The Fractal Hall Journal

To this day, these incidents remain barely reported. There was a flurry of news coverage in the British media during the time, but curiously almost no-one in the media picked up on the alleged occult connections, or even the rumours regarding a possible relationship between Agosto and Winfield.

What is known for certain is that following an ill-fated second week of filming and facing the inevitable abandonment of filming, Winfield did not show up to the final day on set, and it was the early evening when Agosto found him hanged in the cottage where she had been staying. Several days later, on Christmas Eve, Agosto herself was killed in a collision on the M25. She had been returning to London, and was found with several boxes of research material on Daniel Morgan that had been collected by Harry Grant and passed on to Winfield.

The story that later emerged indicated that the two had been having an affair. Both were married, things had likely gone sour, no doubt exarcebating an already stressful production. As a result Winfield took his own life, and though the coroner found no intoxicants during post-mortem it was generally accepted that Agosto’s accident had probably occurred while she was under the influence.

The timeline of events preceding their deaths is unclear for several reasons. Many of the crew were never interviewed during the short inquiry that followed, several refusing point blank to talk to investigators. It remains a mystery why this was never pursued up by anyone in authority. Much footage had been rendered unretrievable. Mirroring the earlier accidental destruction of White Ship Films’ negatives, most of the tape used degraded during transport back to the company’s offices in London. Quality control may have been an issue for one set of tape, but the documentary segments of the shoot had been recorded on a different type and different brand. It seemed an odd coincidence that both would types degrade within the same narrow time frame.

From the few written accounts available, it’s clear that the incidents on the set increased in severity over the final week. The predicted bad weather caused most of the delays, and contributed to the damage that continued to happen to the crew’s equipment. During the daylight hours no apparitions were reported, but items would go missing and more than one person reported hearing strange banging noises coming from the empty buildings they worked around.

Towards the end of the week, a replacement generator had to be brought in after an engineer was injured by the equipment they had been using. The injury he received was never specified. The new item arrived in time for the last session of night shooting.

The final night was the worst for the production. Many of the crew who were present that night did not return the next day, contributing to the delay in discovery of Winfield’s body. No records remains of the exact events, but several strange things were seen, and much audible phenomena was recorded. Needless to say, everything captured on tape was lost when the storage media degraded.

To date, no-one has attempted to adapt any of Daniel Morgan’s work. The rights are still available, though both White Ship and Conrad Media are no longer ongoing concerns. Most of the crew involved in both attempts at filming have since left the industry, and the ones who remain are clear in their belief that another attempt should not be made. They are not alone in believing that Morgan’s work is cursed.

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Time, I think, for a Christmas ghost story.

During the winter of 1996, Conrad Media began filming a television series and documentary based on various pieces of Daniel Morgan’s short fiction. The BBC had subcontracted the work to them following the acquisition of the licence from Harry Grant.

Conrad were a dependable firm made up of veteran film and television producers, and were seen as a safe and budget-conscious option for a production with an already disastrous history. Filming was almost stopped due to the somewhat superstitious views widepsread at the BBC. Corporate gossip had tagged the endeavour as doomed from the outset.

Bad luck was one thing, the prospect of financial failure another. Not one of the naysayers came close to predicting the extent of the tragic events that followed.

Principle photography started on December 9th, and was to continue until the weekend of the 21st. Various locations had been chosen in and around the Rhondda and Rhymney Valleys, not far from the colliery where Morgan had once worked. Particularly convenient for the production was an extensive plot of land that sported a disused textile factory in surprisingly good order and various buildings, including a modestly-sized farmhouse. The land had once been owned by an industrialist who had made his fortune in the area, before losing it all following the Second World War. The reason it had remained relatively untouched by local vandals soon became apparent.

Filming proceeded to plan during the first week, despite several significant technical glitches. Equipment malfunctioned on-set, and a number of different vehicles were unable to be restarted after parking outside the factory. Despite the hitches, the crew were just about able to keep schedule. A forecast of poor weather in the following week convinced Adam Winfield, the director and one of the main stockholders in Conrad, to bring the night shoots they had planned to do during the final couple of days forward to that weekend.

