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Timeslip At Waterloo Station?

AsamiYamazaki

Gone But Not Forgotten
(ACCOUNT RETIRED)
Joined
Sep 9, 2004
Messages
372
Hello all! It's my first time posting here and just wanted to mention an experience I had, namely, back in May or June of 1992, I experienced what I can only think was a time slip.

Going up to London with a new boyfriend, we caught a train to Waterloo and then headed down into the underground. I can’t remember which entrance we took: I just remember heading down the escalators and seeing scraps of paper lazily blow past me up the other way. That was the first hint of weirdness. The paper wasn’t gusting like it normally would in the blast of subway air – this was deliberately slow mo.

It was at that point that I think I sensed the shift in atmosphere. From the normally bustling energy of Waterloo on a Saturday, it segued into a heavier depressing gloom. Everything was too quiet. Even though there were still people around, they all seemed subdued. It was almost like being underwater.

At the foot of the escalators, there were lines and lines of string, like multitudes of washing lines. Bits of cloth and rag were hung up on the lines, as though makeshift camps had been set up all along corridors and in any available spaces. It wasn’t just a couple of isolated areas, it felt like all the passages had been turned into living areas or camps. I don’t remember which underground line we were taking, but we seemed to be walking far further than usual. The strangest thing was, I felt so tense and at a gut level KNEW that the surroundings had flipped into something more alien, yet it never occurred to me to say something to my boyfriend.

Standing in a corner was a man in official uniform – I don’t really remember him, just have a sense that he was bareheaded, had shiny buttons on his jacket – whose presence made me feel no less uneasy. I was trying to convince myself that if he was there, it meant that all the weirdness of the clothes lines were somehow explicable. Only afterwards, when my boyfriend and I compared notes did we realise that we both sensed something archaic about his outfit and demeanour.

By the time I got on the semi-crowded tube train, I was beginning to feel seriously panicked. Sitting across from us was a man who looked close to tears, red faced, breathing frantically, a really scared expression on his face. My boyfriend gave a surreptitious nod in his direction – the first clue I had that I wasn’t actually the only one experiencing something disquieting. Then my boyfriend whispered, "Look, him too," and there was another man further down the carriage who looked in fear of his life. At that point, it STILL didn’t occur to us to ponder what the hell was going on – we just both thought that maybe we had a premonition or something and ought to get off the train immediately. Only afterwards did we realise it totally felt strange from the moment we headed down into the underground station.

I guess we both assume that maybe it was some kind of time slip or overlay back to maybe the second world war – I don’t know if they turned any parts of Waterloo stations into shelters.

Sorry it’s not as dramatic as hanging out with Marie Antoinette in Versailles, but it still creeped me out big time, and whenever I think about it, I still recall just how scared it made me.

Does anyone have any ideas?
 
Sorry don't know what happened to you but thought I'd interject my "strange" experience on Waterloo's Northern Line Platform.

I was reading Berlitz's "Philadelphia Experiment" book and a down and out (I'm assuming...he wore a dirty two piece suit but had clean white trainers on) shuffled up to me and whispered "It's all true!". He then shuffled off into the crowd.

I dismissed him and boarded the train.

A couple of minutes later it dawned on me he'd be about the right age to have been there!

mooks out
 
Lollypockets said:
. From the normally bustling energy of Waterloo on a Saturday, it segued into a heavier depressing gloom.

A feeling of depression seems to crop up rather a lot during reported time slip experiences. Can't give any sources to that effect ATM but I'll have a quick shufti on the net.
 
Perhaps it was the young man in uniform who was Timeslipping and you were picking up on it somehow.
 
Many underground stations, including Waterloo, were used as air-raid shelters during the Blitz in World War II .. looks like you flipped into this time period.

I don't know how long at a time they would have been occupied, though.. the cloth and rag on lines aounds very strange indeed.
 
Interesting story...the timeslip stuff fascinates me

I wondered whether there was something being filmed in some of the lesser used walkways, and you inadvertantly wandered through while the crew and cast were on lunch-break.

