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.


If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

The scream

This happened to me approximately three years ago, on a seemingly ordinary evening of a seemingly ordinary day.

There is a short underground passageway under a city street (not an avenue, nothing particularly wide, just an ordinary two-way street) near my former home that I used to cross every day for many years (until two and a half years ago, when I moved). I was so familiar with it that I could walk through it blind-folded, if necessary.

The early evening that I am talking about I was walking towards the stairs that lead down, into the underground passage. There were two or three girls hanging around the entrance to the staircase. Nothing extraordinary so far.

When I was about 15 metres or so from the entrance, suddenly a blood-curdling scream came out of the passageway. The girls obviously heard it too, because they all turned around and looked towards the stairs, to see who would emerge or what would transpire.

What immediately struck me as strange was the fact that, after the scream, NOTHING, no sound whatsoever, was heard - and this is a passageway where the echo of every single step resonates right to the top of the stairs.

That worried me: I was afraid that I would find somebody lying there - and I didn't even have my cell phone with me (to call for the ambulance, if needed). The girls just stood there, as if frozen, and watched me descend the stairs.

But there was something else that I also found very unusual: unless the person who screamed had been alone all the while, I should have heard the steps of whoever made her (it sounded like a woman) scream like that, even if that person was going in the opposite direction.

Moreover, I should have seen that person emerge on either side of the passage. The passageway is not a very long one - there was time enough for me to see him/her come out on either side while I was still walking towards the stairs.

But I didn't see anyone coming out - and I didn't hear anything.
That worried me even more. As I descended the fifteen or so stairs that lead underground, I braced myself for a possibly unpleasant encounter (cursing myself all the while for having left the phone at home).


There was nobody in the passage.
It was completely deserted, and no steps were audible anywhere. There was no sign of any unusual going-on anywhere; and certainly no sound.

As you can probably gather at this point, I only mentioned the girls because they were my only "witnesses", my only proof - to myself - that they had heard it, too, and from the very same direction. (There was no other place around from which an echoing sound like that could have come, anyway.)

I have tried to reconstruct the event, going as far as making a friend of mine take off his shoes in the underground passage and run (because such a swift disappearance from the place would only be possible with almost preternaturally speedy running), while I positioned myself in more or less the same place where I had been when I heard the scream (i.e. above ground, a few metres from the entrance to the staircase).
Even when he was barefoot - and we live in an urban environment where nobody has been seen barefoot in public for hundreds of years, I would imagine - I still could hear the clapping sound of his running feet from where I was standing, above ground.

To this day I have not been able to solve the puzzle of that scream. And I am only posting it here because - for all I know - it might have been a spacial/temporal distortion of some kind. Certainly I can't think of any plausible ordinarily "logical" explanation for it. Still, I am keeping my mind open.

But I have read about similar events since. One is too elaborate to explain it in detail here; and another one bears only a partial similarity. You can read about it here:

Heard accident before it happened

Edvard Munch, The Scream, cca 1893-1910 (here digitally altered).

IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE: 

My body, myself?

If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.

In Its Image and Likeness?

(Obviously, this cannot be perceived as a "time slip" story or a musing on it, but I feel it does pertain to the wider context that is the main subject of this humble blog.)


Does nature with its terrestrial phenomena mirror a wider, cosmic (perhaps not necessarily physical) reality?

Or is it perhaps even the materialisation – a condensation, if you will – of the forces underlying the unceasing (re)creation of the world and their dynamics?

I have always, even as a child, detested the »animistic« view of the cosmos (our world included). I found nature »as is« (as IF we ever observed it »as is«... ;) interesting enough without men trying to read into »her«.

But even I – even then – had to wonder sometimes. I have noticed often enough that sometimes, rarely, there seem to be »signs in the skies« that for some reason cannot simply be dismissed as our »reading into« them. (It would take a lot of time and effort to describe some of them, so let me just mention the extraordinary aspect of the sky on January 25, 1938, and on August 23rd, 1939: the day of the signing of the Molotov-von Ribbentrop treaty.)

And now, I have come upon a website that claims the river Nile actually conforms to the shape of – the Milky Way.

TIME RIVERS

To be totally frank, I am not sure I subscribe to this theory.
But I got to give them - specifically, the author of the theory, Goro Adachi - credit for observation and »lateral« thinking.
Brainstorms seldom pass without yielding at least a single drop of valid and useful information.

And, after all, according to Sufi mystics, the entire world, with all its creatures, is nothing but a mirror created by God and observed by God's unblinking eye, to see the image of »Himself«.

»God created the world because He wanted to see His image in the mirror.«

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 benefitting from it).

What I didn't know at the time, is that the series was supposedly (or so I was told) inspired by a series of apparently real incidents that, again supposedly, 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... :)


EDIT
For more - many, many more - reports of goings-on along this street, go here.


If you want to report a perceived dimensional anomaly, please do, but read this first.