This column is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing. Read the previous instalment of Graveyard Shift here.
For several months, the lunatic sermons laid on me daily by my colleague down at the graveyard had been a persistent source of confusion until finally, he was sacked. I have met more than my fair share of freaks in my time, yet he was genuinely one of the most singular individuals I have ever chanced upon. He had a habit of coming at a conversation from so far out of left field that it would grudgingly force me to abandon my default position at the fringes—my assumptions about being a man of alternative ideas, of heterodox thinking, of rare patience towards what some elements are at constant pains to frame as ‘conspiracy theory’—and take up the unfamiliar role of sober-headed skeptic.
Like an agent of nemesis, he would amble late into work, then hold a black obsidian scrying mirror up to my self-image, as if to say, “You think you’re a weirdo? Have some of this, you fucking civilian.” In the blast of his unhinged screeds I would stand corrected, denuded of all pretense under the howling onslaught of schizophrenic free-association.
Little details accumulated over time. Walking past his car (a souped-up Vauxhall Astra), I noticed he had a Baphomet sigil hanging from the rear-view mirror, which he later complained was always vanishing and re-appearing of its own volition. Another time, I saw a porcelain doll (he told me she was called Annie) peering out from beneath some other items piled up on the back seat. It seemed that he kept this most prized of possessions with him at all times—partly out of sentimentality, but mostly as a means of scaring the shit out of anyone who might want to break into his car. I found his affection for this objectively creepy item strangely touching, despite suspecting it might have a far more disturbing and as-yet-undisclosed backstory.
“The police began making enquiries after him pertaining to an arson incident”
He occasionally hinted at a closer relationship to the occult, speaking of midnight meetings deep in Epping Forest with some of the most powerful witches in the country, complete with rituals around blazing bonfires. He never divulged just how deeply he got involved at these clandestine sabbaths, and it was hard to tell whether I was dealing with Crowleyan levels of diabolism, but I still found it concerning that someone whose quotidian existence was so lawless had found his way into this stuff. I wanted to warn him that toying with these things can have negative effects, that if he brought the same erratic approach he had towards work into dealings with the black arts he might end up in a fix, but once again I saved my breath. It was hard to reason with a man who told you with a straight face that a historical person named Count Dracula used to live in Purfleet.
His worldview was channeled constantly through a paranoia that had metastasized out of all control, as evidenced by the contents of his car, which also included a boot full of camping gear and other practical ‘bug-out’ items in case he ever needed to run to the hills (which, for personal reasons, it would appear he often had to). This combination of tools both occult and practical he took everywhere as a means of covering his bases across all potential planes of interference.
Another feather in his tin-foil hat was his stable of alternative identities, although these had actually served him well on numerous occasions, such as when the police began making enquiries after him pertaining to an arson incident. Once he’d shaken them off, he told me that he and an anonymous accomplice had torched a property identified by the local community as one housing a sex offender, finally finding some sort of applicable use for his much-lauded pyromaniac tendencies. “Yeah, we burned the gaff down and that nonce cunt was still in it,” he told me once, over lunch. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell, what the ultimate outcome had been.
“It was hard to reason with a man who told you with a straight face that a historical person named Count Dracula used to live in Purfleet”
The other boys at the yard had this guy pegged as a total bullshitter, and at this stage, it’s likely that you have too. But know this: I wasn’t born yesterday, and I always felt there was more than a grain or two of truth in all the mental bollocks he spouted. For good or for ill, he saw things his own way, and he lived and will probably one day die by that viewpoint, not suffering fools gladly. As a man who ended up working in a graveyard, I’ve seen plenty of middle-class punk cosplayers claiming to be authority haters, but this guy was the real deal: I’m sure he’d have been more than happy to tell the King to go fuck himself had the opportunity arisen. It was refreshing to be around someone who believed and trusted absolutely nothing that was coming out of the mainstream, and despite being at times as annoying to work with as a swarm of locusts, I actually became fond of him—fond enough that I will leave the story of just why he was sacked to the national tabloids.
This column is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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