Lee Morgan

The Alchemy of a coven

There are so many different coloured story-threads that have been woven together to form the Anderean Witch House - something which has in fact manifested as an actual house over time. Red, Black, White and Green, and everything in between, we have stood together through deaths, births, property-love , publications, crisis and travel. With thirty years of history under our belts and thirteen years since the formation of our current coven (because it takes at least three witches to make a coven - according to the late, great Terry Pratchett, and for a while we only had two ongoing members) we have learned some things… Some of what I would like to talk about is passed down lore, the rest is the accumulated knowledge of decades of successful coven practice. Over the years I’ve seen things that fly and things that die, and sometimes things that do both. Wanting to weigh in on a world that so often talks about what doesn’t work I have put together both an in person, and online lectures that unknot many of the troubles that groups of witches tend to face when they congregate.

Night visions and Rams Heads 

I think of there as being a daytime and a nighttime vision for our Witch House. The nighttime vision is a different one, a dreaming world. Something that was unintentionally seething away underneath the other vision, like its shadow, coming into being through the stories being written that attempted to imagine what it might be like to do live with one’s coven. In The Bones Would Do, book two of The Christopher Penrose novels, the only way I, a kid from a working class background, could imagine such a thing into being was at the hands of a rich benefactor. In this part of my story sorcery threads Seth has an old occult teacher who owns a home called Rams Head Inn, where they end up living with him. Just like in our daytime vision there are three characters at the beginning and they move into a house called Rams Head. This property was inspired by The Ancient Ram Inn, which is said to be one of the most haunted houses in England. This I did for narrative reasons, as it places our highly Sighted and somewhat traumatised character, Sophia, in the way of a great deal of spectral challenge.

Part of the inn was originally built in 1145, apparently on a ‘pagan’ burial ground. It is thought to link up two ghost roads and wells beneath the house. The location has also been accused of playing host to child sacrifice and the murder of a witch. Naturally this sounded like the perfect inspiration for a house from which to draw up dark streams of folk horror.

Intense episodes have apparently happened at this house, such as visual corpse candles, and people being pulled by the leg out of their beds. Keen to pursue a few different horror staples I drew intensively on its history when creating Vincent’s Rams Head Inn, which features things like the ghost of a witch, and a child’s spirit trapped under the stairs.

Many years later, due to our lack of a wealthy benefactor, our coven was able to pitch in together to purchase our own house. Thankfully we didn’t receive anything with quite such a speckled history as the Ancient Rams Inn. However, there are certainly some echoes and reverberations. We soon discovered that our property was the former site of woodsmen’s cottages, including stone foundations underneath the structure of our own home that seem to have belonged to such a dwelling. This part of the house that sits on the old foundations has been the site of objects moving on their own before the eye, and many a mysterious sight of a figure, or inexplicable sounds. There is also a secret grave site here, which may belong to someone who met with a widow-maker and had not actual widow to have his body sent home to.

Whereas The Ancient Rams Inn is haunted by highwaymen who killed people, we have a local bushranger’s cave and his murder sites. Instead of a confluence of ghost-roads here we find ourselves half way up kunanyi, which is considered from indigenous stories to be a misty pathway and a road for the dead to take to the land of the ancestors.