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Timeslip At Waterloo Station?

The following link has been posted on FT before, but fits nicely on here.

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/comment/52814867#Comment_52814867

This is a brilliant thread, and the Doll Feet case is especially interesting. I have exchanged quite a few messages with the witness. She is not sure it is a time slip (and there is no evidence that a cafe ever was at that location -- there was only a cafe on street level in the 1900s). There are a number of other time/dimensional cases in the Regent St/Piccadilly area.
 
yes this has the cachet of a new age buzz phrase, arent all places liminal for someone ...

I guess whether a space is liminal or not is context dependent. So, a station might be liminal for a person who arrives there to catch a long distance train: they are no longer at home, but not yet travelling, for example. They are 'between states' while they are waiting for their train. But the same station is likely not very liminal at all to the lady who works at the ticket office, because it is her destination every day. She's at work, and that is a fairly unambiguous state.

The state of liminality is very tied to the context of the person doing the experiencing rather than being an essential or inevitable part of the architecture.

Totally agree about the link to magic. See also liminal times of day - dawn and dusk (the witching hour).
 
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.

Totally agree about the link to magic. See also liminal times of day - dawn and dusk (the witching hour).

maybe OP had wandered onto platform 9¾
 
I think it's been posited elsewhere that the state of mind of the woman taken into the 'cafe that didn't exist' might have led to her being confused about the exact locality of the cafe. But, if not, it would be interesting to find out more about the 'couple' that befriended her, since they were the ones who seemed to know about the cafe and, in fact, took her there.
 
I think it's been posited elsewhere that the state of mind of the woman taken into the 'cafe that didn't exist' might have led to her being confused about the exact locality of the cafe. But, if not, it would be interesting to find out more about the 'couple' that befriended her, since they were the ones who seemed to know about the cafe and, in fact, took her there.

I don't think there is any doubt about the location of the cafe, near the bottom of the stairs leading down from the Glasshouse St entrance. From Doll Feet's original post, I had the (totally unjustified) idea that the couple were an elderly couple who had approached her in the street but in fact the contact occurred when she was waiting for her missing boy friend in the lobby of the hotel in Glasshouse Street, who had given it as his postal address. A girl in her early 20s who had seen her sitting there that morning returned in the late afternoon, and asked if she was OK. While they were talking the man (also quite young) came over and remarked how beautiful they both were (!). When the girl told him that D.F. had been sitting there all day without even a drink, he offered to buy them coffee, and the girl said she knew a cafe in the tube station. The witness was reluctant to leave the hotel (and there was a coffee shop actually on the premises), but the girl suggested she leave a note for her boy friend in reception, which she did.

She said the couple didn't seem odd, only the old woman in the cafe was creepy. But to me the encounter seems
a bit contrived. The girl claimed to know about the tube cafe which (it now appears) never actually existed, and the man's approach sounds more like something in a romantic film to me.

Add to this the fact that DF has had quite a few other Fortean experiences, some quite extreme. She is clearly very sensitive. I wonder also if the couple might have hypnotised her into experiencing the cafe visit.

While having her coffee the witness suddenly "saw" her boy friend up on the street and ran up the steps to meet him. As she did so all sounds in the (obviously very busy) Piccadilly Circus ceased for a few seconds (for both her and the boy friend).
 
I have experienced the 'sound ceasing for a few moments' thing. However, I haven't experienced an accompanying timeshift or movement through a dimensional portal.

Ahh well, can't have it all.
 
Ah, thank you Carl, this clarifies things a little more. So the 'couple' weren't actually known to each other prior to the event? But it does pose even more questions - why 'take' the distressed girl offsite, making her walk through London streets in an obviously upset condition, when there must have been more convenient coffee shops nearer to hand? Just because one of them 'knew a coffee shop'? Or even just sit her in the foyer with a takeaway coffee (which one of them could have fetched) if she just needed to calm down and talk to someone...

Edited to add: I'm not meaning to poke holes in someone's story, but I'm interested in the psychological angles of these things, and wondering why people act a certain way in certain situations. If the girl's evident distress made her more 'malleable' to some characters/situations, then perhaps she could have been influenced in some way by this 'couple' (who do have something of the feeling of 'volunteers from the audience' about them).
 
