Dark pitch

After several of our cunning plans to trick the authors of the spam siege against our "time slip" mailbox went awry, we recently discovered that a few of our readers have experienced unseemly "time slips" of their own - thanks to us and to our apparent callous unresponsiveness...

There is no way we can express our regret for this time (banana) slip. But we can - and gladly will - publish some of the best personal accounts sent in by readers.

What follows - verbatim - is a personal account from S. E., England.
(And it is almost exemplary in its completeness. It's not often that people record the weather - even though they absolutely should!)

Photo: The Unpredictables, 2006

In their own words...

"DATE: I can only be very vague. It was possibly 1994, in either late spring or summertime.

TIME: early evening, it would have been around about 6.40 to 6.45pm.

LOCATION: a cricket pitch in the grounds of a mental hospital in central England (it was a mainly staff cricket team but with additional friends & family to make up the numbers - my father had got me involved - I swear I wasn‘t a patient!!).

WEATHER: a storm had recently passed over no more than an hour earlier. It had left the ground quite wet but the sun was now out and it had become a pleasant evening.


Unsure if the rainstorm would mean the cricket training for that day was cancelled or not, I decided to chance-it and made my way to the ground arriving at the cricket pitch around 6.30pm. In the middle of the pitch there was a rope held up by small poles which marked off the main playing area (the square) and was designed to discourage people from entering there in order to preserve the playing surface.

As I arrived, I saw that someone had lifted several of the poles from their holes and dropped them on the ground (it wasn’t unusual for things like this to happen - the very nature of the hospital meant that patients would often do quite odd things for no apparent reason). I made my way to the middle of the pitch and replaced each pole (there were only 5 or 6 of the 8 poles removed) and looped the rope back onto some of the poles as it’d become dislodged.
Having done this, I continued across the pitch to the far side where there were two small huts a small distance apart, one of which was used as a changing room (Hut 1) and one of which was used for storage (Hut 2).

Nobody else had so far arrived so after a few minutes I was pleased to see a friend of mine arrive on his bicycle. Cycling around the pitch, he dismounted and leant his bike up against Hut 1 on the side which faced Hut 2.

After some discussion we agreed that it appeared training had been cancelled, however with 20 minutes or so until opening time at our local social club (where the team met after training), we decided to try and find a ball we could toss to one another to kill some time. My friend decided to search in the hedgerow where we were knew many balls had been lost in the past while I tried my luck at forcing entry to Hut 2.

The door to the hut to was a split door - rather like you’d find in a stable - and being wooden and exposed to the elements wasn’t in good condition. Using a stick I was able to prise the two door sections apart and push the lock on the inside of the bottom half of the door open allowing me to crawl inside.
I knew there was a kit-bag under a table to my left, so crawled that way and fumbled around in the darkness for 30 seconds or so until success, I found what I’d been looking for. However, I could feel it was a bit gnarled and old and generally not in good condition and after backing out the way I came and back into the light, this was confirmed.

Standing up, I turned to face the pitch and was a little puzzled. The sky had darkened and there were now grey clouds rather than it’s previous sunny blueness. The poles in the middle of the pitch I had returned to their holes not 10 or 15 minutes earlier were once again on the floor and in exactly the same positions they‘d been in as I first arrived.
Turning to my right I could see that my friend’s bike was now gone. I quickly scanned the hedgerow but he was not in sight and moving toward Hut 1, I could see through the windows neither he or the bike were on the far side of the hut. I looked to see if he was cycling away but there was no sign whatsoever.

At the time, I was unable to grasp what I was seeing and assumed it to be a practical joke being played on me. I felt very angry over the events - probably more so than was reasonable and I recall swearing before heading back to Hut 2 and crawling back inside to return the ball I’d found.
Backing out of the hut once again I stood back up into sunshine, turning to see the poles back in their holes. My friends bike was once again against Hut 1 and he was coming from the hedgerow having given up his search.
I remember asking him what he was playing at and why he’d moved his bike and the poles, not once but twice. My mind initially seemingly ignored the sudden weather changes and the shortness of time in which he’d had to carry out the supposed practical joke! Of course, he could only deny any wrongdoing but he had experienced some oddities…
In conversation as we left the pitch my friend told me that while searching the hedge he’d noticed a sudden change in the weather, that it’d become gloomy and cold. He’d also turned to witness me come forward from Hut 2, take a look around for a few moments (including looking right at him), mutter something and return to the hut.

