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Time Or Dimensional Slips

A Norwich toilet timeslip to the future (it was a notorious cottage though, and I'm sure there were ways for people to "disappear" should they need to)

https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/23147452.tombland-norwich-creepy-toilets-time-travel-tale/

Tombland Norwich: creepy toilets and a time-travel tale
It was a trip to the toilet that led to time travel into the future: and despite being in the centre of Norwich’s clubland, it didn’t involve any intoxication whatsoever.
This curious tale is courtesy of Reverend Lionel Fanthorpe, a retired British priest who has also worked as a journalist, teacher, TV presenter, author and lecturer and who was born in Dereham and taught in Norfolk from the 1950s to 1979.
It involves the incredibly creepy but now-demolished underground toilets at Tombland, which were built in the 1930s and demolished in 2020, and time travel into the future: not your standard visit to what even Norwich City Council described as “generally unwelcoming” public loos.
Tombland has been a market place, a centre for merchants, the home of a palace and a cathedral and a place which has witnessed revolts, great fires and medieval fairs.
Although its evocative name suggests a place where burials occurred, Tombland takes its name from an old English word derived from the Danish meaning ‘empty space’.
Rev Fanthorpe has spoken several times of something strange that happened in the sunken toilets, which until they were demolished were visible from street level due to a Cold War bunker-style ‘lid’ which announced them to the public.

The tale begins as Rev Fanthorpe and wife Patricia had returned from a walk around the Cathedral and to their car parked next to the underground toilets in Tombland (neither exist today, dating this experience to, we believe, before the mid-1990s)
In an interview with themalestrom.com he said: “…as we came out [of the Cathedral gate] a poor woman came running across to us, her car was parked pretty close to ours. She saw my dog collar and realised I was a priest and she said, ‘Father can you help me?’
“’I don’t know what’s happened to my husband. He went to the toilet and left me in the car and didn’t come back. I asked a traffic warden who went past if he’d be kind enough to take a look down there in case he’s had a heart attack or fallen on the stairs.’

The traffic warden had walked down the steps and into the toilet, checking the cubicles and the urinal, but there was no one there: the woman swore she could not have missed her partner leaving.
“She was getting more and more worried so I went and had a look down there myself and just as the traffic warden reported, the place was empty,” said Rev Fanthorpe.
“Then, not long after, as Patricia and I were talking to her and trying to comfort her, to my utter astonishment, a man emerges from this toilet that I had seen empty with my own eyes, looking very bewildered.”
The man walked to his car to the delight of his worried wife. Ashen-faced, he told her he needed to recover for a moment before he could explain. Then he told a strange tale.

“He said he’d gone down to use the toilet, then come up again, only to find his car was not there, his wife was not there and everything looked strangely different,” said Rev Fanthorpe.
“The cars a little way ahead of where that toilet was located were going past on the road and he said they were almost silent, it sounded as though they had electric engines rather than the normal internal combustion engines we’re used to.
“He said: ‘I stood there and it was as if I’d gone into the future.’”
The man added: “I’ve read science fiction stories in which there are time slips and if you can get back to the right place again you might be able to slip back.”
Looking out over an unfamiliar view, the man stood staring for a few minutes and then went back down the stairs, rested for a moment and walked back up into what was, for him, the present day. His wife and the Fanthorpes were waiting.
Rev Fanthorpe said: “I tried to weigh up what might have happened and it seemed when he came up the stairs the first time there had been some sort of time slip, – you get time slips and time quakes just as you do earthquakes or faults in the electricity supply.
“I certainly couldn’t explain how or what had happened. I think time is very mysterious and he did exactly the right thing by going down again and when he came back up, he was in our time.”

The underground Tombland toilets were closed by Norwich City Council in 2012 due to maintenance costs and lots of plans were mooted as to what should happen to them.
City Hall’s feasibility study in 2018, noted: “The toilets are not easily accessible and were generally unwelcoming when they were open to the public, at times attracting antisocial behaviour.”
In November 2020, work began on the disused block as part of a shake-up to the area which saw bus stops moved and open space created for pedestrians.
As the work continued, a skull was unearthed followed by around a dozen skeletons.
Analysis of two of the skeletons suggested they could be brothers – one in his late teens, the other in his early 20s - who were executed, possibly during Kett’s Rebellion.
The other skeletons were far older, dating from between 772AD and 941AD and offered a tantalising insight into where one of Norwich’s lost churches might once have stood.

Archaeologists believed they would have been buried in what was once the churchyard of St Michael’s, a church which was known to have been demolished at the turn of the 12th century, but which has never been precisely located.
Tombland is a treasure trove of ghosts. There’s also the Grey Lady of Tombland and the cannibal child ghost of the street’s crooked house.
But how did he go back down again? If it was the future we know it’s been demolished. I suppose it could have been a parallel universe slip.
 
