Time Or Dimensional Slips

[CuriousIdent]

Timeslip at Waterloo Station


Location: Waterloo Station, London

Date: May / June 1992

Type:

• Type 3: A sharp realistic image that surrounds the witness. People in the image seem unaware of the witness's presence, and there is no physical contact with elements in the perceived environment.

Persons Involved: FTMB forum poster AsamiYamazaki

Number of Persons Involved: 2

Interactions:

• Visual – Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.

Source of Testimony: The FTMB thread Timeslip at Waterloo Station in the IHTM forum: https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/timeslip-at-waterloo-station.17728/


Description: To quote:

"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.


...


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!"

Notes:

A couple of posters debated as to whether this might have been some kind of slip back to Waterloo undergrounds use as a bomb shelter during WW2


MorningAngel: 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.


Although as eburacum pointed out:

“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.”


Conversation shifted to the 1980s and Waterloo’s Cardboard City of homeless people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardboard_City_(London) ):

eburacum: 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.


It was also discussed that depending on the thickness of the lengths of string (i.e. id closer to that of ropes) they could have been the equivalent of a ‘Two Penny Hangover’ – a Victorian Doss House concept, whereby individuals could rent a place on a length of rope to lie against in lieu of a proper surface to sleep on.

It is difficult to say with certainty that Waterloo was intentionally used as an Air Raid shelter during WW2. It was certainly not one of the eight deep level shelters built during the war.

At the outbreak of WW2 the British government were reluctant to allow their use as shelters.

“Reasons given were the spread of disease due to the lack of toilet facilities at many stations, the inherent danger of people falling onto the lines, and that people sheltering in the stations and tunnels might be tempted to stay in them day and night because they would feel safer there than outside the stations.”


They also weren’t immune to German bombing.

On 16 September 1940, at Marble Arch tube station, 20 people were killed.

On 14 October 1940, a bomb penetrated the road and tunnel at Balham tube station, blew up the water mains and sewage pipes, and killed 68 people. Mostly by drowning.

At Bank station a direct hit caused a crater of 120 ft by 100 ft on 11 January 1941, the road above the station collapsed and killed 56 occupants.

However, the highest death toll was caused during an accident at Bethnal Green tube station on 8 March 1943, when 1,500 people entered the station. The crowd suddenly panicked on hearing the sound of an unfamiliar explosion. Someone stumbled on the stairs, and the crowd pushing on, were falling on top of one another. 173 people were crushed to death in the disaster.


80 London tube stations were used officially as impromptu shelters by the end of the war. But I have been unable to find a list of which stations those were.

AsamiYamazaki has been inactive on the FTMB since May 2015.

 

[Dr_Baltar]

Timeslip at Waterloo Station


Location: Waterloo Station, London

Date: May / June 1992

Type:

• Type 3: A sharp realistic image that surrounds the witness. People in the image seem unaware of the witness's presence, and there is no physical contact with elements in the perceived environment.

Persons Involved: FTMB forum poster AsamiYamazaki

Number of Persons Involved: 2

Interactions:

• Visual – Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.

Source of Testimony: The FTMB thread Timeslip at Waterloo Station in the IHTM forum: http://forum.forteantimes.com/index.php?threads/timeslip-at-waterloo-station.17728/

etc...

There was plenty of construction going on at that time. Upgrading of the Waterloo and City line for starters, prior to its acquisition by London Underground (it had previously been operated by British Rail as part of its mainline overground operation at Waterloo). There was also the beginnings of the construction of the new Eurostar terminal above ground at Waterloo in the early 90s. This would all cause quite a bit of disruption and perhaps what was witnessed were misconstrued construction works.

 

[CuriousIdent]

There was plenty of construction going on at that time. Upgrading of the Waterloo and City line for starters, prior to its acquisition by London Underground (it had previously been operated by British Rail as part of its mainline overground operation at Waterloo). There was also the beginnings of the construction of the new Eurostar terminal above ground at Waterloo in the early 90s. This would all cause quite a bit of disruption and perhaps what was witnessed were misconstrued construction works.

Could well have been. Anybody who has ever seen a tube station in a state of works being done will know that it can be a little bit unnerving.

We tend to think of the Underground as an ever-running entity. A living thing you can count on to be there. But it is a very old entity, which as it has modernised hasn't really replaced the old as much as (for practicality reasons, I'm sure) often just built on top of the old with the new. And when maintenance peels the veneer back to expose a view of something older it can be jarring.

When escalators are temporarily closed at a station you can find yourself being funneled off a platform, through yellowed corridors unused in years, and out of the station up creaky spiral staircases that don't look like they've been used since Victoria was on the throne. Even closing something as small as a single side of the escalators for maintenance can radically change the acoustics of the station.

So there can be viable reasons why a tube station can *feel* eerie, which aren't supernatural in nature.

That said it's still difficult to come up with a conclusive reason as to why thee would be string or ropes strung up in this fashion.

 

[escargot]

Could well have been. Anybody who has ever seen a tube station in a state of works being done will know that it can be a little bit unnerving.

We tend to think of the Underground as an ever-running entity. A living thing you can count on to be there. But it is a very old entity, which as it has modernised hasn't really replaced the old as much as (for practicality reasons, I'm sure) often just built on top of the old with the new. And when maintenance peels the veneer back to expose a view of something older it can be jarring.

When escalators are temporarily closed at a station you can find yourself being funneled off a platform, through yellowed corridors unused in years, and out of the station up creaky spiral staircases that don't look like they've been used since Victoria was on the throne. Even closing something as small as a single side of the escalators for maintenance can radically change the acoustics of the station.

So there can be viable reasons why a tube station can *feel* eerie, which aren't supernatural in nature.

That said it's still difficult to come up with a conclusive reason as to why thee would be string or ropes strung up in this fashion.

So true. Stations are atmospheric places. Carlisle, for example, has been scaffolded up for yonks now. It reminds me of Terry Gilliam's fillum Brazil.

 

[CuriousIdent]

So true. Stations are atmospheric places. Carlisle, for example, has been scaffolded up for yonks now. It reminds me of Terry Gilliam's fillum Brazil.

Ha. Just be careful if anybody approaches you in a Baby mask, yes?

It's true though. When they made over Liverpool Lime Street for the Capital of Culture a decade back that became a vastly different place for a couple of years. The huge open space of the glass roof shrunk down by scaffolding.

Nothing compared next to Birmingham New Street though. The entire orientation of the station and surrounds is now completely different to the building I knew travelling through it for Uni at the tail end of the 90s.

 

[escargot]

Ha. Just be careful if anybody approaches you in a Baby mask, yes?

It's true though. When they made over Liverpool Lime Street for the Capital of Culture a decade back that became a vastly different place for a couple of years. The huge open space of the glass roof shrunk down by scaffolding.

Nothing compared next to Birmingham New Street though. The entire orientation of the station and surrounds is now completely different to the building I knew travelling through it for Uni at the tail end of the 90s.

