This is an updated version of John Billingsley’s article in Northern Earth 181.
A memory popped into mind some months ago as I was driving along a stretch of road near my home in West Yorkshire. It was an image of that stretch at some point in the early to mid/late 1990s when the roadside hedgerows were defaced by long strips of spooled-out cassette tape. It wasn’t just that stretch − other roads had the same kind of ‘decoration’.
At first, grumpy before my time, I just tutted and muttered about the litter tossed out from car windows by litterbugs (after all, cassette tapes were always breaking in car players); but after a while I began to notice a certain consistency. Very often, they turned up at hazardous stretches of road − in the case that reminded me, a set of double bends between two stretches of straight road on a very busy main route between Keighley and Haworth. The consistency was that other locations were also often potentially dangerous.
Mentioning it to friends, several had seen such tapes but likewise had dismissed it as litter, at least until I suggested there might be a pattern to their location… Other friends vouchsafed a rumour they had heard which put a rather different complexion on things: perhaps these stretches of tape were not litter but deliberate deposition, with moreover something of an avowed magical intent.
Thirty years on, I remembered all this and wondered if a group of younger friends I was with at the Todmorden Folklore Centre had ever come across it. One − a musician working with The Folklore Tapes ensemble, whose work has deliberately encompassed the sound we get in cassette technology, unsurprisingly remembered something and that it had a rationale, but wasn’t sure what it was. Another dimly remembered roadside tape. None of us had seen any for some time. So this seemed a good reason to put a query out around our NEreaders e-group, and see if any other readers could recall what evidently was something of an ‘old bygone custom’.
So what I heard at the time, after some asking, was that the tape was deliberately strung alongside hazardous stretches of road (what used to be called ‘black spots’ or ‘death traps’) as ‘psychic flypaper’, the idea being that the magnetic tape would absorb and dispel any discordant energies or spiritual devilry that might serve to distract drivers and cause an accident. People said it was the work of neopagan witches or magicians. It was, if my informants were correct, not littering (as such), but magical thinking and ritual, positively deployed at a local and community level.
My NEreaders query revealed that my remembered timing of the 1990s and the association with magic chimed with others, e.g. Johanna Hope Bricher and Jeremy Harte: ‘Rumours that spooled cassette tape was some kind of occult marker were certainly current c.1993 because that was when I spent a summer afternoon with the kids finding all the lengths we could and gleefully rearranging them into pentagrams. It added creativity to a country walk and taught them about ostension’ (JH). So the custom was indeed known, and known as a magical activity, at least among those of a certain generation (that of cassette tapes and driving in the 1990s). Penny Kelly ‘always believed it was to do with witchcraft − possibly marking a witch’s territories or marking the boundary limits of a spell’, and this kind of idea occurred spasmodically in a Fortean Times Message Board thread1 that Dave Raven alerted us to.
That thread began in January 2002: ‘You know how you often see audio tape from cassettes lying by the edge of the road, tangled up in hedges and all sorts?’, SmirnoffMule asked, and revealed that they had heard that it was ‘how a witch marks their territory’. Sometimes one might find spells attached (how was not divulged) and it was alleged that members of Leeds University Christian Union used to go round clearing up this presumed demonic litter − ‘sometimes they come over all sick and dizzy as they handle it’, a point echoed by others in the thread! One might wonder reductively if car emissions had not been concentrated at such places and contributing to the nausea. ‘Research’ was apparently quoted (without source of course − these threads were in the internet era after all) that taped-up roads had a higher accident and fatality rate. There’s a ‘chicken and egg’ element here of course, since these stretches were already hazardous. One poster weighed in with personal reminiscences of accidents at a taped section; they’d apparently identified the original cassette as a Madonna album, which complicates the Christian connection no end. The possibility that a tangle of tape fluttering by the roadside might distract drivers was not mentioned in any posts I saw.
The Christian connection surprised me in that it was entirely opposite the positive magical intent that I’d heard. These people believed that ‘modern-day black witches/occultists record bad spells and curses onto audio tape and then unravel the tape and place it alongside road junctions etc. as a means of cursing that section of road’, i.e. causing accidents. Ingenious. Norman Darwen had heard but rather discounted this rumour: ‘I do recall someone saying it could be part of some ritual (along the lines of putting something significant on the tape) but that seems far-fetched given how common it was.’