What this doesn't explain is the fightened people on the train.

And everyone so far has assumed that you slipped back, and not forwards to some future disaster...
 
Maybe it wasn't a timeslip but a dimension slip - a Waterloo Station where we didn't win the war....
 
What a wicked idea!! Very Kim Newman!

It's weird how even though the experience doesn't sound rampantly dramatic, it's one of those situations where I can instantly recall the tangible wrongness and it still freaks me out.

Normally if anything happens, I find my innate scepticism kicks in - I'm sure if I was in a roomful of people and we were all confronted by a fully-fledged, all-singing all-dancing apparition, gloops of ectoplasm everywhere, an hour later I would already be rationalizing it away - but not that experience!

L
 
I have experienced a time slip, but haven't wanted to post about it, actually I have experienced it more than once. There are a couple of treads about timeslips on the IHTM board. There is one from america where someone saw a red indian huting buffalo (wow) and another one which I believe was also about a train station. There was also a timeslip in central Liverpool reported in the FT magazine, and I have read about other ones in books but obviously the Versailles one is the most famous.

Quite a lot of timeslip stories involve several people experiencing the same thing like you describe but when its happened to me I have been with other people and they haven't noticed anything.

I know that timeslips happen and that they are totally real experiences. When it happened to me I was 17 and in a very busy crowded central area of my home city, (I was literally in the middle of a crowd). Suddenly it was daylight instead of dark and I could see people dressed in medeival costumes. They were sat on the ground with wares in baskets having a market. I could smell the fish in the baskets. One person ran passed me so close that they almost hit me as though they couldn't see me and I was knocked back into the present when they did this. The whole experience only lasted a couple of seconds. I didn't find it scary but after a few minutes when I had walked further down the road it started to come back. I could see people (soldiers?)loading things into a cart, and a group of beggars. One of the beggars looked directly at me suddenly I was scared and was back in the present again. Nobody else seemed to notice me but the beggar clearly sensed that I was there although he didn't react in any way.

No one that I have told this story to believes me, but I've read plently of similar stories in paranormal books etc. Some of them even claim that they spoke to the people from the past when they were in the timeslip and did things like have a meal there (?) and pay for it in modern money, which I find hard to conceptualise. No one reports that the people reacted to them oddly. You say that you actually got on a train. Did it start moving? Where you actually transported from one place to another (in the present). How did you come out of the timeslip? If the time slip had ended when you were on the train maybe you might have found yourself in the middle of a tunnel in the present.(Hmm)
 
Hello all! It's my first time posting here and just wanted to mention an experience I had, namely, back in May or June of 1992, I experienced what I can only think was a time slip.

Going up to London with a new boyfriend, we caught a train to Waterloo and then headed down into the underground. I can’t remember which entrance we took: I just remember heading down the escalators and seeing scraps of paper lazily blow past me up the other way. That was the first hint of weirdness. The paper wasn’t gusting like it normally would in the blast of subway air – this was deliberately slow mo.

It was at that point that I think I sensed the shift in atmosphere. From the normally bustling energy of Waterloo on a Saturday, it segued into a heavier depressing gloom. Everything was too quiet. Even though there were still people around, they all seemed subdued. It was almost like being underwater.

At the foot of the escalators, there were lines and lines of string, like multitudes of washing lines. Bits of cloth and rag were hung up on the lines, as though makeshift camps had been set up all along corridors and in any available spaces. It wasn’t just a couple of isolated areas, it felt like all the passages had been turned into living areas or camps. I don’t remember which underground line we were taking, but we seemed to be walking far further than usual. The strangest thing was, I felt so tense and at a gut level KNEW that the surroundings had flipped into something more alien, yet it never occurred to me to say something to my boyfriend.

Standing in a corner was a man in official uniform – I don’t really remember him, just have a sense that he was bareheaded, had shiny buttons on his jacket – whose presence made me feel no less uneasy. I was trying to convince myself that if he was there, it meant that all the weirdness of the clothes lines were somehow explicable. Only afterwards, when my boyfriend and I compared notes did we realise that we both sensed something archaic about his outfit and demeanour.

