Maps of the Lost
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mapsofthelost.com
Maps of the Lost
@mapsofthelost.com
470 followers 310 following 160 posts
The maps to the lost places and the secret histories. Be cautious: if you follow them, you may become lost yourself.

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(2/2)

You’ll notice her because she always clutches an orange Sainsbury’s carrier bag and sometimes she’ll raise it and speak into it.

Don’t be afraid of her. But don’t mock her either, because although you shouldn’t be afraid of her, you absolutely should be terrified of who she’s speaking to.
a woman holding a Sainsbury's supermarket carrier bag open
November 7, 2025 at 7:36 PM
mapsofthelost.com
There’s a country path in County Durham that was where a railway line serving the pits once ran. Now it’s tarmacked and used by cyclists and dog-walkers. On a quarter-mile stretch of the path, the trees close in around it, and almost meet to obscure the sky above. A few times a year that stretch is shrouded in a low fog that hangs between the trees like it is trying to smother the space below. On those days, the cyclists and walkers emerge at the end a little confused, as if they can’t remember what they’ve been doing. Sometimes, once they are back home, they will find something unfamiliar in their coat pocket, or bag: a key, a coin weathered long past legibility, an old child’s toy, or a train ticket to a destination they don’t recognise.
November 1, 2025 at 3:09 PM
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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.
October 18, 2025 at 10:39 AM
mapsofthelost.com
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.⁣ ⁣ Don’t.⁣ ⁣ 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.
October 13, 2025 at 7:20 PM
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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.
October 12, 2025 at 2:06 PM
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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.
September 26, 2025 at 5:27 PM
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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.
September 15, 2025 at 5:01 PM
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Well, this is nice.
September 14, 2025 at 10:23 AM
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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.
September 14, 2025 at 8:27 AM
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July 26, 2025 at 9:39 AM
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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)
July 18, 2025 at 7:32 PM
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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.
July 13, 2025 at 2:23 PM
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(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.
July 4, 2025 at 5:38 PM
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...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...

substack.com/@mapsofthelo...?
June 29, 2025 at 10:02 AM
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Read on, at Substack.

substack.com/profile/8041...
June 22, 2025 at 3:54 PM
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Ah, but we know though, don’t we.
June 16, 2025 at 7:47 PM
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One day you might find yourself walking through a quiet street in Vauxhall, thinking your thoughts and maybe listening to your music and not paying much attention to anyone, when a man will step out of the air. You’ll stop, taken aback, but quickly decide that you were too busy thinking your thoughts and maybe listening to your music. He must have come from somewhere, perhaps from behind a parked car even though there isn’t one parked in the right spot, or perhaps he just walked from the other pavement and you didn’t notice him. It’s likely you’ll change your mind on this when you see the man glance up and down the street as if looking for someone, notice you and give you a brief polite nod as if to say you are not the person he is looking for, and then step back into a fold in the air, like someone walking through the gap in a set of curtains, and vanish. The next morning, you will wake up and there will be a new message on your phone from an unknown number, and it will simply say: do you wish to know?

Think very hard before you answer, either way.
May 29, 2025 at 11:02 AM
mapsofthelost.com
Quite close to where you live, there’s a t-junction where you can turn out from a road of quiet bungalows, mostly inhabited by the elderly, onto the much busier main road. If you are listening to DAB radio, or streaming music or audio in your car, or through a pair of headphones, or if you’re talking on your mobile, you may notice something as you approach the t-junction and turn out onto the main road. It’s only for a few yards, but you’ll lose the signal, whether it’s radio or streaming over mobile data. Keep going, and back it comes. Go a few steps backwards, and you’ll lose it again. The junction, and a few feet either of side of it, is a dead spot. No signal gets through there. You might speculate whether it’s the configuration of the houses around it, or a dip in the land, but you’d be wrong, because it’s nothing to do with that. If you were diligent and checked the time as you pass in and out of this junction, you’d notice that it’s not only mobile signals and the radio that do not work there. That’s why the man who lives in the corner house, the 1930s bungalow by the junction, will never move from there, and it’s why he had the 1930s bungalow built on the site of his previous house, and that house built on the site of the previous, right the way back to when he first discovered the dead spot in 1394.
May 19, 2025 at 6:29 PM
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You struggle a breath in, blink, but nothing changes except a low buzzing and crackling that seems to come from the air itself. The seagull hangs there, frozen in flight, its wings out stiff, the left lower than the right as it had started its bank towards the water.

substack.com/@mapsofthelo...
May 18, 2025 at 9:48 AM
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"Orchestral music, ghosting in and out, voices in languages you couldn’t understand. In those early hours in those confused, painful years, you took comfort in this world outside the boredom of your home, the confinement of your village, the horrors of your school."

substack.com/profile/8041...
May 10, 2025 at 5:07 PM
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It’s daytime in a late autumn, but the light’s never amounted to much, the clouds low and although it’s not raining the air feels wet. Everything is shades of grey. As you walk through the city, everyone’s got their heads down, hurrying to get to wherever they are going. Your foot hits a slick of rotted leaves on a metal drain cover and slides, and you jerk to stop yourself falling, flailing your arms, and only just get your balance. Embarrassed, you look up to see if anyone has noticed, and everyone is gone. Cars stand empty on the street, as if parked in a line from the traffic lights. The pavements are deserted. The lights in all the shops are on but you can see that no one is browsing, no one is standing behind the counter. You look down at your own feet to make sure that you are still there, and see your boots, a clot of leaves still stuck to the bottom. 
When you look back up, the world is there again, cars move and people shuffle past you and the shop door next to you hisses open and shut, open and shut, as people go in and out. This has never happened to you again, but there are moments sometimes when you wonder to yourself whether what you see is true or what you saw is true.
May 8, 2025 at 5:55 PM
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The strange and debilitating illness affecting many diplomats after postings abroad has been the subject of much rumour, with speculation that it is the result of sound, microwaves or other directed energy weapons. The illness is real, the speculations are wrong. In a rented flat, not far from a targeted embassy, you may find a small old man, sitting cross-legged in the middle of a circle made of rare stones and animal bones and glass vials full of dark liquid, waving his hands in the air as if making a cat’s cradle with invisible string, and saying words in a language that only nineteen people in this world can recognise and only seven can speak.
May 4, 2025 at 10:55 AM
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“Watch,” he says, and he points a long finger at a lime tree just down the street from you. There’s another tearing of the sky and this time a bang, you’re so dazzled by the white brightness you just see spots in front of your eyes for a moment...

substack.com/@mapsofthelo...
May 2, 2025 at 4:32 PM
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You can’t drive down a motorway numbered the M72 because there is no M72. You won’t find it on any maps, because it isn’t on any maps, because there is no M72...or at least, that’s how it is after The Event, and no one knows about the event either.

(more:)
substack.com/profile/8041...
April 28, 2025 at 7:59 PM
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The public information film 'Don't Meddle With the Dark' about the dangers of the occult, some unfortunate set design, and what's lurking out there on YouTube, mostly unwatched. For now.

substack.com/profile/8041...
April 26, 2025 at 10:04 AM