On a crisp October morning in 1957, three teenaged cadets of the Royal Naval Academy entered the quaint old village of Kersey in the Suffolk countryside. And they may also have stepped back hundreds of years in time, to an age before electricity and modern medicine. Did these young men experience the strangest of paranormal phenomena...a timeslip?

In this edition of the Wormwood Files, the Good Doctor shall examine the curious and eerie possibility that human beings can move backward...and sometimes forward...through time. Although rare, there are many instances of this happening. In fact, internet forums are full of strange tales of trips through time. The great trouble with timeslips is that all evidence is anecdotal. Nobody yet has gone back to ancient Rome or Merry Olde England and snapped a picture of the past. Nevertheless, the anecdotal evidence is often quite powerful. And even the greatest scientists have not yet fathomed all the mysteries of time.

Let’s go back to the English countryside. Our three young men were William Laing, Michael Crowley and Ray Baker. None of them had ever visited Suffolk in the east of England before. They had been assigned a task by their superiors. Using just map and compass, they were to locate the small village of Kersey and then report back what they had seen there. It was basically an orienteering assignment.

It was a pleasant day for the exercise. The young cadets hiked through the scenic countryside and felt they were nearing Kersey. They could see smoke rising from chimneys just over a hill and heard the church bells of the village. But when they came over the hill, a stupefying quiet suddenly engulfed them. The air became quiet and very still (a common characteristic of timeslips)...the church bells stopped, the chimney smoke disappeared and even the chatter of birds and insects ceased.

The village lay before them. There were no modern paved roads, no sign of cars or other vehicles, no electric wires running between the buildings. In fact, there was no sign of life at all. Not a soul was seen walking the village. Well, it was Sunday and they might have all been in church.

An uneasy feeling gripped the boys as they walked through the town. None of the buildings had the least sign of modernity. Of particular interest was a storefront that appeared to be a butcher’s shop. But this was like no butcher’s shop they had ever seen. The window panes were thick and greenish. Inside the empty shop was the shocking sight of three skinned ox carcasses hanging on hooks. The carcasses were green with rot. The shop looked like it had been abandoned for a considerable time.

The thick blanket of quiet smothered the cadets. Although all the houses seemed empty, they had an overwhelming feeling they were being watched. Laing later mentioned he thought something not human was observing them. Baker seemed the least troubled by the experience, although all of them felt something was definitely “off”. Finally, the oppressive atmosphere became too much and they decided to leave Kersey by the same way they came.

The second they went back over the hill, regular noises restarted and a feeling of normalcy returned. Cars could be heard driving nearby and chimney smoke again appeared. Bemused, the boys returned to base and reported on what they found. They never forgot the strange experience and years later, they would occasionally connect to discuss what happened. Laing contacted the well-known psychic researcher Keith McKenzie, who was the first to suggest that the boys had “retrogressed” in Kersey to a time hundreds of years ago. The lack of habitation and the abandoned condition of the butcher’s shop indicated to McKenzie that they may have seen Kersey during a time when the Black Plague or some other disease was ravaging the country.

Skeptics note that Kersey, a very old town indeed, had always had a medieval look to it. In fact, historical preservation laws maintained that power lines be underground instead of in the open air. None of the boys were familiar with the village or the area in general. Was it possible they just got confused or “in a mood” and let their imaginations run away with them? Yet their description of certain buildings fit the historical record. The building that was the butcher’s shop had not been one since 1907. But before that time, it had always been a butcher’s shop, going back perhaps as far as 1350.

It seems bizarre that three cadets trying to prove themselves on a military exercise would come up with such a tale just for publicity. They certainly did not stand to profit by the story and in fact, there was a chance their superiors might reprimand them for lying. To this day, the Kersey incident stands as one of the most intriguing timeslips on record.

