Another episode. If sceptical you could put the first section down to unfamiliarity with a place and possible illness (she feels very cold on a hot day). But the second, with four witnesses, seems harder to dismiss. You can read a blog post from one of the experients himself on And Sometimes He's So Nameless. He makes the interesting point that after a while you are merely telling the story of your story, rather than truly remembering the incident itself. But he and his friends made the sensible point of writing down their experiences independently immediately after they happened.
Ripples in Time.
Chris
Jensen-Romer: I’d always laughed at people who saw ghosts as being insane.
I’d made jokes about our friends who said they had psychic powers. And this was
the thing which suddenly shocked me into completely reordering my own mental
universe.
Axel Johnston: It’s still the most real psychical experience I’ve ever had.
Narrator: Is it possible to travel in time? To step through
the curtain of our daily life and find ourselves in a completely different time
and place – different scenes, different people, different landscape? It is of
course the very stuff of science fiction. But could it ever happen in real
life? It’s a question that’s fuelled scientific controversy for decades, and
indeed it still does. But there are people who would claim to know the answer:
it is possible, it has happened to them. One of them is no less a person than
the famous psychiatrist and philosopher Carl Jung. In the 1930s he was
travelling in Italy and he went to visit the tomb of a Roman Empress in
Ravenna. In his account of the episode he describes how he became aware of a
strange atmosphere in the place – an unexplained mild blue light everywhere.
But what caught his attention was the remarkable beauty of a series of mosaics
depicting maritime scenes. He stood in front of them and discussed them with
his companion for twenty or thirty minutes. On leaving the mausoleum they tried
to buy postcards of them. But surprisingly there were none. Later on he asked a
friend visiting Ravenna to obtain pictures for him. It was then that he learnt
the truth. The mosaics simply did not exist. These are the mosaics that were in
the mausoleum at the time of Jung’s visit: nothing like the ones he described.
The mosaics of Jung and his companion discussed, infused with that strange pale
blue light, had existed once, but then been destroyed by fire several hundred
years earlier. Jung came to believe that he had indeed travelled in time and
witnessed the building as it was in the time of the empress herself, fully 1400
years earlier.
Mary Rose Barrington is a paranormal investigator who has
become deeply involved in these ripples in time, where people seem to walk out
of one world into another time and place. She has studied the Jung case in
detail and believes there are extraordinary similarities with another case that
occurred in this country. It involves the Bartons. They were a couple who ran a
famous, much talked-out bookshop in the ‘50s, who often spent their leisure
time walking in the Surrey hills. On one of these walks they believe they
travelled back in time to another landscape.
Irina Barton: Before we left the flat in the morning, I had
been extremely depressed and didn’t want to go for the walk. And unknown to me,
he’d felt the same but we neither mentioned it, we thought it would just spoil
the day.
Narrator: By some strange compulsion they still don’t
understand, they travelled on beyond the spot they had intended, and eventually
stopped in the village of Wotton Hatch. Once there they decided to visit the
tomb of John Evelyn, the famous 17th Century diarist.
IB: We were rather surprised to find the gate of the tomb
open, which we’d never found before. And so we looked round that, spent a lot
of time investigating the memorials and the inscriptions and all the other bits
that make up a very beautiful tomb. And then we left the church, walked down to
the gate, and as we came out of the gate almost immediately we turned onto a
path that was totally overgrown with vegetation. And then we began to climb
this path – it was a very narrow path, we had to go single file to go up it.
And we climbed up, up, up, up. And then we came out at the t… at a point, at a
clearing, with the straight path, and a clearing behind it, and wooded trees
behind that. And then on the path, along the path, was a seat, a backless seat.
And Eric said “Why don’t we sit on this seat, as we spent so much time in the
church, let’s sit on the seat and have our lunch now.” It was about ten to
twelve, twelve o’clock. I could only say that the depression was by now very, very
overwhelming. I just couldn’t eat the sandwiches. The only comfort came from
the sound of a woodman and a dog howling. What it sounded like, down in the
valley. And as I was crumbling the bread and throwing it to the birds, there
was suddenly a total silence. Not one bird was singing. I could still hear the
wood chopper and the dog, but that was all. Everything went absolutely still.
Eric Barton: Then Irene, my wife, turned to me and said, “Is
it cold?” Cold? - it was a very hot day. I said “No, certainly not.” And she
said, “Feel my arm.” And it was icy cold.
IB: And I saw, standing in the clearing behind, three men.
And I went to turn round to look at them, and I realised I’d seen them through
the back of my head. I’d say they were wearing a sort of cape, a black… they
were all three of them entirely in black. The centre one was most definitely a
clergyman, because he had a clerical collar on. And he had a smaller rimmed
hat. The outer two men had a larger black rimmed hat. And I would have said
that they were, as I say, late 18th, early 19th century.