Ah, thank you Carl, this clarifies things a little more. So the 'couple' weren't actually known to each other prior to the event? But it does pose even more questions - why 'take' the distressed girl offsite, making her walk through London streets in an obviously upset condition, when there must have been more convenient coffee shops nearer to hand? Just because one of them 'knew a coffee shop'? Or even just sit her in the foyer with a takeaway coffee (which one of them could have fetched) if she just needed to calm down and talk to someone...

Edited to add: I'm not meaning to poke holes in someone's story, but I'm interested in the psychological angles of these things, and wondering why people act a certain way in certain situations. If the girl's evident distress made her more 'malleable' to some characters/situations, then perhaps she could have been influenced in some way by this 'couple' (who do have something of the feeling of 'volunteers from the audience' about them).

I agree, it seems the witness was targeted. Whether it was to program her in some way, or to organise the meeting with her boy friend, I don't know. From things the witness said during our exchange of messges, it seems the boy friend wasn't a very nice guy and found her frequent other worldly experiences frightening, hence their break up. Oddly enough, two of the witnesses at Rougham both broke up with their husbands, one because he refused to support her story, the other actually many years later after I had made contact with her -- all very odd.
 
I have experienced the 'sound ceasing for a few moments' thing. However, I haven't experienced an accompanying timeshift or movement through a dimensional portal.

Ahh well, can't have it all.

It's one of those features of Jenny Randles' "Oz factor." However, it's not a common feature of time slip cases.
 
I'm thinking I first heard about this from the film Ironweed. Could be wrong.

I'd only heard of this (sleeping on a rope) from an Episode of Hancock's Half Hour ('Back from Holiday') from 1956, if you please. Could there really still have been such Victorian-style doss-houses one year to the month before Sputnik?
 
I'd only heard of this (sleeping on a rope) from an Episode of Hancock's Half Hour ('Back from Holiday') from 1956, if you please. Could there really still have been such Victorian-style doss-houses one year to the month before Sputnik?

it was certainly happening in the 1930s - Orwell mentions it in Down & Out in Paris & London. :reader:
 
Blimey, what a bizarre 'solution' to the problem. I suppose it's better than nothing, in extremis. Shamefully, although I've read The Road to Wigan Pier I've never even looked at 'Down and Out...' And I have a copy knocking around somewhere...must rectify this.
 
Waterloo Station is unique on the Underground network for being the only one where staff are allowed to refuse to go in certain rooms, and so opt out of the station checks.
These checks are carried out regularly to check fire equipment, make sure doors are locked and to look for suspicious packages and liquid spills on the floor.
The reason for the exemption is that there have been numerous reports from staff of sudden temperature drops and of the feeling of unease in some rooms.

As to why this might be, there have been experiments carried out where certain low frequencies can cause this, perhaps the trains make these?
Pressure changes can be caused by the air pushed along tunnels by trains.

On a historical note, Waterloo began as part of a "Necropolis" railway, used to ferry the dead to outer London and Home Counties cemeteries in the mid-19th century.
The original station and tunnels are very close to the existing one.

In World War Two, corpses from D-Day were brought to Waterloo Station and stored in rooms which are still in use.
 
Interesting; didn't know that about Waterloo.

As you say, infrasound* has been demonstrated to (possibly) cause precisely such effects on humans in the London Underground environment. It's touched upon in this very watchable documentary (apologies if you've all seen this before - which seems quite likely, ho ho ) ;)

NB. NOT to be confused with one of those Derek Acorah things.

For those who haven't, some of the spooky anecdotes are quite alarming! The first is pure modern-day MR James.


*see about 10:20 and 18:00. Mind you, like millions of people I've been all over the tube network under all sorts of circumstances and never felt any sudden feelings of inexplicable dread.

