Out of mind?

Oh, to be in England - the magic country of wandering houses and wayward hills and flights across time ...

Just as I thought I had read most of the most interesting "time slip" stories taking place in the United Kingdom, I was reminded of another one - of two, actually. (And yet a third one, for good measure.)

It's a story about a vision purportedly witnessed by Dr E. G. Moon, a supposedly "very down-to-earth" Scottish physician, on a certain day in 1935 when he visited one of his patients, the famous Lord Carson, at his home at Cleve Court (Isle of Thanet).

Now, this particular house is said to be haunted.
But what is said to have happened to Dr Moon doesn't appear to be a "haunting" proper. (And what is a "haunting" - or a "ghost", for that matter - anyway? For a few of my thoughts on the subject, see here.)

I found this story here, and since it is uncommonly well written, I think it would be best to let the author of the original text speak:

In 1935 Dr EG Moon, a very down-to-earth Scots Physician with a practice in Broadstairs, was at Minster in Thanet visiting his patient, Lord Carson, who lived at Cleve Court, a haunted house referred to elsewhere in the section. After talking to Carson, the doctor left his patient and made his way downstairs into the hallway. His mind was very clearly occupied at the time with the instructions he had given the nurse about the prescription he had left for Carson. At the front door Dr Moon hesitated, wondering whether to go back upstairs to have another word with the nurse.

It was at this point that the doctor noted that his car was no longer where he had left it in the driveway. In fact, it had been parked alongside a thick yew hedge and that, too, was missing. Even the drive down which he had driven from the main road was now nothing but a muddy track, and a man was coming towards him.

The newcomer on the scene, only thirty yards from Dr Moon, was rather oddly dressed wearing an old-fashioned coat with several capes around his shoulders. And he wore a top hat of the kind seen in the previous century. As he walked he smacked a switch against his riding boots. Over his shoulder he carried a long-barrelled gun. He stared hard at Moon. And the doctor registered the fact that the man coming towards him might have looked more at home in the 19th century.

Remarkably, Dr Moon seems not at the time to have been either alarmed or even mildly surprised by the changed scenery, by the quite oddly dressed man approaching his or the fact that his car was missing. What preoccupied him was the thought of Lord Carson's prescription. He simply turned away, without any concern, to go back into the house. But he did quite casually take one more look at the scene he was leaving. And now, as if by magic, the car was back where it had been and the yew hedge too. The drive was no longer a muddy track. And the man had also disappeared, back one assumes to the previous century. And it was only now that Dr Moon realised that something odd, something decidedly odd, had occurred.

All of this took seconds and so there is every reason to understand why Dr Moon did not immediately go out into the driveway to see where his missing car was. For the same reason it is understandable why he did not speak to the man dressed like a farm bailiff of the past. Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state. When he came to - for that seems to be the best way of describing his return to his own time - he described to Lady Carson what he thought had occurred. He was anxious, however, that no word of if should come out in his lifetime for fear that his patients would begin to question his judgement. It was only after his death that the story was revealed.**

Now, this is a fascinating story as it is. But it's this little bit what makes it even more interesting, to my eyes:

"Dr Moon was drawn into some kind of accepting, hallucinatory state".

He seems to have been in some sort of trance, an almost hypnotic state, similar (at least I understand it that way) to the state of mind one often encounters in dreams: the weirdest things seem not only somehow "normal", but often we simply know (during the dream only), why they make sense, why they should be so. This, I believe, is the Theta "state of mind" (actually, a brain wave rhythm).

Salvador Dalí, The Apparition of the Face of Aphrodite of Cnide in a Landscape (1981)

And, luckily for us, we seem to have another story - from the very same region (and found on the same website) - pointing to the very same phenomenon, whatever it is that induces this strange state of receptiveness.

It is the account of a woman called Charlotte Warburton, who is said to have had a "time slip" on June 18, 1968, on Calverley Road, in the English town of Tunbridge Wells (Kent).

You can read the account here. I shall only point out the similarly unquestioning state of mind that she seems to have experienced - because I believe it is the key to such phenomena.

Was it an external factor, something from outside, what caused these experiences?