Over the years I’ve tried to explain the events of those few minutes without success and a time slip is the closest to an explanation I’ve ever come. And if I did experience one, how far backwards I saw I cannot say, though it was more likely minutes or hours rather than days or years. Whatever it was, it was highly unusual."

***

It certainly was unusual in the sense that such things do not happen - or are perceived - very often. But within the context of timespace distortions it sounds quite typical: the "unsettled" weather, especially, seems to have played a role, even though one can only guess how.
Was this oddity in the perception of timespace somehow influenced by the discharge of the storm that had recently passed?
Did this discharge perhaps affect the neural paths - and thus the perception of timespace - of those involved?
It does seem more than a coincidence that such experiences are often - albeit not always - associated with stormy weather. (See, for example, this story; or this one.)

More (speculation, of course ;) on the possible influence of electricity on neurons in a future post.

Have you seen this house?

ALERT


HAVE YOU SEEN THIS HOUSE?

Age: uncertain, possibly Georgian (app. 160 - 280 years old)

General appearance: large; brickwork

Distinguishing marks: variable

Area of sighting: variable, general area of Rougham, Kingshall St, Bradfield St George (Suffolk), UK

Location of last sighting: Kingshall Street (unconfirmed)

Date of last sighting reported: October 2007 (unconfirmed)

Present whereabouts: unknown



The house is not known to be dangerous, but due to its highly unpredictable nature approach is discouraged.

If you happen to see it, immediately contact this blog's mistress, or your nearest time slip investigator.

***

Have you ever owned, or stayed in, a "mobile home"?
It's fun. Not for very long, but it is fun.

Especially if somebody else is driving.
Especially if somebody else is driving.

In England, however - as well as in some other places - there are a few homes that are mobile in a very special way. They take off on their own - brick, mortar and all. And nobody knows what, ahem, drives them to do so.
Furthermore, they appear in places far removed from their original location, wherever that is or was.
And most interesting of all: there seem to be places, i.e. geographical spaces, with special attraction to such wayward houses.

The most famous such place appears to be the area around Rougham, in Suffolk (England). According to Betty Puttick's book Ghosts of Suffolk , there have been sightings of a house - possibly just one, the same house in all cases (but there is no way to ascertain it without a doubt) - all over the place.

Its rise to fame started in 1934, when Edward Bennett was compiling his book Apparitions And Haunted Houses. At that time, he received a letter from a teacher, Miss Wynne, telling him of an extraordinary incident that happened in the autumn (possibly October) of 1926:



"I came to live at Rougham, four miles from Bury St. Edmunds, in 1926. The district was then entirely new to me, and I and my pupil, a girl of 10, spent our afternoon walks exploring it. One dull, damp afternoon, I think in October 1926, we walked off through the fields to look at the church of the neighbouring village, Bradfield St. George. In order to reach the church, which we could see plainly ahead of us to the right, we had to pass through a farmyard, whence we came out on to a road.

We had never previously taken this particular walk, nor did we know anything about the topography of the hamlet of Bradfield St. George. Exactly opposite us on the further side of the road and flanking it, we saw a high wall of greenish-yellow bricks. The road ran past us for a few yards, then curved away from us to the left. We walked along the road, following the brick wall round the bend, where we came upon tall, wrought-iron gates set in the wall. I think the gates were shut, or one side may have been open.

The wall continued on from the gates and disappeared round the curve. Behind the wall, and towering above it, was a cluster of tall trees. From the gates a drive led away among these trees to what was evidently a large house. We could just see a corner of the roof above a stucco front, in which I remember noticing some windows of Georgian design. The rest of the house was hidden by the branches of the trees. We stood by the gates for a moment, speculating as to who lived in this large house, and I was rather surprised that I had not already heard of the owner amongst the many people who had called on my mother since our arrival in the district....

My pupil and I did not take the same walk again until the following spring. It was, as far as I can remember, a dull afternoon, with good visibility, in February or March. We walked up through the farmyard as before, and out on to the road, where, suddenly, we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. "Where's the wall" we queried simultaneously. It was not there. The road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees which we had seen on our first visit. We followed the road on round the bend, but there were no gates, no drive, no corner of a house to be seen. We were both very puzzled.