By the time I got on the semi-crowded tube train, I was beginning to feel seriously panicked. Sitting across from us was a man who looked close to tears, red faced, breathing frantically, a really scared expression on his face. My boyfriend gave a surreptitious nod in his direction – the first clue I had that I wasn’t actually the only one experiencing something disquieting. Then my boyfriend whispered, "Look, him too," and there was another man further down the carriage who looked in fear of his life. At that point, it STILL didn’t occur to us to ponder what the hell was going on – we just both thought that maybe we had a premonition or something and ought to get off the train immediately. Only afterwards did we realise it totally felt strange from the moment we headed down into the underground station.

I guess we both assume that maybe it was some kind of time slip or overlay back to maybe the second world war – I don’t know if they turned any parts of Waterloo stations into shelters.

Sorry it’s not as dramatic as hanging out with Marie Antoinette in Versailles, but it still creeped me out big time, and whenever I think about it, I still recall just how scared it made me.

Does anyone have any ideas?

This is a very interesting case. For some reason, there are a number of time slip cases reported on and around trains, especially tube trains. It looks as if you left the slip when you got on the train, and the two upset people had also experienced it. It is typical that if there are a crowd of possible witnesses, only a few actually enter the TS. If you are still visiting FT I would like to hear if you have had any other similar experiences since then.
 
This is a very interesting case. For some reason, there are a number of time slip cases reported on and around trains, especially tube trains. It looks as if you left the slip when you got on the train, and the two upset people had also experienced it. It is typical that if there are a crowd of possible witnesses, only a few actually enter the TS. If you are still visiting FT I would like to hear if you have had any other similar experiences since then.
It does seem to be a heavily localised phenomenon. Also, only a few people will notice their transition through a timeslip.
 
Yes, it's quite possible that the majority are so engrossed in themselves and their interests that they don't notice what's happening around them, especially if the slip is just a few years or less. Nevertheless it seems that all of the witnesses I have contacted have had other equally puzzling experiences before. I know of at least two people who have had three ostensible time slips (one I know personally).
 
Yes, it's quite possible that the majority are so engrossed in themselves and their interests that they don't notice what's happening around them, especially if the slip is just a few years or less. Nevertheless it seems that all of the witnesses I have contacted have had other equally puzzling experiences before. I know of at least two people who have had three ostensible time slips (one I know personally).

That's an interesting observation. Do you think some people are more prone to these experiences? If it is just that they are more likely to notice then it would be difficult to accurately measure.

I have had two that I am certain of (one of which I wrote about on another thread) and several occasions where things have just seemed wrong or too quiet.

I have often wondered whether people who temporarily enter another zone are still present in this one; i.e. if anyone who was walking the same route, but remained in the early 20th century, as the two ladies in the Versailles incident would have still been able to see them, or would they have vanished and reappeared later?
 
That's an interesting observation. Do you think some people are more prone to these experiences? If it is just that they are more likely to notice then it would be difficult to accurately measure.

I have had two that I am certain of (one of which I wrote about on another thread) and several occasions where things have just seemed wrong or too quiet.

I have often wondered whether people who temporarily enter another zone are still present in this one; i.e. if anyone who was walking the same route, but remained in the early 20th century, as the two ladies in the Versailles incident would have still been able to see them, or would they have vanished and reappeared later?

I might have seen the time slip you posted but I can't be sure -- can you give some details to refresh my memory? Also the other one?

Yes, some people definitely are more sensitive or prone to contacting other dimensions.