A third account - not strictly a "time slip" -, about a girl called Naomi Fuller (read it on the same page as the two accounts above) would seem to suggest that there is something about the area itself that, under certain (as yet undetermined) circumstances, switches a susceptible mind into a Theta-like state, which then makes it possible to perceive usually non-observable realities.

But if that were the case, wouldn't there be many more reports of such experiences? After all, timidity or fear of ridicule can only explain so much.

On the other hand, of course, there places, all over the world, where such experiences (be it "hauntings", "ghosts" or whatever one might call them) are reported quite often. Of couse, it is virtually impossible to establish how many reports are genuine, and from those that are, how many were "fed" by self-suggestion, by expectation.

Anyway, such places deserve - and often get - a thorough in situ individual investigation. (However, many seem to show unusually high electromagnetic activity. More on that some other time.)

For those who would fancy having a look at the planetary configuration of Mrs Warburton's purported "time slip", I even made an astrological chart. (Not knowing the exact time of the purported sighting, only that it was "morning", I entered 10 a.m.)

(If you find anything interesting in it, do let me know. ;))

Be it as it may, I think there is little doubt that it is the individual's susceptibility that makes such things happen.

But if you think I am politely alluding to so-called "hallucinations", you couldn't be more wrong. Apparently, there can be shared visions of things normally unseen (this blog is full of such accounts; I would especially recommend reading the entries about Jung, the Andersons and, of course, about the legendary Misses Moberly and Jourdain) - and not all of them can be satisfactorily explained away as either lies or "folie a deux".

So, judging by such accounts, it would be relatively safe to assume that, at certain locations and under certain (undetermined) influences, an external local force (or interplay of forces) is capable of inducing or triggering perception of otherwise unobservable realities external to the observer - and judging by the accounts of odd or uncharacteristic receptivity accompanying these visions, it would be safe to surmise that the mind is perhaps on a Theta-like "wavelength" at the time of the experience.

More on that on a future occasion.



* Unfortunately, it is not entirely clear who the author of the text(s) is. According to the Credits, it could be either W. H. Johnson or John Haverson (or both).

** I have yet to unearth the original source of this account.

Come again?

Have you ever had the peculiar sensation that you're re-living, moment by moment, something that had happened before?
Of course you have.
Most likely you even know what it's called: deja vu.
(More - much more - about deja vu in a future post.)

Typically, it involves a sensation of a situation being repeated, without any sensory evidence that a repetition of any sort is taking place; and the time of the supposed "original" event is usually perceived as unidentifiable. In other words, people don't usually get a feeling of a deja vu about an event that took place a minute ago. (Unless, of course, you are participating in a mind-numbing board meeting - but I digress...)

But since the advent of the internet people have become aware of another, apparently similar type of event, often - and perhaps incorrectly - also described as deja vu: the apparent exact repetition of an event, involving the same factors (people, circumstances, etc.), within a time frame that would normally make the repetition of said event physically impossible.

For example: you see a person come out of a house - a house that you know without a doubt has no back or lateral doors -, stop for a moment to look at his or her wrist watch and then walk down the street.
A minute later, you see the same person come out of the same house, through the same (and only) front door, stop for a moment to look at the wrist watch, repeating every gesture in minute detail, and walk down the street - again.

Interestingly enough, many people seem to have experienced this. And even if some of these experiences could undoubtedly be attributed to insufficient attentiveness (or worse), others baffle the mind.

This delightfully illustrative short account comes from Cynthia Sue Larson.

The Lady Appeared... Twice

In fact, something seemingly similar happened to me, in early January 2008.

I was watching a live newscast.
I watched three segments in a row, then I stepped out of the room (I don't remember what the reason was, and it's not important). When I came back, I sat behind my desk to do some work. The TV was on all the time.

Not a minute had passed when I heard the anchorman announcing the first of the three segments that they had already shown. I remember thinking to myself "Oops...", but didn't bother to even turn the head. After all, even the best of journalists can make mistakes and reread an announcement or whatever.
But then the segment began - and it was the same one as before.
So were the following two.
To convince myself beyond reasonable doubt that it wasn't a "false memory" or anything like that I started repeating word for word the sentences that I had remembered from before. They were identical - even the anchorman's jokes were the same!