Lime Street is being rejigged again - Spotlight on Christmas 2017: Liverpool Lime Street

There was a hoarding up for a while with an impression of what it'd look like finished. Most bizarre! I have pictures of it somewhere.

Brum, yeh, they're SO proud of it. I can recommend the Tesco for knock-down food and sarnies!

 

[CuriousIdent]

Coliseum Timeslip


Location: The Coliseum, Rome, Italy

Date: 15th December 2000

Type: Type 4: A sharp realistic image, in which the witness is completely integrated; they can communicate with people around them, handle objects, and even purchase things.

Persons Involved: Tracy Dionetello, a New Jersey Housewife, visiting Rome.

Number of Persons Involved: 1

Interactions:

• Visual – Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.
• Physical – Physically interacting with another person or persons.
• Auditory – Hearing a sudden change in the level of background noise in the area.

Source of Testimony: Weekly World News, 13 Feb 2001

Description: Tracy Dionetello, a 39 year old mother of 3, was vacationing in Rome with her family in December of 2000.

During this visit to Rome the family visited the Coliseum. During said visit she claims:

“I was snapping pictures of some of the ruins and trying to imagine what it must have been like in the old days, when all of a sudden I started hearing what sounded like the noises of a huge crowd.

“Everything became blurry for a minute and the next thing I knew the stands were packed with a roaring audience of thousands of people in togas.

“I’d always thought those gladiator battles were romantic, but believe me, they weren’t. The smell of fresh blood and entrails from poor fellows who’d just been disembowelled was nauseating. And I saw one man chop off another man’s head with a sword.

“In one area there was an old man being forced to fight a bull bare-handed and in another corer, this virgin was being publicly deflowered while the crowd laughed and jeered”.

Mrs Dionetello claims to have found herself in the middle of 15 women wearing furs.

“They wanted us to fight a group of these little pygmies. The guards kept herding us toward them and when I was too slow one of them sliced me in the leg with this pitchfork thing”


An image is included with the article.

“Some of the braver girls started to wrestle the pygmies. But I was in a group that tried to run.

“The ground opened up under our feet and we fell into a pit. That’s the last thing I remember”.


The article claims that to the rest of her family and tour group Tracy had simply gone missing, for roughly 20 minutes, after which she was found in an underground chamber some 200 yards from where she was last seen. And semi-conscious.


Notes:

• This is an article from Weekly World News – which while in publication is known to have frequently fabricated or elaborated its stories for the purposes of entertainment.

• Coliseum is misspelled as ‘Colosseum’ in the article.

• The image included is highly likely to be a photoshop or tampered image.

• As anonentity noted in reply to this account:

“ It might be worth mentioning, that the Roman soldiers didn't use the trident, it was a specialised Gladiator who used the trident and net, along with a fish type helmet.”​

It is unlikely that guards at the Coliseum would have used tridents.​

• No record of a Dr Carlo Muni – ‘a scientist who has written extensively about time slips’ – has been found.

• In the article it is claimed Dr Muni “...took measurements and found that the spacing of the wounds corresponded to the spaces between the points of a genuine trident from 250 A.D. – to the millimetre".

If this were true it would still not be a clear confirmation of anything. The likelihood of there being any kind of regulatory sizing for a trident in ancient Rome is deeply unlikely.​

 

[Coal]

If this were true it would still not be a clear confirmation of anything. The likelihood of there being any kind of regulatory sizing for a trident in ancient Rome is deeply unlikely.

But more likely than an 'actual' time-slip one might think.

 

[CuriousIdent]

But more likely than an 'actual' time-slip one might think.

Agreed.

I had reservations of posting this one when I reached it.

It kind of is the Time Slip equivalent of a Sunday Sport article. But still, I thought it might interest some. Even as a source of a bogus story.

 

[CuriousIdent]

A Scottish spinster at the Battle of Nechtanesmere



Location: Letham, Nr Dunnichen Hill, Angus, Scotland

Date: 2 January 1950

Type: Type 2: A clear sharp and totally realistic visual image. A witness will see it and have no idea that it is anything other than an ordinary image.

Persons Involved: Miss E. F. Smith.

Number of Persons Involved: 1

Interactions:

• Visual – Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.

Source of Testimony: Mike Dash’s article A Scottish spinster at the Battle of Nechtanesmere, 685AD which also references Hauntings and Apparitions by Andrew MacKenzie.


Description: Miss Smith had been attending a cocktail party in Brechin, roughly 10 miles from home.

By her own admission she had left the party late an had consumed an unspecified amount of cocktails. Earlier snowfall had been followed by rain, and the road conditions were poor as a result. Roughly 2 miles outside of Brechin Miss Smith skidded her car – “due to her fainting, or [an] other lapse of consciousness” – into a ditch.

She claimed to have not been injured or concussed in any way, but opted to abandon the car, and continue the remaining 8 miles on foot. A journey described as “... along deserted country roads in a countryside with a few scattered farms”.

She was not entirely alone. She had her dog with her (a small dog of unidentified breed). Though as it was a tiny dog she had to carry him on her shoulders for the final 2 miles to Letham.

There was “a commonly used, and normally welcome, shortcut“ back to the village, but that would have taken her out into open country and alongside a dark wooded area. So she deliberately chose not to take that route.

Her experience began about half a mile from the first houses of Letham village. The time was approximately 2 am.

As Dunnichen Hill appeared on the horizon Miss Smith spotted groups of lights moving in the distance. As she got closer to them, these “gradually resolved themselves into a shadowy group of figures carrying flaming torches”. A short distance ahead she noticed a second group, of to her right, about a third of a mile away.

As she reached about 50 yards from the group her dog started to growl.

Miss Smith said ‘He was sitting on my left shoulder and he turned and looked at the lights… and I thought, next he’s going to bark.’

Miss Smith continued home expediently, leaving the scene and the mysterious figures behind her. Upon arriving home she claims to have gone straight to bed. Apparently it was “Only on waking in the morning did she fully recognise how strange the experience had been”.


In September 1971 Miss Smith was interviewed about her experience by Dr James McHarg of the Society of Psychical Research.

“Miss Smith said that at the beginning of the first phase, in the distance straight ahead, she saw… ‘quite a lot of torches.’ Miss Smith felt that what she was seeing had not suddenly started but that it had already been going on when she came upon it. Her recalled reaction was to say to herself, ‘Well, that’s an incredible thing.’…

Speaking about the nearest figures of all, which she watched during the third stage of her experience, Miss Smith, ‘they were obviously looking for their own dead… the one I was watching, the nearest one, would bend down and turn a body over, and, if he didn’t like the look of it, he just turned it back on its face and went on to the next one… There were several of them…. I supposedthey were going to bury them.’