The feature of futuristic cars driving silently appears in a number of cases. Could certainly be a time slip, if not a clever hoax. The name Fanthorpe takes me back to my childhood, when he authored tons of weird stories (under several different names). He was also a martial arts expert at one stage.
Wonder what Martial Arts he is a expert as it said Dan Grade which means Japanese.
 
That's more Sapphire and Steel territory.
They never had anything that straight forward. I loved the time slip element in The Living and the Dead.

Maybe I should write some myself. I’ve been a bit lax in the writing department lately. I need to get back into it in the new year.
 
To be taken with a large pinch of salt. Interesting but not really believable. And so much attention to the men’s clothes the women’s barely gets a mention, too hard to google was it?



Liverpool didn’t have mounted police until 1886.

29.jpg


Hanover Street and the Bank of England ( date unspecified )

maximus otter
 
i Absolutely L❤️VE this kind of stuff .

I'd like to experience a Time ⏰ / Dimensional Slip myself someday .

I'm Fascinated & interested in these kinds of ParaNormal experiences ....... Practically JEALOUS of those who have experienced them
Having studied them for years, I eventually had one, in a local high energy area. But I didn't realise what it was at the time, which was probably a good thing!
 
It was a bit early for me to see the first time around I was only born late 70s. I did catch one on Britbox I can’t remember why I didn’t like it now. But there was some reason I left it after one episode.
Apologies, I didn't realise that Mr @Carl Grove had mentioned this a few minutes before I posted.

Anyway this should be moved to the TV thread as @hunck will not be pleased that we're talking about it here.
 
I know. It was so good and left with that cliffhanger.
My brother bought me that on DVD a few years ago - I was obsessed with that programme growing up. And they meet future possible versions of themselves, I've always remembered that. I think the boy from Timeslip was in Penda's Fen a few years later? (Or I may be misremembering something I vaguely read). But it was a cracking series. We really need more like that, rather than all the Whizz Bang Time Travel shenanigans that seems to pass for TV these days.

Except Dr Who, about which I will not hear one bad word. Unless I say it.
 
Liverpool didn’t have mounted police until 1886.

29.jpg


Hanover Street and the Bank of England ( date unspecified )

maximus otter
He keeps slipping up on such details. In an earlier post he claimed Liverpool police still used whistles when in fact they had been issued with radios. 'Craig' and 'Val'...? The names of the 'witnesses' are rather common whereas in my experience doctors and vets came from well-heeled, middle-class families who would have given their children 'posher' names e.g.. Alexander, Felicity, Beatrice.... (this may be changing now but back then only 10% of young people went to university, a prerequisite to being a doctor or vet and such professions were chosen by said middle-class offspring)


He also doesn't even bother to state how these witnesses got in touch with him and when, or indeed any other information about them. Complete fabrication in my book.
 
My brother bought me that on DVD a few years ago - I was obsessed with that programme growing up. And they meet future possible versions of themselves, I've always remembered that. I think the boy from Timeslip was in Penda's Fen a few years later? (Or I may be misremembering something I vaguely read). But it was a cracking series. We really need more like that, rather than all the Whizz Bang Time Travel shenanigans that seems to pass for TV these days.
Yes, Spencer Banks;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penda's_Fen
 
It’s probably been asked before, apologies if it has, but has anybody ever found evidence of timeslips being reported on in old newspapers? I mean surely if - like with the Slemen Christmas timeslip example posted above - there were several witnesses to a strange new cab not powered by animals (the Mini) containing strangely dressed people trundling down the street, newspapers of the day would get hold of the story? Especially if two of those witnesses were policemen. Of course it wouldn’t be called a timeslip so we‘d just have the description of what I image they’d call either a bizarre episode or temporary madness of the witness/es. Just a thought!
 
It’s probably been asked before, apologies if it has, but has anybody ever found evidence of timeslips being reported on in old newspapers? I mean surely if - like with the Slemen Christmas timeslip example posted above - there were several witnesses to a strange new cab not powered by animals (the Mini) containing strangely dressed people trundling down the street, newspapers of the day would get hold of the story? Especially if two of those witnesses were policemen. Of course it wouldn’t be called a timeslip so we‘d just have the description of what I image they’d call either a bizarre episode or temporary madness of the witness/es. Just a thought!
It's a good idea, so we need someone with good eyesight and a lot of spare time to go to the newspaper archive and look for these cases! Another similar case would be the Regent Street incident.
 
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