JOEL MORRIS invite FT’s BOB FISCHER to Station 14 for a scratching mass

“Somebody said to me that it’s like Detectorists meets The X Files,” smiles Will Maclean. “And as far as I’m concerned, there is no higher praise.”

We’re discussing Broken Veil, a new six-part podcast created and hosted by Will and his long-term friend Joel Morris. The comparisons made are entirely apposite: like gentle BBC comedy Detectorists, Broken Veil explores the hobby-based bonds of male camaraderie against a backdrop of tangled Essex countryside. But it also boasts a sense of all-pervading weirdness, an atmosphere of creeping unease far more relevant to the investigations of Mulder and Scully.

Both Will and Joel are celebrated writers. Will’s supernatural 2020 novel The Apparition Phase was widely acclaimed, while Joel continues to be a prolific TV writer, putting words into the mouth of Diane Morgan’s fearless BBC investigator Philomena Cunk. Broken Veil, however, places their own presenting talents in the spotlight, with the duo on the trail of what appears to be an alarming rift in the fabric of reality located somewhere between Chelmsford and Basildon.

“We wanted it to be saturated with the spirit of place,” explains Will. “Joel is from Essex, and it’s a county we both love. It’s an old, old place.”

“I got into researching the history of Essex,” says Joel. “I’ve only discovered in the last few years that the history of where I grew up is fascinating. I’m from Chelmsford, near where the Assizes were held, where Matthew Hopkins tried hundreds of women as witches. I’ve researched witchcraft in every other part of the country, but I didn’t realise it was also happening at the end of my parents’ road.”

“We’ve muddled up the geography a bit, though,” admits Will. “We kept thinking of Borley, where people still turn up to conduct paranormal investigations. If you live there, it must be an absolute pain in the arse.”

The podcast reveals its secrets with a sense of gently swelling disquiet. In Episode One, real-life actor Tony Way sends the duo on the trail of a mysterious Essex facility where, he tells them, he was once despatched for an unnerving medical examination. In Episode Two, comedian Sara Barron claims to have performed a stand-up set for a sinister corporate audience in a similar building, later becoming trapped backstage in a network of featureless corridors.

The inspiration for these plotlines, explain Will and Joel, came from an online creepypasta urban legend. The “backrooms” meme began with a single image of an empty shop unit posted to the image-sharing website 4chan in 2019, but has since exploded to become an expanded parallel universe of deserted commercial properties with an ambience of alarming wrongness.

“My kid has talked endlessly about the backrooms,” says Joel. “We once went to the cinema, and we left through the wrong door and found ourselves in the unmarked corridors at the back. And they were so scared. In the end, we had to find an intercom button and push it. I’m sure everyone has been in similar places, in those hidden bits of a shopping centre that don’t have the corporate branding. You just think ‘Have I slipped through a rift?’”

“I remember once getting lost in the back of a Chinese restaurant,” shudders Will. “The architecture was all the same, and I remember worrying I was going to be stuck there forever…”

The hair-raising stories relayed to Will and Joel by friends within the TV industry send them scurrying to investigate, and further contributors seem to compound the case for Essex being the location for an eddy in the space-time continuum. In Episode Three, actor and director Al Campbell (attention, Charlie Brooker fans – you’ll know him as Barry Shitpeas) claims to have visited a secret military bunker and spotted Blackadder actress Gabrielle Glaister filming a wartime drama that seems not to exist on our plane of reality. Episode Four, meanwhile, has comedy actor Paul Putner relaying a classic tale of spookiness from a 1970s school trip to an historic Essex church. The stories told are relayed with impressive conviction by all concerned.

“All the actors were incredible in different ways,” says Will. “Joel and I spent weeks trying to edit around the fact that we can’t really act, but the speed with which they all digested our stories and personalised them was amazing. Tony Way said that when he was being stared at by two women during that strange medical, it was ‘like they were watching a pub telly’. Stuff like that was just priceless.”

“We were going to make a film with Al Campbell a few years ago,” recalls Joel. “And we all went on a location recce to a military facility. So that story was partially a conversation with a mate about something that actually happened.”