The FT discussion rather degenerated unproductively after that into things like porn mags and Scandinavian bands through vague associations not worth repeating here (we get a much better class of input on NEreaders) and flagged until December 2004, flickering again in 2009 without useful input. Another FT thread2 appeared in August 2015, which also went downhill rather quickly, but not before Christians were invoked again − OneWingedBird remembered ‘My friends who were born again christians claimed that it was done by satanists who recorded rituals on the tape and then unspooled it to contaminate the area’; and Dave Raven pointed out there was a reference to ferrous oxide tape being effective against supernatural entities − a key point here being, of course, the association of ferrous with iron and its use in keeping fairies and witches and so on at bay (cf horseshoes, lucky pins, etc.).
Regarding location, AnalogueBoy had seen tape in a hedge ‘near me’ in 2015. At a general micro-level, hedgerows (in which it is surely easier for tape to get stuck than on, say a fence) were clearly favoured: Norman Darwen from E Lancashire remembered seeing tape but ‘only associated with hedgerows along the sides of roads’, which is just as I and Drew below and some FT posters recalled.
There was little indication in either of the FT threads of where people had seen such tapes, though. Leeds/W. Yorkshire were implicated quite strongly, but that may of course just reflect an accidental correspondent demographic. And indeed one NE reader had actually witnessed such a deposition − but in Wales, at quite an early date: Matthew Hartley ‘on holiday in Wales as a youngster (around 10 or 11, so early 1980s), I remember seeing a man (in his 20s?) decorate a tree with cassette tape. The effect was quite haunting (which is, I guess, why I remember it). I remember thinking at the time that this was odd behaviour, and following stern parental advice about stranger danger, moved on rapidly’. We found Yorkshire, Lancashire, Ireland and Wales in the NE discussion. One anonymous FT poster potentially internationalised the discussion even further: ‘This whole thing takes on an even weirder aspect if you consider the way that the Taliban decorated Afghanistan with cassette tape’ (did they? this is something new to me, can anyone shed any light on this odd link − perhaps they prerecorded the tapes with nasheeds as prayer, along similar lines to the witch rumours of Leeds?).
More convincing that the custom (if that is what it was) was widespread was NE reader Drew Shiels remembering it in Ireland up to the early 2000s. Drew was much more forthcoming re place: ‘never in housing estates, parks, or main streets; never on dual carriageways, or even the bigger roads; sometimes in industrial estates, if there were hedges; always on hedges, of some kind, thorn or bramble; frequently on the approach to small towns, just outside the urban limits’. Apart from industrial estates, Drew’s memories pretty much tie in with mine. He added ‘I remember talking to my father about them, and both of us being mystified − we could imagine a broken cassette being thrown out of a car, and roadside littering was still an occasional thing then (although not at all to the level it was in the 80s, and already below the level I still see in the UK), but it was hard to imagine a mechanism whereby the actual tape would be coming out of the cassette, and then be spread so thoroughly along relatively long stretches of road’.
However, the general response to the magical theory in the first FT thread was, quote unquote, ‘bollox’ [sic], and the preferred scenario was litter: that the tape came from cassettes chewed up by the car stereo and chucked out the car window. This is, one might suppose, the Occam’s razor perspective; it’s much easier to see humans wilfully tossing stuff out of car windows, since they self-evidently still do so.
But the question was raised, several in fact − whether it was litter or ritual, did the esoteric explanation originate from a fevered Christian fundamentalist imagination (the Leeds Christian Union at that time certainly leant that way)? Was it détourned by neopagans? And at what point did the rumours split into whether it was bad magic or good magic − i.e. whether it was a curse or a protective?
And the association Jeremy makes with pentagrams shows up another aspect − were these cassette tapes, if deployed to deflect misfortune, a modern and short-lived addition to the repertoire of apotropaic practices, alongside hag stones, Advent inscriptions and Albanian soft toys?3
Postscript
While thinking of unusual and perhaps little-known apotropaic customs, I remembered that when one enters a Buddhist temple in Japan (and Korea and China I think) you are confronted by a pair of stone guardian beasts before the sanctuary. One has its mouth open and the other’s mouth is closed. The former is saying A… and the latter …M, and as you walk between them you are passing through an implicit sonic threshold represented by the unheard sacred and protective syllable AUM, whether one is aware of this or not (and I can’t recall seeing it in the usual guidebooks). There’s some laboured parallel with the idea of the tapes conferring a similar silent protection or curse on the passer-by, perhaps…
Notes
1. https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/tangled-cassette-tape-beside-roads.14038/
2. https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/ferrous-oxide-cassettes-used-as-defences.59986/
3. John Billingsley, ‘The eye-spy teddies of Albania’, Fortean Times 339, April 2016, p.28–35; ‘Please look after this bear’, Northern Earth 146, p.22–24.