Edit: Having watched the documentary again with a skeptical eye I notice an apparent contradiction: comparing the 'white overalls' story with the 'little old lady' one it seems highly suggestive that in the first case the former ghostly/stone tape recording/interdimensional or whatever apparition is unseen to the naked eye but clearly seen on CCTV, yet the latter quite the reverse. It's a bit late at night to begin grasping towards conclusions, but to my mind this suggests that either there are different phenomena going on, or that the phenomena will interact with us and manifest in a variety of changing ways in our world...or that these are merely reports of perceptual glitches, false memories, hallucinations or just tall stories.

Do watch the film if you're in that sort of mood though - it's excellent fun and beautifully shot and edited.
 
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...On a historical note, Waterloo began as part of a "Necropolis" railway, used to ferry the dead to outer London and Home Counties cemeteries in the mid-19th century.
The original station and tunnels are very close to the existing one.

I'm not sure that this is right. London Waterloo was certainly part of the London Necropolis Railway system, but I don't think it 'began' as that; it is my understanding that the company built their own private station within Waterloo after the latter was already established (originally as a stop on a line reaching towards the West End).

In World War Two, corpses from D-Day were brought to Waterloo Station and stored in rooms which are still in use.

This is certainly interesting, but it would be good to have more detail. My understanding is that the vast majority of the D-Day dead are buried in the British and American cemeteries in northern France; the allies simply did not have the resources or the time to ship the dead back to the UK, certainly not in large numbers, and it would be interesting to know under what circumstances some where repatriated.

Interesting; didn't know that about Waterloo.

As you say, infrasound* has been demonstrated to (possibly) cause precisely such effects on humans in the London Underground environment. It's touched upon in this very watchable documentary (apologies if you've all seen this before - which seems quite likely, ho ho )...Do watch the film if you're in that sort of mood though - it's excellent fun and beautifully shot and edited.

Always worth a rewatch; one of the best TV documentaries on things ghostly that I've seen.

For those who haven't, some of the spooky anecdotes are quite alarming! The first is pure modern-day MR James....

For some reason it's the Hyde Park Corner story that's always stuck in my mind - I'm really not sure I could have gone back to working nights if that had happened to me.
 
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...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 wonder if sometimes the fact that a place exists because of its connection to - or more accurately, connecting of - other places, creates a feeling that the area is somehow unsettled. And as that space establishes itself as an individual place in its own right we experience a not necessarily conscious uneasiness about something coming from nothing: this place was nowhere, then it connected some somewheres, now it too has become a somewhere. There’s something almost alchemical about it - life out of other life...a spatial golem. (God, that sounds pretentious – but the phrase ‘spatial golem’ popped into my head and I couldn’t help myself.)

The other environments that come to mind, for the same reasons - and it might sound odd comparing them to railway stations at first - are staircases and corridors: they would simply not be there if it was not for the need to connect different spaces. Clearly staircases are another common focus of oddness; we have several threads which indicate this. And corridors: how many movies have expoited the oddly unnatural parallel lines of a corridor disappearing into the distance – all connecting somewhere to somewhere else, but somehow suggesting a frightening emptiness, to be filled at some point with god knows what?
 
I'm not sure that this is right. London Waterloo was certainly part of the London Necropolis Railway system, but I don't think it 'began' as that; it is my understanding that the company built their own private station within Waterloo after the latter was already established (originally as a stop on a line reaching towards the West End).
Correct, from 1854 the London Necropolis Company had a separate station next to the London South Western Railway's Waterloo Bridge station, which was at that time a through station opened in 1848. That lasted until 1896 when the LSWR wanted to further expand Waterloo (which had lost its 'Bridge' suffix in 1882) and the only available land to expand into was the LNC station; the LSWR therefore agreed to buy out the LNC site and built a new station for them on Westminster Bridge Road which opened in 1902. As an aside I'm fascinated by the Necropolis Railway but have always had the feeling that it couldn't really have existed, surely it must just be an elaborate steampunk hoax. I read about it and I think this cannot possibly be true. But no, it apparently really did transport London's dead out to Brookwood for nearly 100 years.