When asked about clothing, Miss Smith said ‘…they looked as if they were in – well, I would have said brown, but that was merely the light – anyway, dark tights, the whole way up, a sort of overall, with a roll collar, and at the end of their tunics there was a larger roll around them too. And it simply went on looking like tights until it reached their feet. I did not see what was on their feet. But they weren’t long boots.’

Miss Smith was asked about the torches the figures she saw were carrying. She replied ‘…they were carrying very long torches in their left hands… [the torches were] very red… Afterwards, I wondered what on earth they’d been made of – tar, I suppose. Was there tar in those days?’



In Hauntings and Apparitions, Andrew MacKenzie, observes: ‘It was assumed that the scene Miss Smith described concerned the aftermath of the Battle of Nechtanesmere.’ At some point in the intervening 20 years she had come to the opinion that this is what she had seen, and freely admitted that she was both aware of the battle, and knew that it was supposed to have been fought near her home village. She insisted, however, that she knew nothing of the specifics of the fight, nor of its precise location, nor of the Pictish period dress and equipment of that period.



Notes:

The descriptions given in the 1971 interview do somewhat match up with Pictish dress, though it would be worth noting that a lot of blanks/gaps can be filled in the course of 20 years. It would be impossible to rule out personal research having affected the details of the memory of the experience for Miss Smith in between times.

It is unclear how Dr McHarg heard of Miss Smith’s story.

A map of Miss Smith’s experience appears in Haunting & Apparitions by Andrew McKenzie

In compiling his piece on this account Mike Dash does go into the history of the Battle of Nechtanesmere. It took place on “20 May 685 and is mostly forgotten today, though it was the Waterloo of late seventh century Scotland. The combatants were the indigenous Picts* and an invading army of Saxons commanded by Ecgfrith, King of Northumbria, who was by some distance the most powerful ruler in the British Isles at the time. The battle was, nonetheless, a Pictish victory, and it resulted in Ecgfrith’s death and the dispersal of his army – thus helping to secure the independence of Scottish kingdoms from Saxon overlordship.”

Though there has been debate over where the battle actually took place in modern Scotland.

“the battle is extremely ill-recorded. The most detailed description is given by Bede, writing in Northumbria some half a century later, though Ecgfrith’s violent end is also mentioned briefly in a couple of Irish chronicles and one Welsh one. Bede observes, in his Ecclesiastical History, that Ecgfrith “rashly led” his army north against the advice of his most trusted advisors, and that the battle occured when “the enemy made show as if they fled, and the king was drawn into the straits of inaccessible mountains, and slain with the greatest part of his forces,” but he sadly neglects to mention even approximately where the fight took place. That detail is supplied by the Annals of Ulster and the Annals of Tigernach (both compiled, according to even the most optimistic estimates, several centuries later), which refer to the battle as “Dún Nechtain”, and by Symeon of Durham who – writing in the 12th century – called it “Nechtanesmere”. The idea that the battle was fought close to a body of water is echoed in the work of the ninth century Welshman Nennius, who called it Gueith Lin Garan, or ‘the Battle of Crane Lake’, but it was not until the early nineteenth century that the likely site was identified by another noted historian, George Chalmers, who (in his Caledonia, or, an Account Historical and Topographic, of North Britain) first suggested it had been fought at Dunnichen, a shallow hill near Forfar, in Angus, which shares its name with a small nearby village.

Since the precise location of the Battle of Nechtansmere is central to our enquiry, it’s worth pausing for a moment to look at the manner in which Chalmers arrived at his conclusion. Alex Woolf of the University of St Andrews, author of the most recent study of the problem, says that he ‘based his identification on early forms of the name preserved in the cartulary of Arbroath abbey; Dunnichen comprised part of the abbey’s endowment and is described there as Dunectin or Dunnechtyn, which seems definitely to stem from Dún Nechtain.’ Chalmers’s conclusion has been generally accepted by scholars ever since, and though there is no longer any sign of a loch or mere near Dunnichen, a small stone monument in the village now commemorates the events of 685.”


So it is impossible to say with total certainty that Dunnichen Hill is the site of the battle. But the village commemorates the battle. Dash’s article also suggests that Dunachton, in Badenoch, on the shores of Loch Insh, is a contested alternative site - again suggested by Alex Woolfe.


Dr McHarg of SPR was apparently very cautious in approaching the background to Miss Smith’s story “he asked no impertinent questions about how much Miss Smith might have drunk at her cocktail party, or whether her intake of alcohol had contributed to her crash, merely offering a brusque assurance that, in any case, an eight-mile walk would have ‘sobered her up’.”

He did not question her mental health thoroughly though did note ‘I detected nothing of a medical (i.e. neurological or psychiatric) nature to suggest temporal lobe epilepsy or any relevant clinical condition.’

Mike Dash notes “McHarg did consider the possibility that the whole experience was a false memory of some sort, produced by long musing on some trigger event. His research, however, inclined him heavily to a third conclusion, that the experince had been real – and, furthermore, that it had most likely been a genuine instance of retrocognition, one that had probably occured in some sort of altered state of consciousness. (It was surely noteworthy, he remarked, that Miss Smith had been more worried about the possibility that her dog might begin to bark, and wake the village, than she had been frightened or intrigued by the bizarre scene she was witnessing.)”

And that the two central points which convinced McHarg that this was a genuine experience were:

• “At the time of the interview McHarg assumed that Miss Smith meant that it had been the flames of the torches that had been unusually red, but she may equally have meant that it had been their shafts. Enquiries revealed that torches in Scotland used to be made from the resinous roots of the Scots fir which, in their natural state, do indeed have a distinctive red colour which would perhaps be enhanced by torchlight. Such roots would have been available at Nechtansmere, for Dunnichen Hill was crowned then, no doubt, as it is today, with the Scots fir of the Caledonian forest.”

• “McHarg’s second point, though, seems far more solid, for it concerns the activity of the ‘Pictish warriors’ reported by Miss Smith, and particularly the way in which, the witness concluded,

“the nearer figures carrying torches were… quite obviously skirting the mere, because they didn’t walk, from where I was looking, straight across to the far corner of the field, they came round…” “​

Dash points out “This deviation can be seen on the map McHarg prepared of the site [above], where it is shown by an arrow curving around the north-east lobe of the mere.

McHarg seemed to be on especially firm ground here – at least so far as Andrew MacKenzie was concerned – because the little local loch, presumably once known as Nechtansmere, had – it will be remembered – drained centuries previously and been turned into farmland. No local knew exactly where the lake had been, and its likely contours were effectively disguised by the gently rolling nature of the landscape. Only a few years earlier, however, during the unusually wet winter of 1946-7, floods had partually refilled the ancient lake, and Dr FT Wainwright of Queens College Dundee – then one of the leading authorities on Dark Age Scotland – had taken the opportunity to map the vanished loch, a task he undertook with the aid of aerial photography. As MacKenzie points out, his results, published in Antiquity in 1948, ‘clearly showed a finger of the loch projecting in a north-easterly direction, round which people moving towards the east would have had to skirt.’”