And there are a LOT of them on record...more than even I knew of. When I started researching the subject, I quickly found many internet sites devoted to them. These are usually purely anecdotal stories related by anonymous individuals...impossible to confirm or deny. But the more outlandish of them are fairly easy to spot and dismiss. Others have a great depth of detail to them, details that can be factually checked. Strangely enough, certain locations are more disposed to timeslips. The city of Liverpool in England is well known for them. England in general seems to be predisposed to timeslips. That being said, they have been reported from every continent.

It’s important to say what timeslips are NOT before we can pinpoint what they ARE. First, they are not hauntings. Hauntings are usually ghostly images of the past that impinge on the modern day. Many times they are like “recordings” of past events that play out in front of modern eyes. Sometimes ghosts do interact with living people. But these are not timeslips. A timeslip would be a flesh and blood person physically moving into the past (or future...though those are less common). The witness sometimes sees real flesh and blood people of the past, like in the famous Moberly-Jourdain incident, which we will look at shortly. There are often buildings and physical parts of the landscape which no longer exist in the present. It is quite a different experience from a ghostly visitation.

The physical reality of a timeslip also means it is not just a “vision” of another time. This can be a pretty fine distinction. There are many instances where a person sees an old looking house or building which doesn’t exist in the present.  Are they merely “looking” into the past or are they actually THERE? In most timeslip incidents, there’s an overwhelming feeling of literally being on location. A timeslip is also not simply a case of “lost time”. “Lost time” incidents, an intriguing phenomenon in itself, are often reported in connection with UFO abductions or encounters with strange entities. A person realizes that several hours, or maybe even days, have vanished from their lives. For example, a person stops their car to watch strange lights in the sky. The next thing they know, it is five hours later and their car is in a completely different spot. “Lost time” is a close cousin of  the timeslip phenomena but not exactly the same thing. In most true timeslips, the person never sees a strange object or entity...the atmosphere just seems to change and they find themselves elsewhere in time.

We now have a better idea of what a timeslip is but the really big question in all of this is: what is time? Oh, is that all? That’s a question Man has been grappling with since he was first able to mark the passage of time. I couldn’t even begin to deal with all the philosophical and scientific aspects of trying to describe time. But the overwhelming perception of time through the ages has been a linear one...time passes in a straight line, from Point A to Point B. Or better yet, from the past to the future. But is this what time really is? Or rather, is it just the easiest way for our simple ape minds to perceive it? Recent discoveries in quantum physics seem to indicate something different is going on...that maybe time exists all at once and we just move along it in the best way we can understand. Several ancient Eastern philosophies also hold this view of space and time all being one single chunk.

Time has often been compared to a river. Well, rivers have strange currents...backwashes, eddies, whirlpools, odd waves. Maybe time is not as “perfect” as we think it is. These backwashes and disruptions in the current could be responsible for timeslips. In fact, I think they may be responsible for much of what we consider the paranormal. Ghosts, hauntings, even cryptids that suddenly appear and disappear...all may be caused by disturbances in the river of time.

Plenty of food for thought there, if you have an open mind. Before I shut the lights off on this edition of the Wormwood Files, let’s take a look at some more famous timeslips.

By far, the most famous slippage in time was the one experienced by Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Anne Moberly at Versailles in 1901. The two women, who were dons at Oxford, had decided to visit the legendary gardens of Louis XVI while on vacation. They were two well educated and respected women. On August 10, 1901, they wandered through the elaborate landscape on a pleasant day until they reached an area where everything felt “wrong”. The air became very thick and heavy…sounds were muffled and an oppressive quiet smothered everything. This was very much like the sensation the three cadets felt during the Kersey timeslip...the uneasy feeling has been reported by many who have experienced the phenomena.

Soon they began to see people dressed in antique clothing that was the fashion of the late 18th century nobility in France. A man in a powdered wig told them in an archaic French accent that they were not allowed to go any further. Proceeding in a different way along the many paths, they encountered other such people, including an attractive woman in elaborate dress and hair who smiled sadly at them. They later recognized the woman as Marie Antoinette from drawings of her.

