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#387 The Oxforth Records

Age: 40 Years

Hidden or Lost: Lost

History: Do you remember that old TV show, the Oxforth Records? It was an anthology show somewhere between The Twilight Zone and Tales From the Crypt, featuring a different sci-fi or horror story each week, all presented as dramatizations based on the work of a paranormal investigator. It's one of those pieces of media that seems to have simply slipped out of the collective consciousness. Mainly because there seems to be forces working to erase it from existence.

The short-lived show was based on the research, notes, and esoterica of real life of occult explorer Elsa Oxforth, who agreed to assist in creating the show as a way of alerting the world to the dark supernatural powers lurking in the shadows. Oxforth remained behind the camera, but on screen she was portrayed by television presenter, Tiffany Butler, who, years later, claimed to have forgotten the show entirely.

Regardless, from the relative anonymity of her seat next to the director’s chair, Oxforth added secret messages and breadcrumbs to the already bizarre scripts, hoping that eagle-eyed viewers would be able to follow the trail she left. Where similar shows of the time focused on moralistic theater, the Oxforth Records instead explored strange tales of unknowable gods, righteous madness, and bizarre formalist experiments into the further reaches of ‘entertainment.’

Some of the more well-remembered episodes include, ‘The Case of Radio 10,’ in which a small town is slowly driven to collective obsession by a pirate radio broadcast inspiring the enthralled listeners to tear down their surroundings and build a vile monument to a folk deity known as The Horntooth Moke. In the episode, ‘Dispatch,’ a faceless man sits amid a misty void reciting a string of numbers and code phrases while graven statues materialize and dissipate in the fog, as though closing in on the bizarre figure. The dread and threat grows as the recitation gains speed until finally, the episode simply ends. Few of the episodes were straightforward, and even fewer provided much in the way of messages or explanation.

During its original airing, the Oxforth Records gained a small following, but as suddenly as it had hit the airwaves, it seemed to disappear, canceled and never spoken of by the network again.

Oxforth tried to explain that there were fell forces at work that buried the show, trying to keep the secrets of the supernatural world in the dark. But only fringe outlets would talk to her and Oxforth faded from the public eye, before disappearing completely.

Since its airing, the Oxforth Records has become a mythic piece of lost media, only remembered by aging geeks who can barely describe the details. Occasionally a script or wobbly VHS recording of the show will pop up online or at some bargain basement convention. But those who come into possession of them have a habit of disappearing shortly after, becoming just another footnote in the Oxforth Records themselves.


 

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