It cannot be dismissed that this may all have simply been a hallucination, brought on by stress and hypothermia.

Or indeed that Miss Smith simply saw two groups of random people out in the fields, and filled the other details in, in her mind, later on.

 

[Carl Grove]

Coliseum Timeslip


Location: The Coliseum, Rome, Italy

Date: 15th December 2000

Type: Type 4: A sharp realistic image, in which the witness is completely integrated; they can communicate with people around them, handle objects, and even purchase things.

Persons Involved: Tracy Dionetello, a New Jersey Housewife, visiting Rome.

Number of Persons Involved: 1

Interactions:

• Visual – Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.
• Physical – Physically interacting with another person or persons.
• Auditory – Hearing a sudden change in the level of background noise in the area.

Source of Testimony: Weekly World News, 13 Feb 2001

Description: Tracy Dionetello, a 39 year old mother of 3, was vacationing in Rome with her family in December of 2000.

During this visit to Rome the family visited the Coliseum. During said visit she claims:

“I was snapping pictures of some of the ruins and trying to imagine what it must have been like in the old days, when all of a sudden I started hearing what sounded like the noises of a huge crowd.

“Everything became blurry for a minute and the next thing I knew the stands were packed with a roaring audience of thousands of people in togas.

“I’d always thought those gladiator battles were romantic, but believe me, they weren’t. The smell of fresh blood and entrails from poor fellows who’d just been disembowelled was nauseating. And I saw one man chop off another man’s head with a sword.

“In one area there was an old man being forced to fight a bull bare-handed and in another corer, this virgin was being publicly deflowered while the crowd laughed and jeered”.

Mrs Dionetello claims to have found herself in the middle of 15 women wearing furs.

“They wanted us to fight a group of these little pygmies. The guards kept herding us toward them and when I was too slow one of them sliced me in the leg with this pitchfork thing”


An image is included with the article.

View attachment 7641

View attachment 7642


“Some of the braver girls started to wrestle the pygmies. But I was in a group that tried to run.

“The ground opened up under our feet and we fell into a pit. That’s the last thing I remember”.


The article claims that to the rest of her family and tour group Tracy had simply gone missing, for roughly 20 minutes, after which she was found in an underground chamber some 200 yards from where she was last seen. And semi-conscious.


Notes:

• This is an article from Weekly World News – which while in publication is known to have frequently fabricated or elaborated its stories for the purposes of entertainment.

• Coliseum is misspelled as ‘Colosseum’ in the article.

• The image included is highly likely to be a photoshop or tampered image.

• As anonentity noted in reply to this account:

“ It might be worth mentioning, that the Roman soldiers didn't use the trident, it was a specialised Gladiator who used the trident and net, along with a fish type helmet.”​

It is unlikely that guards at the Coliseum would have used tridents.​

• No record of a Dr Carlo Muni – ‘a scientist who has written extensively about time slips’ – has been found.

• In the article it is claimed Dr Muni “...took measurements and found that the spacing of the wounds corresponded to the spaces between the points of a genuine trident from 250 A.D. – to the millimetre".

If this were true it would still not be a clear confirmation of anything. The likelihood of there being any kind of regulatory sizing for a trident in ancient Rome is deeply unlikely.​

Also worth noting that there is no record of anyone named Dionetello in US genealogical data, with the qualification that people in the US have the right to have their records removed from public scrutiny should they demand it.

 

[CuriousIdent]

Three 1950s youths in a medieval plague village



Location: Kersey, Suffolk.

Date: A Sunday in October 1957

Type:

• Type 2: A clear sharp and totally realistic visual image. A witness will see it and have no idea that it is anything other than an ordinary image.

Persons Involved: Naval cadets William Laing, Michael Crowley and Ray Baker.

Number of Persons Involved: 3

Interactions:

• Visual - Change in Environmental Appearance and/or attire of persons in the vicinity.
• Visual – Change in Season observed.
• Auditory – Hearing a sudden change in the level of background noise in the area.

Source of Testimony: Article by historian Mike Dash with references to this experience's inclusion in Adventures in Time by the SPR's Andrew Mackenzie.

Description:

One morning in October 1957 three naval cadets (William Laing, Michael Crowley and Ray Baker) were taking part in a map-reading exercise, in the Suffolk Countryside.

The exercise was a relatively simple one – to navigate their way to a designated point, across approximately 5 miles of countryside, and return to base to report what they had seen. This particular exercise led them through the picturesque Suffolk village of Kersey. But as they did so, something did not seem quite right to them.

On their way towards the village the church bells had been ringing. But as they made their way into the village itself they noted that these bells stopped. And it was not just the bells which had fallen silent. They noted that the entire village was. As Dash states “even the ducks stood quiet and motionless by the shallow stream that ran across the road where the main street began.”

As they walked through the village they noted that all birdsong ceased, the breeze against the trees stopped and the wind had seemingly dropped away to nothing.

The main street of Kersey was deserted. As Dash notes in his article this was not unusual “for a Sunday morning in 1957, especially in the rural heart of England. But even the remotest British hamlets displayed some signs of modernity by then—cars parked by the roadside, phone wires strung along the roads, aerials on roofs—and there was nothing of that sort in this village. In fact, the houses on the high street all looked ancient; they were ragged, hand-built, timber-framed: “almost medieval in appearance,” one boy thought.”

The three cadets chose to take a look through the window of one of the nearby buildings. They noted that the window pane was what they described as “Grimy” and looking around there was no clear or obvious signs of it having been recently inhabited. From the visible interior the building appeared to be some kind of Butcher’s Shop, but one of the three relayed to Andrew MacKenzie that what they saw unsettled them:

“There were no tables or counters, just two or three whole oxen carcasses which had been skinned and in places were quite green with age. There was a green-painted door and windows with smallish glass panes, one at the front and one at the side, rather dirty-looking. I remember that as we three looked through that window in disbelief at the green and mouldy green carcasses… the general feeling certainly was one of disbelief and unreality… Who would believe that in 1957 that the health authorities would allow such conditions?”

The three peered into another house. It too showed no obvious signs of recent habitation. MacKenzie says: “The walls had been crudely whitewashed, but the rooms were empty; the boys could see no possessions, no furniture, and they thought the rooms themselves appeared to be “not of modern day quality.” “

The boys were a little bit spooked by this. They turned back and left the village promptly.

As they reached the top of a small hill, one of the three noted “suddenly we could hear the bells once more and saw the smoke rising from chimneys, [though] none of the chimneys was smoking when we were in the village… We ran for a few hundred yards as if to shake off the weird feeling.”