“We’ve tried to do these things in a clever way, though,” adds Will. “I’ve known Gabrielle Glaister for years, but nobody knows that I know her! So we were able to speak to her as though she was a complete stranger. We didn’t want to be Jeremy Beadle, winding people up, but we still wanted that verisimilitude.”

Like Ghostwatch before it, Broken Veil is a piece of fiction whose believability derives from the contributions of genuine public figures. But both Will and Joel repeatedly stress that, although the stories features in Broken Veil are often inspired by real-life tall tales, there is no Beadle-esque intent to deceive listeners.

“I thought it was important for it not to be a prank,” says Joel. “Essentially, the people who made the story, Will and I, are being led a merry dance. And that’s a great Folk Horror story – people being led willingly into a delusion of their own making. It’s basically The Wicker Man! I wanted us to be the fools, not the audience.”

As the stories of Broken Veil begin to coalesce, Will and Joel attempt to construct an overall narrative that links these disparate anecdotes into a unifying theory. And it’s a theory riddled with Forteana, including disturbing EVP recordings of what they call “cthonic babble”: skin-crawling phrases seemingly distilled from the electronic ether. Was a “scratching mass” really an ancient Essex witchcraft ceremony? Is “Station 14” a stop on a rural railway line that exists only in a parallel world? These are probably not questions that should be answered here.

As is increasingly obvious, though, both Will and Joel are avowed Fortean Times readers. FT394, with its cover feature on the Mandela Effect, makes a cameo appearance in Broken Veil Episode Three and – flattery ahoy – Paul Putner is referred to as “a Seventies kid, he’s Haunted Generation”. And one regular and long-running FT feature has proved a particular influence on the series’ overall tone.

“The bit of Fortean Times that we’re really obsessed with is ‘It Happened To Me’,” says Joel. “Because at the point that would normally be the most exciting part of a fictional piece, the stories just stop. There’s never any explanation, and I like that – it’s the authenticity of nonsense. There was a great one where a kid looked through a fence and saw a large, black two-dimensional shape in a field, shaped like a bowler hat. And his mum said ‘Never tell anyone about this!’. That’s my favourite story, and we wanted exactly that feel.

“And if Broken Veil is an essay on anything, it’s on pareidolia. Which is what Fortean thought often is: trying to make rational sense out of a series of irrational clues. All the way through the series, we keep saying ‘Don’t trust this – you’re seeing patterns where there are no patterns’.”

“Yes, it’s a story about the nature of perception,” nods Will. “What became the Broken Veil method was to take all these stories and make a bigger, different story out of them – one that you can take or leave. So there is a proper narrative spine, but when you get to the end it unravels in a way that you probably wouldn’t expect. And I think it gets there in a very interesting route. As Charles Fort said, ‘One measures a circle beginning anywhere’.”

Broken Veil has been an avowed success, topping Apple’s fiction podcast charts, and the duo are planning further instalments. In the meantime, Joel Morris is keen to conclude our conversation with an example of genuinely uncanny synchronicity.

“The last part of the show is us, out in the freezing cold at night, telling a story about Robert Anton Wilson,” he recalls. “And we fluffed it. So we went out again, but in the daytime – and you could hear that the world was alive. It wrecked it. We said ‘We need to re-record this at ten o’clock, in the dark, in a field in Essex’. So we tried three or four different places, and everywhere we went there was a bikers’ meet or somebody fixing their roof! But eventually we drove off randomly, stopped somewhere quiet, the moon was up, and it sounded brilliant.

“The next day, I tried to work out where we’d been, and we’d actually been recording at Station 14. The real place where we’d based the fictional station. We’d never been there before, it was an unmarked field in the middle of nowhere, but it was exactly where we’d planned that Station 14 would be. And that’s true – I genuinely haven’t invented that story.”

He pauses for breath and smiles with only the vaguest hint of mischief.

“Except I might have done.”

Broken Veil is available now on all major podcast platforms.

Photos of Joel and Will by Alexis Dubus.

Why not take out a subscription to Fortean Times? “The World’s Weirdest News” is available here:
https://subscribe.forteantimes.com/