It seems that in most cases the person in the slip disappears from view. I have mentioned the Leeds case a few times, where there were two sisters entering a newsagents. The second sister warned the first that she was about to walk into a lady near the door, but the first sister walked right through her and the lady faded away. The shop was now dark, cold, and empty. They quickly went out, and after a brief wait went back in. The shop was now brightly lit and full of people. But the shop assistant was clearly terrified of them. Presumably she saw them enter the first time, pass through the customer by the door, then vanish.. I have an idea of her identity but haven't been able to make contact. (The first sister has since died and I have lost contact with the second). Then there is an American case where a young man working late got a lift from an older couple; when he met them a few days later they had visibly aged, and remarked how he hadn't changed at all after several years. And of course the case in Liverpool where a young shoplifter was chased into an alley by a security guard only to disappear completely; he later reported going back to 1967 where he was upset because his mobile wouldn't get a signal!
 
Here's one of them, on page 3:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/time-or-dimensional-slips.13755/page-3

The other is a bit more disjointed, but here goes:

This happened around 15 years ago, on a weekday morning in Summer 2002, in Folkestone.

I had to drop my son off at college for 9.30 am, so we set off just after 9 am and got there 20 minutes later. I carried on into town and soon after I came off the roundabout there was a flurry of flashing blue lights and a siren. In my rear view mirror there was a large car behind me and behind that was an ambulance. Although it is the main road it is single lane and there are islands at various intervals, so I pulled over to let it pass. The car behind me drove past and the driver flashed me an odd glance, but the emergency vehicle had vanished. It couldn't have turned round and we were all far enough clear of the roundabout for it to be impossible for it to have somehow looped round and taken another exit.

I sat there for a few seconds then pulled away, suddenly the ambulance was about 200 yards ahead of me, lights flashing, at the traffic lights. It was as though I blinked and it was there. I am certain it didn't pass me, it was a straight road with not much traffic and I moved specifically to give way to it.

A feeling that something was 'off' had come over me but I parked up further along and went to run errands. Everything I tried to do, there were problems. Every shop had a queue out the door, the bank, the post office, the bakery. The shoe shop just past Woolworths simply wasn't there. I had wasted about two hours so gave up, went back to the car and drove home.

As I pulled up outside my house the time on the dashboard display was 10.10 am. I had only left home 60 minutes earlier, which couldn't be right. That was the journey time there and back, there would have been no time for my fruitless trip into town. I went indoors and checked the wall clock, just coming up to quarter past ten. TV teletext display confirmed it - 10.15 am.

When my son got home I double checked the time I dropped him off and it was definitely just after 9.20 am. I'm not sure if this counts as a time-slip but am at a loss as to what else to call it.
 
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I've been thinking about this quite a lot the last couple of days and one thing that's struck me is that while very many older buildings have shifted in purpose over time (often several times), or have become preserved in the aspic of heritage and/or been turned into museums, gallerys and that kind of thing, railway stations are one of the few Victorian/Edwardian edifices that serve precisely the same purpose that they did when they were built, and are still used for millions of individual journeys virtually every single day of the year - year in year out. (I'm not suggesting that every station is in it's original form - but many are, or at least enough so to be recognisable to the original passengers.)

(Obviously there are other examples of such continuity - theatres would be one, but the footfall for such buildings is utterly tiny, compared to metropolitan railway stations.)

I just wonder if this might psychologically or, if you like, paranormally, make railway stations prone to a certain chronological looseness (or 'thin places' - as my terrifying Irish grandmother might have said). Certainly, from a psychogeographical point of view they should be rich habitats - and yet oddly, from my reading in that area, they seem to be under-represented environments; maybe we are just so familiar with the places that we unconsciously assimilate their atmosphere without thinking about it.

I am not at all a train buff, but I love railway stations - and have done since I was a kid: the whole of human life in all its variety, the contemplation of which is inexhaustible, and all that stuff. (I've mentioned recently that Marylebone Station always looks to me - especially on a misty late autumn or winter afternoon - that it is only just about clinging to the present time. And, as I've mentioned in the past, one of the oddest - but really quite nice - things that ever happened to me happened at a station.)
 
Here's one of them, on page 3:

http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/time-or-dimensional-slips.13755/page-3

The other is a bit more disjointed, but here goes:

This happened around 15 years ago, on a weekday morning in Summer 2002, in Folkestone.