But still, no big deal. I was merely surprised to see the network switch to what I naturally thought to be the replay of the newscast for audiences overseas - before the live show was even through!
They had never done that before.
But, as I found out soon enough, they hadn't done it on that occasion, either... It had been a LIVE broadcast, just like on every other occasion I had watched it. And the anchor is a very reputable journalist who would have noticed if he were rereading the same segments that he had read a minute before - including the jokes he improvised.

Or would he?

Whatever it was (or was not), in retrospect this occurrence seems all the more remarkable because around the same date - give or take a day - another odd thing happened:

I was standing in my living room doing a yoga exercise. It was shortly after dawn break, and I saw the line of street lights being turned off. A few (perhaps five) seconds later - I saw them go out for the second time.
Naturally, I was somewhat startled: after I had seen them go out for the first time they hadn't been turned on again (to be then turned off again), of course.
I suppose this must be very difficult to grasp; and I certainly know it isn't easy to describe.
It was as if someone had hit a "replay" button - with no visible interlude (no visibly different state) between the two apparently identical events.

I am observant. Not much escapes me, I must say. (Literally: I must say it, because only I know myself, and so I know this wasn't simply an "attention" issue.)
That's what makes it so puzzling.

I usually like to speculate on the possible causes or sources of various phenomena - and the "weirder" they are, the better.
But in cases like these I really don't know what to say. Jumping to conclusions - any conclusions - would be counterproductive and possibly deceptive, at best.

The wisest thing to do, in my opinion, would be to keep collecting accounts of such events - and keep an open mind - and see where the evidence takes us.

Bold passage

There was in the 1990s a well-loved BBC series called Goodnight, sweetheart.
The plot of each episode was more or less irrelevant (to me); what I - and, I suspect, many other viewers - found so fascinating was the basic premise of the series: a young man, living in London in the early 1990s, strays into a backstreet and finds himself in - 1940. What makes the story even more interesting is the fact that he can walk in and out of 1940 as he pleases: the "passage" is open all the time, in both directions (although he seems to be the only one benefiting from it).

What I didn't know at the time, is that the series was supposedly (or so I am told) inspired by a series of apparently real incidents that purportedly happened on the - now almost famous - Bold Street, in Liverpool.

The most widely publicised of these incidents is said to have happened one Saturday in July 1996 (so it could not have inspired the series, which started in 1993). The accounts vary (here is a nice version of the story; and here is another one); the story was originally told during a radio programme, either by the man who experienced it (that's one version I've heard) or, more likely, by Tom Slemen.

It appears that this man - a Merseyside policeman (off duty at the time of the incident) - and his wife were shopping in central Liverpool. Near the Central Rail Station the couple parted company: the wife went to the Dillons bookshop (to buy Trainspotting, the novel) and he went to a nearby shop selling CDs.

Approximately twenty minutes later the man left the store and headed back towards Bold Street, to meet with the wife. As he was walking up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office, he suddenly felt as if he had stepped into an "oasis of quietness". Then he heard loud honking: a small boxvan - a veritable antique on wheels, with the inscription Caplan's - narrowly missed him. At the same time he noticed that the street pavement had changed its appearance: in fact, all of the sudden he found himself standing in the middle of the road. As he looked around, in a state of utter confusion, he noticed that people were dressed in a distinctly old fashioned manner; their clothes seemed like relics from the 1940s or early 1950s. And when he looked towards the bookstore where his wife was supposed to be shopping, he noticed that the sign Dillons had disappeared - the store displayed the name Cripps, and it didn't seem to be selling books at all: there were ladies' shoes and handbags in the windows.






Then - much to his relief, I imagine - the policeman saw a girl wearing a distinctly NOT "vintage" attire: a lime green sleeveless top and an unmistakably modern handbag. She was heading towards Cripps. He followed her and saw her stop in her tracks before reaching the shop (some accounts say she did enter the shop and then came out): the ladies' outfitters shop had "changed" back to a bookstore. Dillons was there once again, along with the rest of 1996.

"Did you see that?!" the policeman is said to have said to her.
"Yeah," said the girl. "What was that? I thought they were selling clothes, but now I see it's a bookshop... Weird."

Weird, indeed - and on more than count. Such "hybrid" timespace displacements, with mingling of people from different eras, are seldom heard of (but not totally unheard of, witness this head scratching-inducing story.)