Finally, the pair passed through what felt like a barrier and came back into a clear and normal atmosphere. They learned that on August 10th in 1792, Versailles was invaded and sacked by rebels of the French Revolution. The women were overwhelmed by the strange experience and felt it was one of the defining moments of their lives. At first, they believed they had been through a haunting. But upon learning the significance of the date, they believed they had actually traveled back in time to a different era.

Jourdain later returned to Versailles by herself and again experienced a similar timeslip. This time she felt as if she were surrounded by an invisible multitude...she heard whispers in her ear and felt “bodies” rustling past her even though she could see nothing. Moberly and Jourdain wrote a book about their experience at Versailles and how it affected them...titled “An Adventure”, the book was quite popular in the early 20th century and is considered a definite account of a timeslip. The book also opened up both women to ridicule, which continues today, as skeptics either call them bald-faced liars or say they were subject to some sort of psychological dislocation. Both explanations are commonly invoked by those determined to believe that time can only go forward in a straight line.

Strangely enough, it seems as if certain physical locations are more prone to timeslips than others. Perhaps the world capital of involuntary time travel is Liverpool, England, home to The Beatles. Not only is Liverpool the site of an unusually high number of timeslip reports, one street in the city seems to be the location of most of them...Liverpool’s main thoroughfare of Bold Street.

In 1996, an off duty policeman by the name of Frank experienced one of these slips. He and his wife were shopping along Bold Street and separated for a while to pursue their own interests. After puttering about in a record store,  Frank found himself in one of the “quiet zones” indicative of a timeslip.  Suddenly things looked and seemed “off”. The passerby all seemed to be wearing out of date clothes, with men almost all wearing fedoras and women dressed in pillbox hats and wearing gloves. The bookstore where Frank was to meet his wife Carol was not in its expected spot, but was replaced by a woman’s clothing store named Cripp’s. The window display featured more dated clothes. Frank began to feel a panic coming on.

He suddenly saw a young woman dressed in more modern, 90’s style clothing walking up the street. He followed her into “Cripp’s” and suddenly the atmosphere changed again and Frank found himself in Dillon’s Bookstore. He knew instantly he was back in the present. He asked the young girl if she had noticed anything odd and she admitted she thought she was headed into a clothing store but it wound up being a bookstore instead. Frank then met his wife and told her the peculiar story.

Investigation soon showed that there was indeed a clothing store named Cripp’s that occupied the bookstore’s space, but it had closed in the early 60’s after a run of many years. Frank also remembered almost being hit by a truck during the timeslip. A name on the truck said “Caplan’s” and this also was the name of a long defunct business in Liverpool.

Frank’s Bold Street escapade was not unique. For some unknown reason, Bold Street is a hot spot for timeslips. Another odd tale was told by a shoplifter running from the police in the early 2000’s. He took a turn into an alley and emerged into what seemed to be the same location but in the 1960’s. He confirmed this by checking newspapers at a newstand and seeing the year 1967 on them. As for the policeman chasing him, he was baffled when his quarry ran into an alley and seemingly disappeared into thin air from a place with no possible escape.

People have also noticed characters on Bold Street who seemed to be strangers from another time. A bicyclist once passed a man in Victorian garb smoking a pipe. It could have conceivably been a man just dressed up for some occasion, but the cyclist experienced that strange “dislocated” feeling. There are more tales of Bold Street timeslips that could be related. Perhaps the street is a place where time is stretched thin or is not as “perfect” as it is elsewhere.

To tell the truth, it would take more than one book to describe the stories of timeslips crowding the internet today. I will go out on a limb and say most are probably hooey. And those that seem more reliable can not be proven beyond the shadow of a doubt. But as big as that timeslip book would be, a book musing about the nature of time itself would be larger by orders of magnitude. Time is something we all live with...it is the most pervasive phenomena in this universe. But it’s mysteries are manifold and are far from being explained. I think it is safe to say that slippages in time will occur as long as there are people on Earth to witness them.

This is Dr. Abner Mality, turning out the lights.