William Laing was the Perthshire born teen who was leading the group. Reflecting upon the experience some years later her recalls:

“It was a ghost village, so to speak. It was almost as if we had walked back in time… I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness and depression in Kersey, but also a feeling of unfriendliness and unseen watchers which sent shivers up one’s back… I wondered if we’d knocked at a door to ask a question who might have answered it? It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

Michael Crowley was from Worcestershire and Ray Baker was a cockney. All three were 15 at the time, and had only recently signed up to join the Royal Navy.

They relayed their experience to their superiors upon returning to base. Laing describes their response as “rather sceptical,” but that they “laughed it off and agreed that we’d seen Kersey all right.”


Notes:

By the 1980s William Laing and Michael Crowley has both separately moved to Australia, but kept in touch. Over a phone conversation Laing had apparently told Crowley that the experience had always troubled him. Crowley did not remember it in quite as much detail as his fellow cadet, but he too did think that ‘something strange had happened’. Crowley certainly did recall the silence, the lack of aerials and streetlights, and peering through the bizarre butcher’s shop window.

It was this conversation which led to Laing contacting Andrew MacKenzie (by letter) of the Society for Psychical Research.

It was MacKenzie who suggested that, after hearing the details of the case, what the boys had experienced may have been a plausible timeslip - and a timeslip to centuries much earlier than 1957. Dash notes:

“A long correspondence (he and Laing exchanged letters for two years) and a foray into local libraries with the help of a historian from Kersey helped to confirm that view. In 1990, Laing flew to England, and the two men walked through the village, reliving the experience.”

It became the lead case in MacKenzie’s book on retrocognition – ‘Adventures in Time’ (published 1997).

During researching this experience Ray Baker, the third boy, was traced. But he claimed to have no recollection of the experience the others remembered so vividly.

Laing was able to pinpoint that first house which the boys had looked into on October 1957. It was listed as a private residence back then. That also remained the case when Laing and MacKenzie revisited it in 1990. The building dated back to around 1350 AD, and research through local records revealed that it had indeed been used as a Butchers Shop in its past. The earliest recorded usage as such was from 1790.

In further conversation with Andrew Mackenzie, Laing also mentioned that when they had entered the village “it was verdant… and the trees were that magnificent green colour one finds in spring or early summer”. Which confused him, as they should not have been so in October.

In retracing their steps in 1990 one other detail came to surface – that of Kersey’s Church. The three teens had walked across the Ford in Kersey. It was there they noted the ducks, and the silence which they claimed to have fallen over the village. St. Mary’s church is the central landmark for the village. It sits at the highest point visible for much of the village. It certainly would have been visible when moving uphill to climb that street.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@52.0...4!1sBIynu3bOljHVmjMQHd238w!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Laing told MacKenzie that the group had not seen a church after they descended into the village, and after that change in background volume had occurred. He told MacKenzie explicitly that “there was no sign of a church. I would certainly have seen it as I had a field of observation of 360 degrees.” Michael Crowley likewise recalled seeing “no church or pub” during their visit.

This led MacKenzie to speculate the possibility that the group had somehow visited Kersey at a time before construction of the church (and most importantly its tower) had been completed.


St Mary’s dates back to the 14th Century. MacKenzie’s research into the history of the church and town showed that construction of its tower had been halted (and later completed) at some point between 1348 and 1349, because of the outbreak of the Black Death. That plague had killed half the population of Kersey, and MacKenzie concluded that deserted, silent, village the cadets might have walked through was a moment in Kersey's past, as it had been in the aftermath of the Black Death outbreak - when the shell of the half-constructed church would have been obscured by trees. And, since Laing and Crowley also recalled that the village buildings had glazed windows (a rarity back in the Middle Ages), MacKenzie further suggested that the most likely date was around c.1420 - when the church remained unfinished, but the village was growing rich from the wool trade , through sales of it's production of Kersey Cloth.


As Dash points out in his article though, Kersey is a very old village (“it was first mentioned in an Anglo-Saxon will of c.900”). It would not have looked modern in 1957 and still boasts a number of medieval period properties to this day. Thatched and half-timbered buildings. The village itself still looks and feels like it is from another age.

It has been previously used as a olde worlde film location for this reason - most recently doubling for the fictional Russian Meerkat village of ‘Meerkovo’ in a Compare the Market (Meerkat) advert.

He also notes that the lack of wires and aerials may possibly be explained by something altogether more human. Kersey was only hooked up to the national grid in the early 1950s.

“and then only after protests from the Suffolk Preservation Society, which argued strenuously for the preservation of its skyline. [Electrical Review p.414; Electrical Timesp.300] “

Argument which reached up to mentions in Parliament. Records shows:

“negotiations have resulted in the overhead line being carried behind the houses on either side of the street and a cable being laid underground at the only point where the street has to be crossed.” [Command Papers p.96]

So much of the wiring for the village would not have been on display in 1957.

Dash also points out that MacKenzie’s assertion that the windows had glass (still very rare in the 14th and 15th centuries) because Kersey Cloth had brought the village wealth is somewhat flawed.

“And while it’s possible that Kersey’s wealth did make it an exception in this period, one wonders why—if it was wealthy—its houses would have been devoid of furniture. There are other problems with the dating, too, not least the discrepancy between the boys’ description (of a settlement abandoned, as it might have been in 1349) and MacKenzie’s “wealthy village” of 1420. “


Additionally he points out one detail which Mackenzie might not even have considered:

“...the question of whether a medieval village would have had a butcher’s shop. Such places did exist, but they were found almost exclusively in towns; meat was expensive, which meant that most peasants’ diets remained largely vegetarian, and when animals were slaughtered in a village—for a saints’ day feast, perhaps—they were hard to keep fresh and would have been consumed immediately. [Mortimer pp.10-13, 93-4] Yes, meat consumption did rise steadily in the late 14th century (from “a tenth or less of the food budget to a quarter or a third of the total”), but the evidence we have suggests that beef was only rarely eaten; in the village of Sedgeford, in nearby Norfolk, only three cattle were slaughtered a year around this time. [Dyer pp.85-6] Sedgeford was only about half the size of Kersey, admittedly, but even so it stretches credulity to imagine a shop with two or three whole ox carcasses in stock as early as 1420, especially when it’s remembered that Kersey had its own weekly market, where fresh meat would have been available, and which would have provided fierce competition.”


It would be worth noting that of the three witnesses of this potential timeslip experience only two recall the experience as having been something unusual. Baker did not.

Though that two witnesses' recollections seem quite so closely aligned cannot be entirely written off, either.

 

[Dr_Baltar]

...a hallucination, brought on by stress and hypothermia.

I haven't heard of those cocktails before.

 

[CuriousIdent]

I haven't heard of those cocktails before.

Don't ask for them. They will f&*ing WRECK you.

And possibly cause you to encounter what you believe to be an army of Picts marching upon you, bearing flaming torches.

It's a trade off.

 

[Dr_Baltar]

And possibly cause you to encounter what you believe to be an army of Picts marching upon you, bearing flaming torches.

Standard Friday night out.