Later it turned out that other people had experienced unsettling temporal and/or spatial displacements around the same area.
More on that some other time.

And by the way, since Dillons has been defunct since 1999, I am sure many people would love it if the bookshop reappeared again - or at least be comforted, as the many grateful customers of old Cripps are, by the thought that, somewhere in time, it still exists... :)

Time flies... faster than you think

Don't tell me that you haven't noticed it yourself: years becoming ever shorter and shorter and shorter, even though each one of them still has exactly 365 days (and this year even an extra second)?

Whether you have or you haven't, it doesn't really matter right now. This pedestrian time-keeping talk is a red herring - it has nothing to do (or so it seems) with the subject of tonight's... flight of fancy. ;)

Flight of fancy... Indeed, I am sure most "time slip" accounts are called just that - unless the person who experienced such a "slip" happens to be somebody with untarnished reputation for clear and logical thinking as well as personal integrity, both before and after the purported event.

Sir Victor Goddard was such a person.

He had joined the Royal Navy at the tender age of thirteen (in 1910); eight years later, in 1918, he entered the RAF (the Royal Air Force) - in fact, he is considered one of the founding fathers of the RAF- and worked his way up to the rank of Air Marshal.

We know now that even in his early youth he saw - or thought he did, anyway - more than usually meets the eye (more on that later). But whatever his experiences and view of the world, they evidently never obstructed his grasp on reality, needed to progress as he did in his professional career. If there were any unusual experiences during his first fifteen or twenty years of service in the RAF, nothing is known of them.

And then came a day in 1935 (some sources say 1934), when Goddard, flying alone over Scotland towards Andover, flew his Hawker Hart biplane into a gathering giant thunderstorm.

(If you're asking why didn't he check the weather forecast before departure - oh yes, people really do ask this question! - I'll remind you we are talking about Scotland: if you wait for "fair weather", you might never get off the ground.)

Hawker Hart biplanes at Andover (1931 footage)

In those circumstances, there was little that even an experienced airman such as Goddard could do, except land in the nearest airfield. And it so happened there was one nearby: the RAF training airfield Drem. Built in 1917, it had been abandoned, and its runways were badly damaged; but even a damaged runway was better than nothing, Goddard thought (I assume). He knew the terrain well, so even without sophisticated equipment he was able to steer his plane in the general direction of Drem. Flying low, he soon spotted familiar landmarks and then, in the distance, the abandoned airfield itself.

But then, when he was less than a mile away from the airfield, the weather suddenly changed: the heavy clouds parted and rays of brilliant sunshine flooded the landscape.

Still intent on landing, Goddard looked for the runway.

It was there.

But the Drem airfield wasn't.

Or so Goddard thought.

The abandoned hangars and buildings looked freshly refurbished; and the runway was teeming with activity: men in blue overalls - instead of the customary brown - were busy painting airplanes yellow (a fact that confused Goddard more than anything, as he had never seen training planes in any other colour than silvery grey).

In fact, they were so busy that nobody even looked up, towards the incoming airplane.

Goddard circled the airfield. He was now flying at 50 feet, to get a better look at the miraculously restored runways and buildings.

And still nobody looked up.

But then, except for the roaring airplane flying in circles above them, they had no reason to look up: the sky had cleared. The storm was nowhere to be seen.

In view of the considerably improved weather conditions, Goddard climbed back to the normal altitude and resumed his flight towards Andover, his original destination.

Upon return to his base, he checked the current status of the Drem training field: it was indeed abandoned, in disrepair, deserted.

Five years later, in 1938 or 1939, Goddard returned to Drem, this time with a mission to rebuild the ruins into a top-quality training airfield. (The country was already preparing for the eventuality of a war with Germany.)

The runways were repaired, the installations refurbished; and when the airfield finally opened, it was once again full of military training airplanes - now painted bright yellow. And the mechanics were now wearing blue overalls. (Presumably they were also more responsive to Goddard's presence than in 1935.)

Goddard's circling had come full circle.

So there you have it: an in-credible story told by an apparently very credible man.

A man, however, who supposedly had other extraordinary experiences of this type both before and after this extraordinary flight. One such experience was even made into a film, The Night My Number Came Up (1955, starring Michael Redgrave); and Goddard's ghost photo is one of the very few such artifacts around that have yet to be satisfactorily "debunked", as the horrid word goes.