At first we thought that our house and wall had been pulled down since our last visit, but closer inspection showed a pond and other small pools amongst the mounds where the house had been visible. It was obvious that they had been there a long time."

***

One may be wrong regarding the age of a pond - nature can work very fast! - but this detail seems irrelevant anyway, because, apparently, nobody in the area had ever heard of a house like the one she described standing where she said she and her pupil had seen it.

Or did they?

Further investigation, undertaken in the 1970s by a Mr. Leonard Aves, a skeptic local researcher, uncovered reports - and even a witness - of earlier sightings in the area.

In an issue of the Amateur Gardening magazine (December 20th, 1975), a Mr. James Cobbold (writing under a pseudonym) told of a "phantom house" that he said he saw with his own eyes when he was very young, in June of 1911 or 1912.

According to him, on that day he was riding with a Mr Waylett, a local butcher, on his cart. They were driving along Kingshall Street, when "the air suddenly filled with a peculiar swishing sound" and the temperature seemed to drop considerably. The horse was startled out of its wits; Mr Waylett was thrown off the cart, while young Cobbold tried to control the animal. As he was struggling with the horse, he said, he suddenly saw a three-storey, double-fronted, red brick, Georgian-style house, standing where there had been no house before; not only that but it came with a well appointed garden, "with six flower beds in full bloom". And there was more: "a kind of mist seemed to envelop the house, which I could still see, and the whole thing simply disappeared, it just went'."

Young Mr Cobbold might have been amazed; not so Mr Waylett. Apparently, he had seen the house a number of times before. And, as it turned out, there had been sightings of the house in Cobbold's own family.

In June 1860 or thereabouts, his own grandfather (great-grandfather, according to other sources), Robert Palfrey, was stacking hay, or something like that. As he lifted his eyes, there was suddenly a house where there was none just seconds - and, presumably, centuries (if not millenia) - before. He described it as an ornate red brick house, "standing" around the area of Gypsy Lane, close to a wooded area known as Colville's Grove - not too far from the location where Miss Wynne later reported having seen it.

Such erratic behaviour earned the house a name: "the Rougham mirage".

But is it a mirage?
Not in Mr. Aves's opinion:

"I considered that it might have been a mirage, but I have some experience of mirages and I believe this apparition to be too large to be encompassed in one. At least I have never heard of a mirage that large in this country. Furthermore, for it to have been a mirage would mean that there would have to have been such a house not too far away and we cannot find any traces of one within a reasonable radius".

And if it were a mirage, why does it appear - or so it seems - only in the relatively small area in and around Rougham?
(There are other such "mirages", not only in England but in other places, too - but more on that some other time.)

In later years, the house seemed to have more or less settled down somewhere, but recently it seems to have started reappering again - unless it's only due to the fact that people are simply more willing to talk about it now. A year ago, it even made the headlines:

Ghostly mansion spotted in Suffolk

And - this is news - according to a local historian, Mr. Sage, there is evidence that a house once stood in the area of Kingshall (it might explain the name), but nothing is known about its appearance.

(And speaking of appearances... "Georgian", of course, means from a period between, roughly, 1720 and 1840. That's not very long ago, especially not in a place like Britain, where people occasionally have slippers older than that. A "Georgian" house would certainly be not only remembered but would have been properly recorded by local historians. That would lead to the - perhaps premature - conclusion that IF there had been a house in the area, as Mr Sage claims, it would almost certainly not correspond to the descriptions people gave of this fugitive house. You may be thinking: "But these people are not architecture historians. What do they know?" No, they are not historians. But this style is well known - and well loved - in Britain, so even non-specialists are familiar with it.)

That's not all.

Recently, and quite unsurprisingly, the "Rougham mirage" even worm(hol)ed its way onto YouTube.

(But of course... Gotta keep with the times.)

"The contents of the video have never been explained."

Indeed... like, why exactly was the girl was videorecording her dog in the first place?

Of course it's a hoax - what did you think? ;)
But at least it may keep people on the lookout for the real thing... or whatever it is.

P.S. For another story featuring a "mirage" and startled horses, have a look here.



* The photo at the top of the page shows a road in the actual area of Rougham.

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?