 

[blessmycottonsocks]

"By her own admission she had left the party late an had consumed an unspecified amount of cocktails. Earlier snowfall had been followed by rain, and the road conditions were poor as a result. Roughly 2 miles outside of Brechin Miss Smith skidded her car – “due to her fainting, or [an] other lapse of consciousness” – into a ditch."

Having drunk a fair bit. Passed out at the wheel and crashed her car and then took the bizarre decision to walk through snow and rain for EIGHT MILES rather than the far shorter walk back to the venue of the party to seek help, it's a wonder she survived!

Given the frequent symptoms of forgetfulness, confusion and disorientation following a spell of unconsciousness, coupled with hypothermia, exhaustion, the effects of alcohol and shock from the car crash, makes this case far less persuasive.

The one time slip account I found the most impressive, given the reputation of the witness, was that of Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard.

 

[CuriousIdent]

"By her own admission she had left the party late an had consumed an unspecified amount of cocktails. Earlier snowfall had been followed by rain, and the road conditions were poor as a result. Roughly 2 miles outside of Brechin Miss Smith skidded her car – “due to her fainting, or [an] other lapse of consciousness” – into a ditch."

Having drunk a fair bit. Passed out at the wheel and crashed her car and then took the bizarre decision to walk through snow and rain for EIGHT MILES rather than the far shorter walk back to the venue of the party to seek help, it's a wonder she survived!

Given the frequent symptoms of forgetfulness, confusion and disorientation following a spell of unconsciousness, coupled with hypothermia, exhaustion, the effects of alcohol and shock from the car crash, makes this case far less persuasive.

The one time slip account I found the most impressive, given the reputation of the witness, was that of Air Marshall Sir Victor Goddard.

Yes. It's on the shortlist. I'm just trying to work out what the best accounts are to build a report. It's only obliquely referred to on wikipedia, and some of the articles posted to this thread don't provide a lot of details on the actual slip itself.

 

[Carl Grove]

Regarding Kersey:

1. Baker, who noticed nothing unusual, was a city lad who had no idea what a small village would have looked like. He seems to have accepted that country folk lived in squalid conditions, and that was that.

2. I think that the evidence that the witnesses entered the slip (with changes in the season, the disappearance of chimney smoke and modern fixtures, and the silencing of the church bells) is strong, so this must qualify as a Type 3. If you take drinking water from the stream as an interaction, it may be Type 4.

3. Laing identified the location of the butcher's shop on a picture postcard for MacKenzie, who visited the town and found the owner of the building in 1990, Mrs Jillian Finch, who declared, "But this used to be a butcher's shop." There was evidence of its being there back to 1790, although the trail went cold before that.

 

[CuriousIdent]

Regarding Kersey:

1. Baker, who noticed nothing unusual, was a city lad who had no idea what a small village would have looked like. He seems to have accepted that country folk lived in squalid conditions, and that was that.

That is entirely plausible. I come from what would certainly be described as a 'rural area' here in Warwickshire. But the town I grew up in had over 20,000 people, and most of the usual chain stores you'd expect of a town by the 1990s. It wasn't remote. It wasn't particularly countrifed. Yet when I got to Uni mostly when I spoke to people who'd grown up in London they naturally assumed I grew up on a farming lot, cut off from the rest of the world...

I've often found that many of those raised in Capital don't venture far beyond Greater London, unless it's to fly out to another Country. That there is this genuine belief that somehow anything beyond Watford is just cows and fields, and that the North of England begins somewhere 100 miles South of Birmingham.

It's entirely possible that Baker could have dismissed Kersey in this fashion. Although you'd think that he might have recalled something like the rotting meat.

2. I think that the evidence that the witnesses entered the slip (with changes in the season, the disappearance of chimney smoke and modern fixtures, and the silencing of the church bells) is strong, so this must qualify as a Type 3. If you take drinking water from the stream as an interaction, it may be Type 4.

I certainly think that if we take it all at face value (although we cannot entirely write off the possibility that decades of thought about the experience may have embellished or altered it slightly) there is strong enough detail to see this as a plausible timeslip experience.

But why I labelled this as a Type 2 rather than 3 was largely based on the lack of other individuals encountered during the experience. Visually and audibly it could be argued that something changed here - Season, Sound, the Church being missing, etc. But the three cadets did not see any other person in the vicinity.

We classified Type 3 as including: "People in the image seem unaware of the witness's presence, and there is no physical contact with elements in the perceived environment".

Well, the latter is true. The cadets may have peered through windows, but we have no direct statement of physical contact. And they saw no people in the vicinity, to acknowledge them or not.

If we believe that this was a timeslip to the aftermath of the Black Death having taken half of Kersey's population then maybe that could be understandable. But I certainly feel that this is what makes the difference here.

3. Laing identified the location of the butcher's shop on a picture postcard for MacKenzie, who visited the town and found the owner of the building in 1990, Mrs Jillian Finch, who declared, "But this used to be a butcher's shop." There was evidence of its being there back to 1790, although the trail went cold before that.

And to be honest, with a village of this size, it's great that records have been kept even that far back. A lot of MacKenzie's final timeline is a little speculative. It cannot be considered provably accurate as a theory. But I certainly don't think that this rules out the possibility of there having been a timeslip here.

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

What's very striking about these is the unearthly silence/weirdness that descends just before the 'time slip' becomes apparent. It's a recurrent idea. But something about it reads as very filmic. I'm wondering if we could find time slip accounts that predate movies, and all their conventions, and see if they still had this element? It somehow seems informed by our culture. Or maybe, the culture of films and that convention of things appearing to go into slo-mo/silence as signalling entering another dimension, are more deeply hard-wired in the human psyche, somehow?

We've mentioned that weird feeling of an indefinable dip in the atmosphere, in other, paranormal but non time slip-related threads. I have had that experience when certain people appear on the scene, even at a fair distance - just this odd feeling almost of the atmospheric pressure changing,almost like your ears feel at altitude, or being underwater. So that does seem to go hand in hand with other experiences.

 

[CuriousIdent]

What's very striking about these is the unearthly silence/weirdness that descends just before the 'time slip' becomes apparent. It's a recurrent idea. But something about it reads as very filmic. I'm wondering if we could find time slip accounts that predate movies, and all their conventions, and see if they still had this element? It somehow seems informed by our culture. Or maybe, the culture of films and that convention of things appearing to go into slo-mo/silence as signalling entering another dimension, are more deeply hard-wired in the human psyche, somehow?

We've mentioned that weird feeling of an indefinable dip in the atmosphere, in other, paranormal but non time slip-related threads. I have had that experience when certain people appear on the scene, even at a fair distance - just this odd feeling almost of the atmospheric pressure changing,almost like your ears feel at altitude, or being underwater. So that does seem to go hand in hand with other experiences.

I know what you mean. And if I were shooting a film or TV show that is exactly the technique I would be looking to use to convey that shift. That moment of eeriness.