Still, if you know anything at all about aviation, about piloting airplanes (not to mention military aircraft), you know that it calls for people with a steady mind. Airy-fairy (excuse the pun) characters most likely wouldn't last a day in the air.

(Which is the reason why so many professional pilots speak up about purported unexplained events they had witnessed only after they have retired - i.e. when they cannot be sacked on the grounds of "mental instability" or whatever the verdict would be. About this see Martin Caidin's wonderful - only one dud! - book Ghosts of the Air: True Stories of Aerial Hauntings. The present account of Goddard's adventure owes much to his delightfully detailed description.)

Was Victor Goddard such a person?

Certainly his career and public reputation point to a man who was clearly in control of himself and of his surroundings. And those who knew him (so I am told) were adamant in that he was an unimpeachable character.

But does it even matter? After all, couldn't anyone, even the most "level headed" of people, happen to have an event of what appears to be a diminished grasp of the so-called objective reality"?

I suppose so; but there is no way of ascertaining the "truth" in questions as vague as that. Far too many parametres are unknown, unidentified, perhaps even misidentified.
On a purely psychological level, what is an "objective" or "steady" (or whatever one may call it) mind? How do you define it, how do you measure it? And of course, what is the "objective reality"? How do you measure that? Are we really familiar with the rules it obeys? How can we know that even within the apparent frame of objective reality we really do have the same perception of the same phenomena?

Whatever the "true" nature of reality (if there is a single "true" nature at all), Goddard thought this question intriguing - and important - enough to dedicate the last part of his life to researching the realms of the invisible and sharing his thoughts with others. He even wrote a book about his extraordinary experience. Its title sounds like a very appropriate response to all those who undoubtedly must have called his experiences "flights of fancy".

Goddard called his book - Flight Towards Reality. ;)

I suspect he was right.

The hills are alive!

There's nothing quite like a trip with a twist: an unexpected sight, an unplanned detour, maybe even getting lost... for a little while.
(I adore getting "lost" on a trip, although I rarely succeed, much to my chagrin; and unless you are in the Amazonian jungle, or the Sahara, or something like that, it's not really dangerous.)

Only, it's usually the sightseers who stray - not the sights themselves.

And yet, just that apparently happened to an English couple, Mr and Mrs Allan (the names are not real), in the 1950s.

This story - for some reason, one of my favourite time slip stories - is described in H. Brennan's book Time Travel: A New Perspective (p. 63), and he got it from Colin Wilson (Beyond the Occult, 1989).

Please note that, at this time, I do not have direct access to Wilson's work, so I will have to rely on Brennan's account. I am also drawing on a very lucid little article, written by Alan Murdie (scroll down to the section called "Time slips").

According to these sources, in 1954 - in the days of yore when not everyone had a car - Mr and Mrs Allan went on a day trip to the countryside.

I don't know where they were originally headed to, but apparently they missed their bus stop and found themselves in the village of Wotton instead. (N.B. Brennan calls the village "Wotton Hatch". But according to the holy internet - which is not always right, I know -, there is only a pub by that name in Britain; the village itself is called simply Wotton.)

As any true traveller, they decided to seize the day and make the most of this unexpected detour. So they headed for the family church of John Evelyn, to do some sightseeing.

Church of St John the Evangelist, Wotton (Surrey)
Copyright Hugh C.
Taken from here.

When they came out of the church and crossed the churchyard, they saw an overgrown path leading onto a hill nearby. The Allans let themselves be lured by it and followed the path, which led them to a clearing, with a simple wooden bench on it. From there, Brennan reports, there was "an excellent view of the valley".

What better place to eat the sandwiches they had brought with them?
So they sat, ate and watched, ate some more, watched some more.

At some point during this improvised lunch al fresco, something extraordinarily odd is said to have happened to them.

A sudden silence descended upon the place, and, according to Brennan, Mrs Allan "became utterly convinced that three men had entered the clearing behind them. She could see them so clearly in her mind's eye that she was able to note one was wearing clerical garb. But when she tried to turn around, she found she was paralyzed." (N.B. A later mention in Brennan's book also tells of a reported "drop in temperature" they both felt.)
After a few moments "the feeling passed and the Allans left the clearing in a thoroughly disoriented state". (For more details, be sure to consult Murdie's article.)