I had to drop my son off at college for 9.30 am, so we set off just after 9 am and got there 20 minutes later. I carried on into town and soon after I came off the roundabout there was a flurry of flashing blue lights and a siren. In my rear view mirror there was a large car behind me and behind that was an ambulance. Although it is the main road it is single lane and there are islands at various intervals, so I pulled over to let it pass. The car behind me drove past and the driver flashed me an odd glance, but the emergency vehicle had vanished. It couldn't have turned round and we were all far enough clear of the roundabout for it to be impossible for it to have somehow looped round and taken another exit.

I sat there for a few seconds then pulled away, suddenly the ambulance was about 200 yards ahead of me, lights flashing, at the traffic lights. It was as though I blinked and it was there. I am certain it didn't pass me, it was a straight road with not much traffic and I moved specifically to give way to it.

A feeling that something was 'off' had come over me but I parked up further along and went to run errands. Everything I tried to do, there were problems. Every shop had a queue out the door, the bank, the post office, the bakery. The shoe shop just past Woolworths simply wasn't there. I had wasted about two hours so gave up, went back to the car and drove home.

As I pulled up outside my house the time on the dashboard display was 10.10 am. I had only left home 60 minutes earlier, which couldn't be right. That was the journey time there and back, there would have been no time for my fruitless trip into town. I went indoors and checked the wall clock, just coming up to quarter past ten. TV teletext display confirmed it - 10.15 am.

When my son got home I double checked the time I dropped him off and it was definitely just after 9.20 am. I'm not sure if this counts as a time-slip but am at a loss as to what else to call it.

I have that time and dimensional thread on pdf so will check it out later. What you describe certainly seems to fall into that category -- quite a complex story. To quote a witness in one of Jenny Randles' cases, it does sound like a video tape chopped up and spliced together in the wrong order. It's the type of event that suggests the glitch in the matrix kind of explanation. I have heard of a missing shop -- someone who responded to my "vanishing houses and time slips" post spent a long time searching for a card shop; all the other shops were there and it just seemed as though the shops either side of it had joined seamlessly together. And there are a number of cases where people have visited shops that subsequently weren't there, and haven't been able to find evidence that they ever were.

Naomi West's mother told her of something she had seen in her rear view mirror, a car dramatically overturning. Later it was evident that no crash had taken place.

Thanks very much for that fascinating account.
 
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At the foot of the escalators, there were lines and lines of string, like multitudes of washing lines. Bits of cloth and rag were hung up on the lines, as though makeshift camps had been set up all along corridors and in any available spaces. It wasn’t just a couple of isolated areas, it felt like all the passages had been turned into living areas or camps. I don’t remember which underground line we were taking, but we seemed to be walking far further than usual. The strangest thing was, I felt so tense and at a gut level KNEW that the surroundings had flipped into something more alien, yet it never occurred to me to say something to my boyfriend.

Standing in a corner was a man in official uniform – I don’t really remember him, just have a sense that he was bareheaded, had shiny buttons on his jacket – whose presence made me feel no less uneasy. I was trying to convince myself that if he was there, it meant that all the weirdness of the clothes lines were somehow explicable. Only afterwards, when my boyfriend and I compared notes did we realise that we both sensed something archaic about his outfit and demeanour.

I wonder if the man in uniform was an ARP warden or a policeman, although surely both should have helmets.

From the pictures I've looked up about the underground shelters I've not seen any washing hanging up, plenty of coats. I do wonder through if there was any ad hock toilet facilities that might have been sheilded by sheets. They wouldn't appear on pictures or films I'd have thought.

I do think being underground can encourage weird things (basements often have a reputation). Also what if all the people and trains help charge things up somehow? A lot of theatres are said to have ghosts and I think the emotions drawn out of audiences help fuel that. Well imagine all those people sheltering down there scared... The Underground is pretty haunted too.
 
