Please find reproduced below the unexpurgated text of a letter I sent to Floating Goose Studios in Adelaide ahead of the opening of The Apparitionist, an exhibition created by Australian artist Roy Ananda. My concerns were not heeded and the exhibition was allowed to proceed, but I now understand my letter was made available for viewing by all patrons of the studio.
Bob Fischer
43 XXXXXXXXXX XXXXX
XXXX
Stockton-on-Tees
TSXX XXX
United Kingdom
To: Floating Goose Studios
Kaurna Country
271 Morphett St
Adelaide SA 5000
Australia
19th September 2025
To Whom It My Concern,
I apologise unreservedly for this unsolicited communication, but after much deliberation I feel I must contact Floating Goose Studios as a matter of the utmost urgency.
I understand that a forthcoming exhibition, “The Apparitionist”, assembles collages of technical illustrations sourced from school reference books and scientific texts published during the latter half of the 20th century. The artist responsible, Roy Ananda, contacted me via my website to draw my attention to this project, and to solicit a written testimony to be displayed alongside his work.
I am a writer and broadcaster based in the UK, and my work is overwhelmingly concerned with the feelings of nebulous disquiet and otherworldliness that seem to pervade the memories of children who grew up during the 1970s and ‘80s. An artistic movement known as “hauntology” has sprung from the lingering trauma of this collective nostalgia, and for the last decade I have been exploring this phenomena under the umbrella title of my own multi-media project, “The Haunted Generation”.
One aspect of the “haunted” 20th century childhood that particularly fascinates me is that of contemporary urban folklore. Seemingly every region of the UK – and every school within those regions – once cultivated its own myth cycle of outlandish local legend, and these stories were often flavoured with elements of the supernatural. For some time now, I have been collecting these urban myths, piecing together a cornucopia of unlikely tales: from the school lavatory ghost draped in robes of Izal toilet paper to the appalling Satanic rituals conducted by a secret cabal of geography teachers.
Most of these stories are, of course, entirely fictional. Their origins unknown, they have been embellished by successive generations of mischievous children, their purpose simply to frighten and amuse in equal measure. However, there is one example of such urban folklore that I am unable to dismiss with quite as much confidence: not least because I have my own personal experience of the terrifying consequences of such blithe dismissal.
Picture the scene: It is December 1984, the final week of school before the Christmas holidays, and snow is falling lightly outside our classroom window. My friend Christopher Herbert – an amiable lad, despite a permanent, lingering odour of stale digestive biscuits – is bemused by the fact that I have spread all my school textbooks across our tiny, communal desk. I am engaged in a desperate attempt to complete several overdue homework tasks at once, scribbling frantically in three different exercise books while our youthful form teacher Miss Winters attempts to call the morning register.
Suddenly, I notice an expression of genuine alarm and panic falling across Herbert’s face.
“Don’t put those books together,” he warns. “You don’t understand the forces you might be unleashing.”
This is an ambitious sentence for Herbert, whose usual approach to conversation is a unique combination of indecipherable grunting and loud, flamboyant flatulence.
“What?” I reply, with a nervous chuckle.
“Don’t you know what happened to Mooney?” he continues. “He was a lad in Davey Fountain’s older brother’s year, he copied out all the diagrams in his textbooks and stuck them on his bedroom wall so he could do his homework easier. But putting them all together like that ripped a hole in the fabric of reality and a demon came through and took his soul away and now he’s in West Tees Hospital and he just talks in some weird language that nobody else understands.”
“Don’t be daft,” I reply. “You’ll be telling me next that Mr Thompson-Burkiss is running a secret Satanic cabal from the geography department.”
Herbert doesn’t respond directly to this barb, he just gives me a knowing look that feels laden with hidden meaning.
Nevertheless, Herbert’s story stays with me for the rest of the day. And, later that evening, I rashly attempt to re-create the experiments of the (surely) mythical “Mooney” in my own modest bedroom. Meticulously copying the textbook illustrations that had so alarmed Herbert during morning registration, I then cut around the resulting drawings and arrange them haphazardly with Blu Tack on top of my antiquated Star Wars wallpaper.
Nothing happens.
I copy and cut out more illustrations from other textbooks, tentatively adding them to this swiftly-expanding collage.
Again, nothing happens.
I continue throughout the evening, sticking more and more copied diagrams onto the bedroom wall, driven by a mounting compulsion that – four decades later – I still find impossible to rationalise. The feelings are intense. Frantic. I am utterly powerless, driven breathlessly to assemble and re-assemble random conjunctions of mathematical, geographical and scientific illustrations until all possible combinations have been tried; until Christopher Herbert’s wretched story can finally and comprehensively be dismissed as nothing more than the fancy and fable of relentlessly embellished urban folklore.
Hours later, with my normal deadline for weeknight bedtime long since expired, all possible arrangements seem to have been exhausted.
But then, on the very stroke of midnight, fate has one final, appalling hand to play.
A tiny illustration from a secondary school physics textbook that I have previously overlooked is wearily added to the flapping collage of cut-out drawings now completely obscuring an entire wall of my bedroom. And then, as this shaky facsimile takes its place amid a welter of similarly hand-drawn fragments…
…my bedroom window begins to shimmer.
And a hole in the fabric of reality affords me a glimpse into a place I simply cannot bring myself to describe.
Resounding through my head, I hear a single phrase uttered in a completely unfamiliar language: the arcane tongue in which I assume the unfortunate Mooney continues to speak, unheeded, from his sweat-soaked hospital bed.
Unlike the cursed boy’s attendant team of baffled medical professionals, however, I understand completely the meaning of this terrible, guttural utterance.
It is simply this: “I am The Apparitionist”.
In a blind panic, I rip the drawings from my bedroom wall, the careworn faces of Luke Skywalker and Obi-Wan Kenobi swiftly returning to reassure me. Then – as I slip from consciousness, swooning gently onto a pink candlewick bedspread – the window shimmers once more before reverting to its usual benign state, showing only the silhouetted branches of the bare sycamore tree outside and a few residual flakes of pallid, listless snow.
I have never spoken of this incident until now. But suffice to say, the contact I have recently received from Roy Ananda has rekindled these traumatic memories in the most worrying fashion, and I am concerned that his imminent exhibition of the same name – perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not – may yet unleash terrifying and demonic forces upon the unsuspecting art-lovers of Adelaide.
As a result, I urge the management and curators of Floating Goose Studios to cancel this exhibition with immediate effect.
I also advise extreme caution when using the Floating Goose toilets, because John Barker’s next-door neighbour’s uncle swears blind there’s a ghost in there made entirely from old Vegemite jars, and if you run three times around the cubicle and say “Abjuration Spell” backwards, it appears behind you in the mirror and sucks your eyes out through the back of your head.
Yours not entirely sincerely,
Bob Fischer
http://www.hauntedgeneration.co.uk
Further information on The Apparitionist:
https://www.floatinggoose.com.au/the-apparitionist/
All photographs by Sam Roberts
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