The account of the first visit ends here.
But two years later, in 1956, Mrs Allan returned to Wotton. She revisited the church, but she couldn't find the path that had led them up the hill during their first visit.

Even more extraordinarily, the hill itself was not there anymore.

I can easily imagine the animated conversation that ensued when Mrs Allan returned home and told her husband about it... Unsurprisingly, Mr Allan decided to revisit the area himself - only to find that his wife had been telling the truth. The path, the hill, the bench were nowhere to be seen; furthermore, he was told that there was no "wooden seat" anywhere on church grounds.

Twenty years later the Allans, or somebody on their behalf, must have reported this oddity to the Society for Psychical Research, because it apparently investigated the case (in 1974).

It turned out - so the book reports - there never had been a hill there.

But, eerily, the Society did find a 17th century record - an entry (March 15th, 1696) in John Evelyn's diary - of three convicts having been executed on the approximate spot where the "hill" had stood - and one of them had been a clergyman.

Brennan concludes, quite endearingly, that "no spirits of the departed, no natural tape recordings can produce a hill for you to climb and a seat for you to sit on. Only a time slip can account for that".

Indeed... provided there was a hill there at any point in time.
But according to the reports, nobody knew of a hill having been there at any time.
(It is possible, of course, to remove hills. However, it seems highly unlikely that such a huge undertaking would not have been recorded.)

But was the area really as "flat" as that?

Here's how Brennan describes the findings regarding the area: "Nowhere in the area bore any resemblance to the hill, clearing and bench the Allans described."

And now consider this passage from a description of Wotton, including the church of St. John the Evangelist (Evelyn's church), and its surroundings (published in 1911):


The church of ST. JOHN THE EVANGELIST /.../ is most beautifully situated on the summit of a steep ridge, its east and south sides overlooking a beautiful green valley and the hillside opposite/.../. In the hollow behind this hill, to the south east, lies Wotton House. The churchyard is surrounded by noble trees—here, again, in some cases, of Evelyn's planting. /.../

The traveller, on foot or horseback (the road is not one for wheels), passing from the chalk country sees in front of him an ascending mass of broken sand hills /.../. Leaving Wotton House on the right a bridle road /.../ leads up the valley where John Evelyn first began the ornamental planting of his brother's grounds. /.../. Passing on by another hamlet, King George's Hill, so named from a now extinct public-house, the path leads out on to the heather-covered common of Leith Hill. A view opens gradually to the west, as the ground ascends, but it is not till the traveller reaches the southern brow of the hill that the panorama bursts suddenly upon him. The summit of Leith Hill is the highest spot in the south-east of England, 967 ft. above the sea.



Being far too far from Wotton - Hatch and all - to inspect the area in person, I decided to "investigate" the surroundings of Saint John's church in Wotton by means of old photographs, drawing and prints available on the internet.

Here is a series of old prints depicting the church and the surroundings. There is no hill in sight - although rarely is the angle wide enough to really provide a good idea of the surroundings. (In other words, there might have been a hill at the time of the artist's work, but it isn't visible on any of the prints.)

However, this photo (1919) seems to have been taken from a (low) hill. (It could have been taken from a building, but I don't think there are any on this particular spot.) The church is nearby, so this could have been the hill the Allans visited, or thought they did, although it doesn't seem to offer a particularly "excellent view of the valley".


Did the Allans confuse the place with some other?
Anything is possible, of course, but it seems extremely unlikely, considering that, between the two of them, they visited Wotton and the church on at least three occasions.

Were they lying?
Again, anything is possible - but it doesn't sound like it.
(Who, pray, would invent a story like that?)
Besides, I doubt that the Society for Psychical Research, as kooky as it may appear to so called "skeptics", would neglect that possibility and fail to first investigate the credibility of the story (and of the Allans themselves, I hope).

Unless, of course, the Allans did visit Wotton Hatch, after all.
We all know what mighty spirits abide in bottles... :)
(Yes, of course I am kidding.)


For the record, I tend to believe this story really happened as the Allans told it.
I just don't know - I suspect nobody does - what exactly happened.

For a tentative explanation I will refer you once again to Murdie's article.

What do you think happened?