It kind of is common practice for film today. Though I'm not sure how recent a trait or technique that is.

I mean, to use the last example, how often would that technique have been used in the 1950s? TV still very much in its infancy, with static camera shots for entire scenes of drama still very much the norm. Would it be so widely known?

Truth be told it's a *little* bit before my time. But I do wonder.

Likewise I do rather suspect that the technique may also have been informed by personal experience. It is not uncommon for a sudden and traumatic/unnerving event to become a slow motion or supernaturally silent event in your own memory.

For example, when I was 19 I crashed my car. It was the day after Boxing Day and I had made a quick supermarket run over to another town for provisions, to return to my parents' place. It was raining. Relatively hard.

A few hundred yards up the road there was a pub, part of the Harvester chain, on the right hand side of the road - masked from sight by the thick trees which form a barrier marking out the estate next door - a fomer stately home owned by the Freemasons.

The road was a single lane 40mph limit. I wasn't going over it. This was Christmas week, there were speed cops around the area, and while I hadn't drink a drop of booze since Christmas day I wasn't going to risk getting a ticket.

The car ahead was aiming for Pub. They only spotted it very late and slammed their brakes on. I slammed mine on too. But my tyres skidded on the wet road surface, and while I tried to swerve the car to avoid impact I failed. The driver's side of the front of my vehicle smashed into theirs, just as I saw their indicators going on.

That was the first car accident I'd ever been involved in. It is etched upon my brain. An my recollection of the event is one of a slow experience. Watching in horror as another driver's inability to know where they were going wrote off my first car, and left me to return to Uni relying on public transport the following week and term. I can still recall the sound of the cars smacking together but in my minds eye everything else was basically silent.

On that's not real. I mean, yes, the experience was definitely real. But in reality there was no slow down. It was quick. Instantaneous. All over in a heartbeat.

Nor was it quiet. For one it was tipping down with rain outside. For two I (shamefully) admit that I had an old tape of Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell playing out of the stereo at the time.

But that's not how my memory recalls it.

I find it interesting that several of these accounts of timeslip experiences DO mention this clear audible shift in background volume. Silences. An absence of breeze. There may be something in that. But equally I do accept that it may just be the way that the brain processes odd and unnerving things.

 

[EnolaGaia]

What's very striking about these is the unearthly silence/weirdness that descends just before the 'time slip' becomes apparent. It's a recurrent idea. But something about it reads as very filmic. I'm wondering if we could find time slip accounts that predate movies, and all their conventions, and see if they still had this element? It somehow seems informed by our culture. Or maybe, the culture of films and that convention of things appearing to go into slo-mo/silence as signalling entering another dimension, are more deeply hard-wired in the human psyche, somehow? ...

The perceived slo-mo / silence is an innate effect, probably based in our biological underpinnings. It has no unique linkage to perceived time slips.

I can state this with confidence because it's happened to me multiple times throughout my lifetime, and I haven't experienced any time slips of the sort discussed here.

For example, it's happened:

- when confronted with seemingly certain death / injury, as a prelude to a TLR (Total Life Recall - 'life flashing before one's eyes') - which I've experienced more than once, as reported here on FTMB.

- when a serious danger or crisis suddenly occurs (e.g., losing control of a vehicle when driving; seeing an arrow flying toward me; having a colleague slip and send a running chainsaw flying at me).

To create a slo-mo bit of film or video, you have to speed up the frame speed of the recording device. IMHO this is an apt metaphor, because I'm convinced the effect involves something akin to, if not literally, an abrupt acceleration in cognitive function triggered somatically (e.g., as an adrenaline rush).

IMHO sound recedes because it requires more cognitively-intensive abstract mental processing than vision, and the brain(?) is either clearing the decks or focusing on the less-cumbersome processing modalities.

As far as the portrayal of such instantaneous shifts into slo-mo in films, etc. ... The visible part is reasonably representative of the experience.

The completely inaccurate trope is having a soundtrack (e.g., noise / voice(s)) persist but slow down in perfect synch with the perceived slow-down in visual perception. I can assure you it doesn't happen this way. I'm not sure when this sonic slow-down first occurred in films, but I don't recall seeing it regularly until the last 2 or 3 decades.

In a 'real' incident, perceived sound radically recedes into the background / distance, often to the level of effective silence.

This fictive sound slow-down is typically cued (in a film) by having the soundtrack shift lower in pitch. This is an understandable, but inaccurate, gloss on the panic slo-mo experience motivated by a spurious analogy to an audio tape.

 

[Carl Grove]

That is entirely plausible. I come from what would certainly be described as a 'rural area' here in Warwickshire. But the town I grew up in had over 20,000 people, and most of the usual chain stores you'd expect of a town by the 1990s. It wasn't remote. It wasn't particularly countrifed. Yet when I got to Uni mostly when I spoke to people who'd grown up in London they naturally assumed I grew up on a farming lot, cut off from the rest of the world...

I've often found that many of those raised in Capital don't venture far beyond Greater London, unless it's to fly out to another Country. That there is this genuine belief that somehow anything beyond Watford is just cows and fields, and that the North of England begins somewhere 100 miles South of Birmingham.

It's entirely possible that Baker could have dismissed Kersey in this fashion. Although you'd think that he might have recalled something like the rotting meat.





I certainly think that if we take it all at face value (although we cannot entirely write off the possibility that decades of thought about the experience may have embellished or altered it slightly) there is strong enough detail to see this as a plausible timeslip experience.

But why I labelled this as a Type 2 rather than 3 was largely based on the lack of other individuals encountered during the experience. Visually and audibly it could be argued that something changed here - Season, Sound, the Church being missing, etc. But the three cadets did not see any other person in the vicinity.

We classified Type 3 as including: "People in the image seem unaware of the witness's presence, and there is no physical contact with elements in the perceived environment".

Well, the latter is true. The cadets may have peered through windows, but we have no direct statement of physical contact. And they saw no people in the vicinity, to acknowledge them or not.

If we believe that this was a timeslip to the aftermath of the Black Death having taken half of Kersey's population then maybe that could be understandable. But I certainly feel that this is what makes the difference here.





And to be honest, with a village of this size, it's great that records have been kept even that far back. A lot of MacKenzie's final timeline is a little speculative. It cannot be considered provably accurate as a theory. But I certainly don't think that this rules out the possibility of there having been a timeslip here.

Agreed. One very unfortunate thing is that although MacKenzie was trying to determine exactly the route taken by the cadets, and seems to have done so with some success, he doesn't provide a map to show it! A verbal description in my view is always going to be somewhat ambiguous, and a map would make things a lot clearer.

As someone who lived in Greater London for over half a century, I must admit that I did have a somewhat slanted view of country life, which was soon changed when I moved to Bury!

 

[Carl Grove]

The perceived slo-mo / silence is an innate effect, probably based in our biological underpinnings. It has no unique linkage to perceived time slips.