Yes, "liminal" might be the key word to this phenomenon.
wouldnt liminal apply more to the train journey than the stations ? liminal just means transitional no, or are you using it otherwise ?

reading the original account with the multiple cords tied up in the station, wasnt that a cheap method of providing tramps and transients somewhere to sleep ? they pay a penny or whatever and are allowed to sleep leaning over the rope ... not sure where ive pulled that from
 
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_penny_coffin

images (4).jpg


The rope was cut at daybreak in order to encourage the clients to wake up early and leave
 
At the foot of the escalators, there were lines and lines of string, like multitudes of washing lines. Bits of cloth and rag were hung up on the lines, as though makeshift camps had been set up all along corridors and in any available spaces. It wasn’t just a couple of isolated areas, it felt like all the passages had been turned into living areas or camps.
This was Waterloo, right? Waterloo is famous for its homeless population - a population that became so large in the 80s that it was labelled Cardboard City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_City_(London)
It seems to have come back in recent years
but it doesn't normally extend into the Underground tunnels themselves. I suspect that you might have seen some kind of organised protest or celebration, especially since the homeless have recently been banned from all the food outlets at Waterloo station.
Standing in a corner was a man in official uniform – I don’t really remember him, just have a sense that he was bareheaded, had shiny buttons on his jacket – whose presence made me feel no less uneasy. I was trying to convince myself that if he was there, it meant that all the weirdness of the clothes lines were somehow explicable. Only afterwards, when my boyfriend and I compared notes did we realise that we both sensed something archaic about his outfit and demeanour.
This may be consistent with the 'organised protest or celebration' theory, but the fact that this chap was bareheaded is not really consistent with a timeslip - before the 60's, most railway employees and security staff were required to wear hats whenever they were on duty. In the war it would have been a tin hat, of course.

If instead it were a timeslip back to the 80's, when Cardboard City were in full swing, then the hatlessness might be explicable.
 
This was Waterloo, right? Waterloo is famous for its homeless population - a population that became so large in the 80s that it was labelled Cardboard City.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_City_(London)
It seems to have come back in recent years
but it doesn't normally extend into the Underground tunnels themselves. I suspect that you might have seen some kind of organised protest or celebration, especially since the homeless have recently been banned from all the food outlets at Waterloo station.
This may be consistent with the 'organised protest or celebration' theory, but the fact that this chap was bareheaded is not really consistent with a timeslip - before the 60's, most railway employees and security staff were required to wear hats whenever they were on duty. In the war it would have been a tin hat, of course.

If instead it were a timeslip back to the 80's, when Cardboard City were in full swing, then the hatlessness might be explicable.

Excellent idea!
 
wouldnt liminal apply more to the train journey than the stations ? liminal just means transitional no, or are you using it otherwise ?

Yes, maybe...then again.

I meant "liminal" as being transitional - the place as well as the state of mind of the people transiting there.

In the same way that the "Crossroads" represent a location between two worlds.

I'm not sure that I am doing a good job of explaining it, but it makes sense to me. :dunno:
 
Yes, maybe...then again.

I meant "liminal" as being transitional - the place as well as the state of mind of the people transiting there.

In the same way that the "Crossroads" represent a location between two worlds.

I'm not sure that I am doing a good job of explaining it, but it makes sense to me. :dunno:

I tend to think of them also as "fringe areas" Crime tends to happen more often in fringe areas because a person's attention is focused on the goal ahead, not the transitional space itself.
You may enjoy reading this:
http://www.nononsenseselfdefense.com/fringe.html
The tendency of liminal spaces to be eerie is possibly linked to this same process of attention.
That said, liminal spaces have long been associated with magic. There is thought to be immense power in the places where one thing becomes another. The cracks in the world where magic gets through.

I happened to read an interesting piece about this on Tumblr once, but can't find it again. But since liminal spaces have been going through something of a vogue, searching the term on Tumblr turned up quite a few musings on the subject. :)
https://www.tumblr.com/search/liminal spaces
 
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