Looking back on it, at the time of course you don’t think like that. You just
see the figures, or whatever, and accept them. You don’t say to yourself, “Oh
I’m seeing three figures from the 18th or 19th century” you
just don’t. I have no idea why one would have a visitation of figures from any
period, at any time like that and in a place like that, because it was out of
place, apart from out of time.
Narrator: Very disturbed by this forbidding apparition, they
hurried on for a while along the lonely path, and then laid down and fell asleep
on the edge of a field. They have only a faint recollection how they eventually
made their way back to Dorking station to get back to London. Eric was so
disturbed by the experience that on the following Sunday he decided to return
to Wotton, and retrace the path of their walk, to unravel exactly what had
happened. But it seemed that the landscape they’d walked through no longer
existed.
EB: Reaching the church, Evelyn’s church, the doors were
opening and people were coming out.
IB: So he stopped a man who was coming out of the church and
said to him, “Are you familiar with this area?” He said “Yes indeed, I am.” And
Eric said, ”Well can you tell me where..” and he described the landscape that we
had been in. And this man said, “No, there’s nothing like that round here.” And
Eric said, “Well, alright then, forget the landscape, where is there a backless
seat on the edge of a path?”
EB: When I asked him about the bench, he said there were no
benches as far… he KNEW there was no bench in the whole of this area, at all.
No bench.
Narrator: So what can have happened to the landscape they’d
walked through? The path and the park bench and the valley. Mary Rose
Barrington was convinced that the key to this experience lay in the connection
with John Evelyn’s tomb.
Mary Rose Barrington, Paranormal Investigator: Well John
Evelyn is the gentleman lying in that tomb, and he is famous for having written
a diary in the 17th century, commenting on political and social
situation. And among his diary entries is a reference to three gentlemen, one
of whom was a priest and they were all to be executed for treason against the
king, and he was very upset about this, and he happens to mention it in a diary
entry. In the same time as he’s talking about having been to the church in
Wotton.
Narrator: The diary entry was for the 15th of march, 1696.
And Evelyn wrote of his concern, and I quote, for three unhappy wretches, of
which one is a priest, executed with a squeak, for attempting to assassinate
the king.
MRB: So I wondered whether Irina might not have been in
effect seeing some landscape initiated through the eyes of Evelyn, in much the
same way as the famous psychiatrist CJ Jung seems once to have got into the mind of a Roman empress,
when he saw some mosaics.
Narrator: But nothing in the paranormal is simple and straightforward.
Both Irina and Mary Rose Barrington have come up with a second theory. It still
involves time travel, but to a different time and place. It seems that on the
19th of July, 1873, Bishop Wilberforce was riding through this very
countryside, on his way to Wotton House indeed, to make up a quarrel with the Evelyn
of the time. He was slightly ahead of his two companions when he was thrown
from his horse and died. Strangely enough it has many resemblances with the
shape of the landscape through which the Bartons remember walking. So what did
Irina witness? Was it the men about to hang, that worried Evelyn so much on
that March day in 1696, or was it the sudden dramatic death of the clergyman
Wilberforce in 1873?
But there is a vital
clue, a railway track. The Bartons distinctly remember crossing a single track
railway. In 1954, at the time of their experience, this was a double track
railway, as now. Of course at the time of Evelyn’s diary there was no railway
at all. But in 1873, the time of Wilberforce’s death, it would have been a
single track railway. And as we’ve said, nothing in the paranormal is simple.
By visiting Evelyn’s tomb, could the Bartons have linked the two events in some
extraordinary way?
MRB: What these two events have in common is the priest.
Therefore I think they switched from the priest in the Evelyn story to the
priest Wilberforce, erm, raking through the centuries so there was a fusion of
landscapes.
Narrator: So, in their walk through the woods on that still
midsummer day, did the Bartons skate through time, experiencing Evelyn’s
concern for the three men, and Bishop Wilberforce’s sudden death, before
returning, in a way they still can’t explain, back to the present time?
(Part Two)
Narrator: Now we go back nearly 900 years, to 1103, that was
when the monks of Cluny founded the priory here at Thetford in Norfolk. For hundreds
of years this was a place of refuge and pilgrimage. During the Middle Ages,
people flocked here because of its reputation for healing and miracle cures.
Just nine years ago, four young students, who came here quite by chance,
believe they witnessed the priory as it was hundreds of years ago.
David Aukhett: The whole thing was emotional, it’s more threatening
being the entire place, than the figure, as you said before, the apparition was
not that important. It was the emotion, the entire place was scary, the entire
place over in that part of the priory anyway. That was the scary thing, I just
had to leave the area. And even that night, I was scared, and then for a few
nights afterwards I had trouble to sleep.