I can state this with confidence because it's happened to me multiple times throughout my lifetime, and I haven't experienced any time slips of the sort discussed here.

For example, it's happened:

- when confronted with seemingly certain death / injury, as a prelude to a TLR (Total Life Recall - 'life flashing before one's eyes') - which I've experienced more than once, as reported here on FTMB.

- when a serious danger or crisis suddenly occurs (e.g., losing control of a vehicle when driving; seeing an arrow flying toward me; having a colleague slip and send a running chainsaw flying at me).

To create a slo-mo bit of film or video, you have to speed up the frame speed of the recording device. IMHO this is an apt metaphor, because I'm convinced the effect involves something akin to, if not literally, an abrupt acceleration in cognitive function triggered somatically (e.g., as an adrenaline rush).

IMHO sound recedes because it requires more cognitively-intensive abstract mental processing than vision, and the brain(?) is either clearing the decks or focusing on the less-cumbersome processing modalities.

As far as the portrayal of such instantaneous shifts into slo-mo in films, etc. ... The visible part is reasonably representative of the experience.

The completely inaccurate trope is having a soundtrack (e.g., noise / voice(s)) persist but slow down in perfect synch with the perceived slow-down in visual perception. I can assure you it doesn't happen this way. I'm not sure when this sonic slow-down first occurred in films, but I don't recall seeing it regularly until the last 2 or 3 decades.

In a 'real' incident, perceived sound radically recedes into the background / distance, often to the level of effective silence.

This fictive sound slow-down is typically cued (in a film) by having the soundtrack shift lower in pitch. This is an understandable, but inaccurate, gloss on the panic slo-mo experience motivated by a spurious analogy to an audio tape.

I made somewhat the same point in my Rougham study regarding the so-called "Oz factor". When someone becomes aware that something weird/threatening is upon them, they will certainly experience all kinds of entirely subjective reactions. I think the early writers on time slips made the mistake of regarding these as intrinsic elements of the time slip itself. When witnesses don't notice anything unusual until after the time slip -- and there are many examples of this, e.g. at Liverpool -- they don't report these feelings. Another point regarding silence is that in our modern society we are bombarded with sounds (cars, lorries, planes, pop music etc.) every day and if we were to suddenly go back to an earlier period it would seem unusually quiet. When I moved from London to Bury St EDmunds, which is actually quite a large town, the quietness seemed almost disturbing at first -- like a Sunday in the 1950s or 60s.

 

[EnolaGaia]

... When someone becomes aware that something weird/threatening is upon them, they will certainly experience all kinds of entirely subjective reactions. I think the early writers on time slips made the mistake of regarding these as intrinsic elements of the time slip itself. When witnesses don't notice anything unusual until after the time slip -- and there are many examples of this, e.g. at Liverpool -- they don't report these feelings. ...

Agreed ...

I wanted to make a strong - if subjectively / experientially based - case that the slo-mo / silence effects more probably reflect the time-slipper's reaction to feeling things getting 'slippery' rather than an intrinsic feature of any time slip itself.

As such, these effects may well be no more than observer-induced 'noise' in the available data (reports), making it more difficult to achieve any clarity on what may actually be happening in such incidents.

It's easy to see how the slo-mo effect might be attributed to the mechanics of the perceived time shift phenomenon. Both involve time, so it's not that hard to believe someone may merge them as two aspects of whatever it must be that explains the incident.

My follow-on point would be that it may prove helpful to filter or weight reports based on the occurrence of such observer-reported effects, so as to reduce - or at least not get unduly sidetracked by - this 'noise'.

 

[Carl Grove]

Agreed ...

I wanted to make a strong - if subjectively / experientially based - case that the slo-mo / silence effects more probably reflect the time-slipper's reaction to feeling things getting 'slippery' rather than an intrinsic feature of any time slip itself.

As such, these effects may well be no more than observer-induced 'noise' in the available data (reports), making it more difficult to achieve any clarity on what may actually be happening in such incidents.

It's easy to see how the slo-mo effect might be attributed to the mechanics of the perceived time shift phenomenon. Both involve time, so it's not that hard to believe someone may merge them as two aspects of whatever it must be that explains the incident.

My follow-on point would be that it may prove helpful to filter or weight reports based on the occurrence of such observer-reported effects, so as to reduce - or at least not get unduly sidetracked by - this 'noise'.

Good idea. Worth pointing out that similar analysis should occur in cases of other phenomena, e.g. ghosts, UFOs, "religious experiences" etc.

 

[EnolaGaia]

Good idea. Worth pointing out that similar analysis should occur in cases of other phenomena, e.g. ghosts, UFOs, "religious experiences" etc.

Thanks ...

... And I completely agree about the relevance of this issue to other categories of Fortean reports.

 

[NumberNine]

Thanks to Simon in the Timeslip at Waterloo Station thread for this photo of the Glasshouse St entrance to Piccadilly tube station. The Regent Palace Hotel entrance was a few feet to the right of this pic. I don't remember noticing the double doors on Glasshouse St. The cafe would have been directly under these. I'm wondering if there are actually rooms there.

 

[henry]

i believe h. samuel is now an angus steakhouse ?

 

[NumberNine]

Regarding Kersey:

1. Baker, who noticed nothing unusual, was a city lad who had no idea what a small village would have looked like. He seems to have accepted that country folk lived in squalid conditions, and that was that.

2. I think that the evidence that the witnesses entered the slip (with changes in the season, the disappearance of chimney smoke and modern fixtures, and the silencing of the church bells) is strong, so this must qualify as a Type 3. If you take drinking water from the stream as an interaction, it may be Type 4.

3. Laing identified the location of the butcher's shop on a picture postcard for MacKenzie, who visited the town and found the owner of the building in 1990, Mrs Jillian Finch, who declared, "But this used to be a butcher's shop." There was evidence of its being there back to 1790, although the trail went cold before that.

For obvious reasons I think it's entirely possible they experienced something paranormal. But did they drink from the stream? The reason I ask is that while reading it struck me that they commented a few times on seeing green...

"“There were no tables or counters, just two or three whole oxen carcasses which had been skinned and in places were quite green with age. There was a green-painted door and windows with smallish glass panes, one at the front and one at the side, rather dirty-looking. I remember that as we three looked through that window in disbelief at the green and mouldy green carcasses…"

And...

"In further conversation with Andrew Mackenzie, Laing also mentioned that when they had entered the village “it was verdant… and the trees were that magnificent green colour one finds in spring or early summer”. Which confused him, as they should not have been so in October."

Made me think of an incident Gordon Hillman related, I think on a Ray Mears programme, where he realized he'd eaten mushrooms he hadn't intended to because his vision turned blue.

"It would be worth noting that of the three witnesses of this potential timeslip experience only two recall the experience as having been something unusual. Baker did not."

Just to eliminate it as a possible explanation I'm wondering if the other two ingested something Baker didn't?