I have been posting on timeslips but thought this should go here. What was it they encountered, a timeslip? Or ghostly echoes from the past? Which could be one of the same thing.

Teens "Plagued" by Fear in Abandoned Town

--Excerpted from Andrew MacKenzie's "Adventures in Time: Encounters With the Past." This book is available through the U.K.-based Society for Psychical Research (www.spr.ac.uk/index.php3?page=books).



It was a beautiful Sunday morning after a cold autumn night in October 1957 when three youths from the Royal Navy shore training establishment, HMS Ganges, at Shotley, Suffolk, approached the little village of Kersey in the same county, guided by bells in the course of a training exercise, but on entering the village they saw it as it probably was in medieval times instead of as it is in the twentieth century.

When they entered a lane leading to the southern end of the village, the ancient Saxon church, rebuilt by the Normans, which they had glimpsed through the trees as they approached across the fields, was no longer visible, and they were walking in silence, as the bells had abruptly stopped after they climbed a fence a hundred yards from the church. As they turned the corner of a leafy lane, they saw a dirt track completely empty of houses on the right-hand side -- only forest trees -- and on the left-hand side, two or three houses widely spaced. The track ran down to a stream and then rose to the northern end of the village; here there were more houses and they were small, old and dirty.

The youths, all aged 15, could not help but notice that instead of there being groups of people chatting in the street or on their way to church (although the church was no longer visible), the village was completely deserted. The only signs of life were provided by a number of ducks, silent and motionless, by the stream through the center of the village. Nowhere were there cars, telephone wires, TV and radio aerials, or other indications of contemporary life in the country.

Depression set in as the youths experienced the deathly silence, unbroken by birdsong, that enveloped the village. The world they had left behind seemed far away. As they surveyed the empty street, not even a dog was in sight, nor did they feel a breath of wind; no leaves stirred on the tall trees around them. It was, as one of them said afterwards, as if they had stepped back in time. Even the season had changed. Although the fields they had left had the colors of autumn, trees in the village had the fresh greenness of spring.

The youths peered into the window of a butcher's shop in which skinned oxen carcasses, green with age, were hanging. This was the only shop visible in the village, and it was so dirty, festooned with cobwebs, that it suggested the butcher had shut up shop and gone away weeks before. The youths looked into other buildings through windows but it was into rooms bare of furniture.

By this time, the feeling of uneasiness increased; the youths felt they were surrounded by invisible watchers. Their pace grew faster as they went up the village street and eventually they took to their heels. After turning a corner at the top of the street, they paused to take a breath and look back. The silence was now broken by the sound of church bells, smoke hung in the air that in the village had been crystal clear, and behind the trees at the southern end of the village the church was visible...

In "Adventures in Time," Andrew MacKenzie follows this synopsis with a chronicling of his interviews with the participants, conducted between 1988-1990, and the specifics of his historical investigations, which revealed, among many other details, that construction on the missing church and its tower had begun in the 1340s but was halted in 1349 due to the Black Death. Work recommenced in the 15th century and was completed circa 1481. Additionally, one of the witnesses marked on a modern-day postcard of Kersey the site of the butcher shop they'd seen. While the building he indicated was not currently a butchery, it had, in fact, been used as one at least as far back as 1790 (no records could be found documenting its previous use), and the building itself dates back to the fifteenth century.

That's a fascinating tale, Lottie, and one I hadn't heard of before. I love timeslip stories, because, if the witnesses are to be believed, it suggests our current understanding of science has a few big holes in it. Perhaps the ones that people slip through!

It does open up possibilities about ghosts. Perhaps some ghosts are travellers from another time, who have momentarily slipped into ours. And if a person from our time does slip into another, do they appear as ghosts in their new location?

Or perhaps a time slip just involves our minds, overwhelmed by an impression of what was once there, while our bodies remain in the present?

Very reminiscent of Miss Jourdain and Miss Moberly's afternoon walk through Versailles in 1901. Those two English schoolmarms also felt the odd sense of depression and unreality as they were apparently transported back to the Versailles just prior to the French revolution.

A fairly good page to this story is HERE

And here Link I posted this in Mysteries of time and space.

Oh and here as well, more on timeslips..Link

Did I post these in the wrong forum?