The Blake House Mystery

On the night of November 3rd, 2010, Jonathan and Imogen Blake, and their eight-year-old son Matthew, disappeared from their house in Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk. The story was a local mystery for a time, but the police were never able to get any solid leads and quietly dropped their investigation after a while.

The Blake House was a new build; Jonathan Blake was an architect and he had purchased some disused land in the forest and built a Modernist-style family home there. The house was left vacant after the family disappeared and, at some point over the next few years a part of it caught fire, probably as a result of a vagrant or a local kid discarding a lit cigarette. In 2016, some kids were exploring the burned out section when one of them fell through a section of flooring that had been weakened by the fire, and into a cellar that had belonged to a much older house that once stood on the site.

Inside that cellar, five bodies were found. Three were identified as Jonathan, Imogen and Matthew Blake. A fourth is thought to have been a man named Phillip Gibson. The fifth body remains unidentified.

All five had been stabbed to death with a set of dressmaking scissors. Forensic evidence was, apparently, tainted and there remains no explanation of who murdered these people, when it happened, or how they got into the cellar, which was not accessible in any way from the newly-built Blake House.

All things have a position in space, and in time. Maybe those positions can be different?

In 1645, a young dairy maid named Faith Mills was accused of witchcraft in a village called Fressingfield in Suffolk. The local magistrate could find no evidence to prosecute Mills but, fearing vigilante justice from the local community, she fled. She was almost certainly headed for relatives in Orford. Her pursuers caught up with her in Rendlesham Forest and they hung Faith Mills from a tree and then they took down her body, drove a stake through her heart, and buried her upside down at the crossroads of two forest trails, to prevent her soul from finding rest.

Those forest trails followed the path of two Ley Lines. If you follow one of those lines south, you come to a church in Wapping called St George In The East. This church was built by Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had a thing for ley lines and supposedly arranged his churches according to their layout.

On New Year's Eve in 1811, a man called John Williams, who had "committed suicide" in his jail cell whilst (probably falsely) accused of the Ratcliffe Highway murders, was also staked through the heart and buried upside down at a crossroads right beside Hawksmoor's church, on Cable Street.

In 1936, Cable Street was the site of a battle between British Fascist and the Metropolitan Police, on one side, and anti-fascists, Jews and members of the Irish community on the other. (Connection?)

One of the fascist agitators was a man called Ernest Gladwin. He was a senior member of an occult organisation called Starry Wisdom, which worshipped an entity they believed represented the Spirit of England, and which was thought to exist beneath the ground in Rendlesham Forest, it having been woken from a millenia-long slumber by the murder of Faith Mills in 1645.

On that same site in Suffolk, a house was built in the mid-1800s. In 1935, a year before the Battle of Cable Street, the Marston Family, whose house it was, were all murdered in their beds by their youngest child, Mary. She stabbed them all to death with a set of dressmaking scissors and then burned the house to the ground.

Mary, who was eleven years old at the time, claimed to have been possessed by something she called "The Beast".

This happened in June 1935, in the same week that live trials began of the Chain Home Radar system on nearby Orford Ness. Coincidence?

The Marston Family murders were covered for the East Anglia Daily News by a young reporter called Robert Harrison Blake, who was murdered architect Jonathan Blake's grandfather.

In 1980, an occult group conducted a ritual in Rendlesham Forest, on what had been the site of the Marston House. One of the participants was a man named Thomas Marston, who was distantly related to the original family. At the time of the ritual, which was intended to make contact with the same spirit worshipped by the Starry Wisdom cult prior to the Second World War, local US Air Force personnel reported an extended UFO sighting, which has become known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident.

The group that conducted the ritual in 1980 were led by a woman called Amelia Fenner, who had been part of a wicca coven in the New Forest run by a man called Joseph Curwen. Amelia had a daughter with Joseph Curwen, who was briefly married to Phillip Gibson, the man whose body was found murdered with the Blakes, on the same sight, in 2016.

Phillip Gibson was Ernest Gladwin's grandson.

After the Second World War, Ernest Gladwin resumed his fascist activities alongside his continued leadership of Starry Wisdom. For decades, he had to battle the attention of Robert Harrison Blake, by now a journalist with the London Evening News, who was determined to expose far-right and occult activities within the British Establishment.

Blake kept a diary of his investigations into Gladwin. It is rumoured that the diary holds clues to the location of the Church of Starry Wisdom, the secret occult headquarters of Gladwin's cult.

Blake dies in 1987, during the famous hurricane. Officially, he was struck by lightning, but the coroner report indicates that he may have died of fright.

In his will, he left a piece of land in Suffolk, that he had purchased to thwart the Starry Wisdom cult, to his grandson, Jonathan. And this is where Jonathan Blake built his house.

Robert Harrison Blake's diary has never been found.