Spookdaddy said:
This is certainly interesting, but it would be good to have more detail. My understanding is that the vast majority of the D-Day dead are buried in the British and American cemeteries in northern France; the allies simply did not have the resources or the time to ship the dead back to the UK, certainly not in large numbers, and it would be interesting to know under what circumstances some where repatriated.
An identical story is told about Glasgow Central station apparently receiving trainloads of dead soldiers killed in the trenches in World War 1, and the cellars under the station still apparently echoing with the wailing of the grieving wives and mothers who went there to identify the bodies. It's also extremely unlikely to be true for the same reasons you give. I've been in the cellars under Glasgow Central by day and by night (for work, obviously) and, although it is an atmospheric space, I've never experienced anything even remotely creepy down there.
 
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Interesting; didn't know that about Waterloo.

As you say, infrasound* has been demonstrated to (possibly) cause precisely such effects on humans in the London Underground environment. It's touched upon in this very watchable documentary (apologies if you've all seen this before - which seems quite likely, ho ho ) ;)

NB. NOT to be confused with one of those Derek Acorah things.

For those who haven't, some of the spooky anecdotes are quite alarming! The first is pure modern-day MR James.


*see about 10:20 and 18:00. Mind you, like millions of people I've been all over the tube network under all sorts of circumstances and never felt any sudden feelings of inexplicable dread.

Edit: Having watched the documentary again with a skeptical eye I notice an apparent contradiction: comparing the 'white overalls' story with the 'little old lady' one it seems highly suggestive that in the first case the former ghostly/stone tape recording/interdimensional or whatever apparition is unseen to the naked eye but clearly seen on CCTV, yet the latter quite the reverse. It's a bit late at night to begin grasping towards conclusions, but to my mind this suggests that either there are different phenomena going on, or that the phenomena will interact with us and manifest in a variety of changing ways in our world...or that these are merely reports of perceptual glitches, false memories, hallucinations or just tall stories.

Do watch the film if you're in that sort of mood though - it's excellent fun and beautifully shot and edited.

It is an excellent documentary, and the most fascinating story concerned a trainee walking the tunnels at night and meeting an old man with whom he had a short chat before going on. After seeing it I spoke about it with my wife's cousin Ray, who worked a long time on the tube (he has now retired). He commented that he knew the witness personally, and that something similar had happened to him as well! Here is a summary that I wrote down for someone else:

Unfortunately my wife's cousin can't recall a lot of details regarding his strange
encounter on the London Underground, so I asked him to give me the major details
over the phone.
Ray Beach was at that time, in the early 1980s, working as a train driver at
Baker Street. Early one morning he was preparing to take a train out of its sidings
tunnel on the Central Line, between Farringdon and Barbican stations, directly under
the Smithfield Meat Market.
The train was bitterly cold (although Ray doesn't think it was the winter) and
as he walked through the train heading for the driver's cab he met a line worker, "A
black guy in overalls, carrying a Tilley lamp," coming the other way. They said
"hello" to each other as they passed. Ray thought it very strange that a "permanent way
operator" would be working at that time, and when he got to his cab he asked his
Guard, via the intercom, "Did that P way guy get off?"
Of course, the Guard had no idea what he was talking about, and nobody had
passed him to leave the train at the back.
A similar kind of case, featuring another man carrying an old-fashioned lamp,
was mentioned on the TV documentary I mentioned. That case involved a trainee
manager walking the line at night (London Underground have the sensible idea that all
managerial staff should experience all work activities at first hand). He met a normal
looking man and had a conversation with him before proceeding on his way. Later
when he mentioned his meeting there was concern that someone had got onto the line
without permission and a search had to be made! His line manager refused to believe
that he hadn't heard stories of the ghost of a line worker who had been killed by a
train.

I can vouch for Ray being a very solid, unimaginative guy. He started out at the bottom and worked his way up to being duty manager at Kings Cross for some years after the fire there.
 
Great stories there - and ones which have the ring of authenticity as they feel unembellished by imaginative flourishes, aka exaggeration.

Memory can be an unreliable resource, but I'm not sure I didn't see a TV programme about the Underground featuring a 'Ray' retiring from Kings X after many years of service...
 
Great stories there - and ones which have the ring of authenticity as they feel unembellished by imaginative flourishes, aka exaggeration.