Delyth Agosto, the actress playing the main character in the series, was the first person to report seeing strange activity on set. Within minutes of beginning the first scene, outside the ground floor of the factory, she complained of seeing people inside staring out through the windows at her. Winfield sent several people inside, but they found nothing. Throughout the first couple of hours, Agosto became more and more agitated, certain at first that the crew were playing a practical joke. Matters became worse after the production manager convinced her it wasn’t their doing, as it was at this point that she started to believe that the events were of unnatural origin. The shoot ended when the portable generator that powered the camera set-up shorted out.

The next day Agosto told Winfield of her intention to quit. She had endured a restless sleep during what was left of the night, convinced that a presence had followed her back from the set to the holiday letting that had been provided for her, an old miner’s cottage not far from the shoot. Winfield was able to talk her round by agreeing to limit the rest of the filming she would have to do at night, and putting it back to the end of the following week.

On the Sunday night, the crew had prepared to shoot without Agosto at the old farmhouse. Whether provoked by her previous behaviour or due to an actual increase in unexplainable activity, this time others reported seeing movement within the house, and in the surrounding area. Winfield struggled to keep order during the long night, as piece after piece of equipment failed and more people claimed to see figures watching them. Winfield was able to cap the rising levels of panic until the end of the scheduled shoot, an achievement made all the more impressive following his admission the next day to his DoP that not only had he too been seeing indistinct figures throughout the site, but had also heared someone whispering behind his shoulder more than once during the night, when there was no one there to be making a noise.

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Harry Grant was a Scottish television producer, who started his career working on popular dramas during the 1970s. He had scripts filmed for episodes of Hammer House of Horror and The Professionals, and was briefly a producer on Doctor Who. In the early 90s, Grant started a production company, White Ship Films, with a view to producing low-to-mid budget horror movies.

Grant’s plan was to create a movie based on Daniel Morgan’s Uni-Mortal strip, anticipating that it would be a straightforward matter to secure funding for a superhero film in the wake of the worldwide success of Batman and Batman Returns. With Uni-Mortal, he would also be able to explore the subject matter via weird fiction, a genre he was fascinated with.

The initial attempts to buy the film rights were a disaster. Believing that White Ship were clear to begin production after paying a fairly large sum to an American media conglomerate, Grant sank a substantial amount of time and money into developing the Uni-Mortal feature. He was forced to put his plans on hold after a Swedish company claimed they held the rights to the character outside of the US. As soon as the first matter was put to rest, it became clear that the legal issues were far more complex than initially suspected. A competing interest was declared by “Universal Adventure Holdings”, causing Grant’s production to once again come to a halt. Facing the possibility of having to wait for the outcome of years of litigation, Grant pulled the plug, almost bankrupting himself and his company in the process.

His last-ditch plan was to make a minimal-budget feature out of what could be salvaged from the Uni-Mortal debacle, using Morgan’s early pulp stories as a source. In the course of the legal maneuverings, White Ship had ended up owning the copyright to a fair amount of Morgan’s prose work when it became easier to buy them outright rather than negotiate a licencing fee. Grant saw an opportunity to avoid ruin.

Instead, he sailed right into it.

Additional filming was never started due to the small crew Grant had hired all falling ill with food poisoning. No other crew could be hired due to the union dispute that followed, and much of the material that Grant hoped to re-use was rendered useless after being stored incorrectly at the office facility where White Ship were based.

Deciding to cut his losses, Grant licenced the property to the BBC. Though Daniel Morgan’s work was not widely known outside of cult fiction devotees, Grant still had friends at the corporation willing to help him who saw potential in the pre-production work already work, and the possibility of an accompanying documentary series that would illuminate an otherwise obscure individual.

The events that followed are a tale for another time, at the next of the spirit nights. For the moment, it’s worth noting that despite the failures to bring Morgan’s stories to the screen, it would have been a medium that the writer would have been more than happy to see his work translated to. And when we consider the global reach of the cinema, perhaps we also see the form which Morgan’s final prophecy will take. Perhaps this is how Morgan will finally open the doors between worlds.

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