The tragic and unexplained events which occurred in 1992 at Black River House, Kildubhan, created a considerable amount of attention when the story finally leaked into the public arena. Black River House with its long standing history of strange events, coupled with the Black River House Murders committed by the seemingly rational John Marchant, made the story irresistible to anyone with the slightest interest in the paranormal, the unexplained or simply the horrific.
Having received a fairly substantial advance from Golden Hoof, the band set about recording what would in effect be their debut album. In February 1996 they invested in new equipment and installed themselves in the remote location to self-produce their music. The reasons for the choice of Black River House would seem to be clear, imbued as it is with a macabre ambience, not to mention its almost complete seclusion. They gained entry to the abandoned residence in the second week of January 1996 and barricaded themselves in with their equipment. They avoided arousing the local residents by basing themselves in rooms that had no view onto the country road, by blacking out windows and by crudely soundproofing rooms to reduce noise. Recovered receipts show that they even took the precaution of shopping for provisions in distant towns so as not to draw any local attention. The Sessions It now appears that the recording sessions got off to a less than perfect start. Despite the band's initial correspondence with Golden Hoof, over a period of several weeks the updates became fewer and their content became less and less encouraging. Bob Longfellow, a former employee of Golden Hoof who has aided me consistently in my investigations points to patterns of behaviour which were quite out of character for the members of the band. Although the use of class A drugs by at least two band members is not seriously contested, many of the offending articles being recovered from the house in March 1996, Bob maintains that this was not a feature of any band member's life before the project began. He also points to the evidence that tempers began to fray almost immediately. From the correspondence which was received, the key characteristic of the sessions appears to have been an atmosphere of tension and irritability. Despite being steered by two individual songwriters in Jimmy Cook and Nick Young, Bob insists that The Secret Method as a unit was not historically prone to internal arguments, preferring to demonstrate a united front to anyone with whom it was necessary to communicate. Whilst Bob admits that the correspondence between the band and Golden Hoof was sparse and may not necessarily have given an accurate picture of more than a few moments of the recording sessions, he still highlights an alarming decline in the spirit of the venture. The letters it seems, mark a transition from a band excited and enthusiastic about the new project to one in a state of constant bickering and creeping despondency.
February 1996 - Communications breakdown Three weeks into the project, Golden Hoof lost contact with their charges altogether and their attempts to reach the band were apparently being ignored. This was not unduly worrying to the record label, indeed it was viewed as rather more of an irritation which led to the dispatch of Bob Longfellow to Kildubhan in an effort to set the situation straight. The subsequent findings of Bob Longfellow, to whom I am very much indebted, are the only certainties which surround this baffling case. Bob received no reply to his repeated attempts to establish contact and ultimately it became necessary for the police to force entry into the building on March 14th 1996. They were confronted by a running electrical generator and a wealth of recording and amplification equipment all of which was humming audibly. Indeed the scene might have been described as a hive of activity were it not for the glaring absence of the band members themselves.
Whilst a case could be made that the messages written by Marchant on the walls of the house were freely available once the murders were reported, his meticulously kept diary was immediately seized by police on the morning on November 20th 1992 and was released only upon my repeated request in 2001. The disturbing links to Marchant took a new turn with the discovery of the master tapes apparently left behind by the band. These recordings were dutifully recovered and when played, the police were chilled to hear not an innovative rock album, but a melancholic and chillingly accurate first person account of the final months in the life of John Marchant. Though not impossible, to the best of anyone’s knowledge no members of The Secret Method knew or had ever known John Marchant. For many, the police included, the disturbing first hand narrative of his life through the music of unrelated artists is as chilling as the disappearance itself. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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March 1996 - Questions Bob Longfellow's testimony, which is fully corroborated by the police report of March 1996, states that the generator was still running and a din was emanating from what had once been John Marchant's study. When the room was entered the band's equipment was still running as though a full live rehearsal were in progress. This might be dismissed a prank of some kind were it not for Bob's observation that there was physical sign that the band had ever left the house. Indeed all doors and windows in the building were either found to be boarded up or locked from the inside. Leaving aside for a moment their means of exit, It is possible to surmise that the group simply walked away from the recording. They would have been working to a deadline and would have felt pressured, with their work and relationships suffering as a result. The evidence of drug abuse was discovered on the site and this would have exacerbated any such problems, especially if as Bob Longfellow claims, it was not their usual behaviour. Having finally reached a breaking point and a decision to scrap the project, they left the unfinished album for Golden Hoof to recover. They 'disappeared', certainly, but only as far as the record industry and the people of Kildubhan were concerned. However, there are more unexplained facets of the case to consider. The presence of the graffiti on the inner walls of the house does not as yet have an explanation. On the south wall a statement reads "Always In My Head" words which were also scrawled on the wall of the Marchant family murder scene but were removed by police several years before the band's arrival. There are six more instances where the graffiti corresponds to diary entries and personal correspondence belonging to John Marchant. These could not have been seen by the band since the correspondence in question was kept by police from its seizure in 1992 until I was able to claim the documents for my own research. The chance of mere coincidence seems possible with one or two of the lines, for instance the word 'Loopy' is written three times, low down on the East wall of Marchant's study. Marchant’s diary confirms this as the pet name of his daughter 'Lucille'. However the sheer number of coincidental statements is unnerving. Most thought provoking of all is the presence of the two sentiments "Who Would Know?" and "My Poor Sweet Love". The fact that both of these exactly match the messages scrawled by Marchant above his murdered family is disturbing enough, but the latter of the two is worrying for another reason. The words "My Poor Sweet Love", written above Carole Marchant's body in 1992 had appeared in Black River House before. Before The Secret Method and before John Marchant, the sentiment was used by George Edward Kinkedd to describe his dead wife. George's wife Emily Anne died in 1900 giving birth to the couple's second son Jacob but the rumour has persisted to present times that she was in fact murdered by her mentally unstable husband as she gave birth. Whatever the truth, it is certain that George would never again refer to his wife by name, instead he used only the sentiment "My Poor Sweet Love".
Parallels The parallels between the fates of John Marchant and The Secret Method are particularly striking. Like Marchant, the band went to Kildubhan with the intention of exploiting its history, only to become preoccupied with it and arguably consumed by it. The band acted out of character soon after entering the house by turning to drug abuse, while the family man Marchant became adulterous and violent. Finally, and once again like Marchant, they left behind a rambling stream of ideas which resonate with the history, character and voices of the house’s past. Regardless of my contribution to it, I am not party to the details of the ongoing police investigation, though It is clear that there seems to be precious little in the way of new developments. There is currently no police search for The Secret Method, and as the actions of the band have never been viewed as more than a footnote to the Marchant case, nor constituted a crime the case is no longer considered to be a high priority. The Police interest in The Secret Method's master tapes has all but completely faded and until recently they were shelved. However, after discussions with both the British and Irish authorities I have succeeded in releasing the material on this web site, and the recordings of the band can now be downloaded free of charge.
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