Memory can be an unreliable resource, but I'm not sure I didn't see a TV programme about the Underground featuring a 'Ray' retiring from Kings X after many years of service...

Not the same Ray, I'm afraid!
 
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

Houses were rented out in big cities, called 'Flop Houses' as they were used for precisely this - it was the cheapest form of accomodation in late Victorian England. I think at least one of the 1888 Ripper victims had been in one of these as it's where I first came across mention of them.

Just had quick look online at images of underground stations being used as air raid shelters - can't see anything like a washing line...
 
@Spookdaddy
You are right. I stand corrected.
Waterloo Station opened 1848 for passengers, the Necropolis Railway there followed in 1854.

I have no documentary record of D-D Day bodies being stored there, only hearsay. I will endeavour to find out more.
www.ddaymuseum.co.uk states that some American dead were taken back to the USA for burial.
The number of dead in the Normandy cemeteries is less than the total killed in action.
 
...I have no documentary record of D-D Day bodies being stored there, only hearsay. I will endeavour to find out more.
www.ddaymuseum.co.uk states that some American dead were taken back to the USA for burial.
The number of dead in the Normandy cemeteries is less than the total killed in action.

I think it was, in many cases, an after the fact process: bodies were interned in Normandy, and exhumed later for transport to the US. Which would possibly mean that there could have been transit points along the journey where numbers of bodies might rest for a period of time. I'm not sure why Waterloo Station would be part of that journey - but I suppose it isn't beyond the realms of possibility.
 
@Spookdaddy
You are right. I stand corrected.
Waterloo Station opened 1848 for passengers, the Necropolis Railway there followed in 1854.

I have no documentary record of D-D Day bodies being stored there, only hearsay. I will endeavour to find out more.
www.ddaymuseum.co.uk states that some American dead were taken back to the USA for burial.
The number of dead in the Normandy cemeteries is less than the total killed in action.

Yes American dead started being repatriated in the late 1940s up until the 1960s. I cant see them being stored at Waterloo. If anything it should have been Kings Cross as that services Cambridge where there is i believe the only perminant American War Cemetery in the Uk. I guess its possible, if the dead came through Southhampton.

Both Waterloo and the Necropolis stations were bombed during WW2. In fact the Necropolis station and lines were so heavily damaged they they never reopened after the war and the area was converted to office space.

Im wondering if your hearsay source got mixed up with the ambulance trains of WW1? I can't find anything on any Southern Railway site about American dead being stored that Waterloo. Happy to be shown differently.
 
...An identical story is told about Glasgow Central station apparently receiving trainloads of dead soldiers killed in the trenches in World War 1, and the cellars under the station still apparently echoing with the wailing of the grieving wives and mothers who went there to identify the bodies. It's also extremely unlikely to be true for the same reasons you give. I've been in the cellars under Glasgow Central by day and by night (for work, obviously) and, although it is an atmospheric space, I've never experienced anything even remotely creepy down there.

I did wonder if this story might have some basis in a slightly distorted local memory of the Quintinshill disaster and its aftermath - the northbound train was headed up to Glasgow, I think. However the Quintinshill dead were buried at Edinburgh. (Actually, despite the fact that I once walked past it very day on my way to work I've never been sure if Rosebank Cemetery is in Edinburgh, or Leith - I think Pilrig, where the cemetery is situated, was the border beween the two.)
 
This has got me wondering... I know some of the earlier railways were cut into older cemeteries/graveyards and the dead disinterred and reburied - particularly in London - but did some parts of underground lines run beneath cemeteries? Never thought of it before. It's possible, though..?
 
This has got me wondering... I know some of the earlier railways were cut into older cemeteries/graveyards and the dead disinterred and reburied - particularly in London - but did some parts of underground lines run beneath cemeteries? Never thought of it before. It's possible, though..?

The cut and cover lines are not deep enough to be below graveyards but the deeper 'tube' lines I think at least 90% of the time are underneath roads.
 
The Jubilee Line extension runs near Redcross Way in Borough, just south of the market.
The reason that the Cross Bones graveyard was discovered is because they were building an electricity substation there when they dug up close to 15,000 corpses.

http://crossbones.org.uk/
 
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