Fawney Rig was the home of Roderick Burgess and his family, as well as the meeting ground for his occult organization, the Order of Ancient Mysteries.
History[]
Originally known as Blackwood Manor, the estate was gifted to Lady Johanna Constantine in 1785 when King George III asked her to retrieve Pandora's Box; when she succeeded, her title was reinstated, and she gained an estate in the Sussex town of Wych Cross. She renamed it "Fawny Rig."
In 1904, Roderick Burgess purchased the manor, adding Gothic additions to the house which served to prepare it for becoming the main base of his Order of Ancient Mysteries.[1] He was determined that his mystical society and its accomplishments would prove him the greatest magician of his day, and on June 10, 1916, the Order conducted an elaborate ritual in the hopes of caging Death itself. The ritual did not quite succeed, however, for instead of binding the personification of Death, they captured the Lord of Dreams. Using a binding ring in the basement of Fawny Rig, Burgess was able to keep Morpheus imprisoned for more than seventy years.
After Roderick's death, his son, Alex Burgess, inherited the estate. In 1968, Fawney Rig was briefly open to the public as a New Age workshop barring the use of psychedelics. In 1970, Alex handed over control of the estate and the organization to Paul McGuire, until in 1988, when Dream finally escaped and trapped Alex in a never-ending nightmare for the next several years.[2]
Trivia[]
- The term "Fawney Rig" is a con that involved dropping a near-worthless ring and then "finding it" in the presence of the mark, who would likely claim partial right to the lucky find: "If you will give me eight shillings for my share, you shall have the whole." The ring actually being worth about 6 pence. Fawney is likely the predecessor of the word phony.
- In Hell & Gone #2, a newspaper clipping revealed that Fawney Rig burned down in 2016 after some teenagers broke in to ransack the house, the implication was that the cause of the fire was the activation of the Matchstick Key.