Narrator: Those four students have returned to Thetford to
describe their extraordinary time travel experience, an event which has had a profound
effect on all of them. Three of them now pursue scientific careers concerned
with the understanding of consciousness and the workings of the mind. Their
experience happened late one summer’s evening, as the four were passing through
Thetford on their way home.
Chris Jensen-Romer, Parapsychologist: So we pulled into the
car park, and wandered through, and it was a very pleasant mild August night.
As we walked through we joked and made silly comments, but we were also fairly
serious keeping an eye open for the history of the place, and wondering why we’d
never come across it. Something else struck us, which was there was no-one
here, we would have expected, it was in the middle of a built up area in the
middle of a town, we would have expected children, people walking their dogs,
people sitting drinking out of bottles.. no one. Very lonely place. Eventually
we wandered, splitting up on the way, and gathered again at about this point.
And while we were standing here, we were looking at the façade of the building
in front of us, and through the small window, well three small windows, just up
here, one of us drew attention to someone watching us. And then a few moments
later, the person we saw pass across and come down through a staircase. Now I
wish to stress this, I know it’s hard to believe, there was a staircase leading
up through that archway, to a doorway that you can’t see but which is in the
room behind. And so we saw someone coming down the stairs. And somebody remarked,
it’s somebody wearing a black sheet – it’s a joker trying to scare us, they’re
trying to pretend they’re a ghost. And one of us began to walk forwards on the
left, and in fact slowly increased his speed as he got closer and closer, and the
figure began to retreat back up the stairs. At which point I shouted “Let’s get
him!” and began to run like this.., I came running in. As I ran in, I tried to
run up the staircase. I had the impression that I actually went a couple of
stairs up the staircase towards a door above us. The figure had by that time
retreated back across. Darren came in on my left, and as he came in, he also
ran at the stairs. I fell forward and pitched, struck my head, probably about
here on the flint wall. Darren also struck himself, though he ran through
almost to the back wall. We both ended up on the ground, and I was bleeding. It
took us a few seconds to get back up and to look at one another, and to realise
that there was no staircase. That not only was the figure not real, but neither
was the actual staircase which we had physically attempted to run up. At that
moment, everything just went cold for me. I got up, Darren was already out
running back towards the car. I staggered back out, joined up with Axel, and we
ran. We just ran in sheer fear. And I was questioning my sanity and everybody
else’s around me at that point. I really did not understand at all what was
going on.
Narrator: None of them had had any previous paranormal
experiences. But being scientifically inclined, they all agreed to go off and
write down what they’d seen independently of one another. Much of what follows
is taken from those accounts.
Axel Johnston, Computer Scientist: Right, this is my account
of the vision. It appeared to be a man about five and a half foot tall, judging
from how high he appeared to be relative to the archway. And he was wearing a
black monk’s habit, in the sort of Dominican style, with the cowl pulled up and
his hands clasped within his sleeves in this kind of position, which meant that
none of his skin or anything was visible in the light at all, it just was
black, with possibly darker face. You know, that’s what I saw.
Darren Lorking, Scientific Researcher: We advanced towards
the steps, that we could see that the [Christian?,] the figure was standing on.
I felt nervous, um, but I was so curious that I had to continue. We walked
towards the steps and as we approached the archway I was still convinced the
steps were there. The figure had gone, disappeared, presumably up the stairs.
Um, I tried to walk up the stairs, but they weren’t there. I just fell over.
That’s when I got up and ran.
CJ-R: It’s odd actually, because, er, my drawing doesn’t
look much like a cowled monk. What I drew and wrote at the time was “It looks
like a person wearing a black sheet or a woman in 18th century
dress. And the reason I had the impression of the 18th century dress
was that it seemed to be flowing towards the bottom. I do agree that the arms
were folded across. And also I noticed there were some dark points almost glittering,
like coal, black coal broken in the central area here, which I recorded on my
drawing as you can see.
David Aukhett, Clinical Psychologist: The doorway seemed
much darker than it should be, and then there was a cloud, smoke or something,
which sort of grew and became bright. I didn’t actually see a figure, I just
saw a column of smoke, glowing and slowly becoming bigger. And basically that’s
when I panicked and fled.
Narrator: From these accounts it’s clear that all four
witnessed a strange and inexplicable event, and it triggered off in all four a
profound interest in the science of the paranormal, in an effort to come to
terms with their experience.
DA: The environment has triggered something in us, and we
all see it in our own minds. I mean I don’t think that invalidates it just
because...
(another interrupts) …no just because it’s an individual’s
perception of it…
DA: Just because I saw a column of smoke, you saw an
individual, you saw someone in a habit, that’s all the… maybe the emotions that
have been taken at that time.
CJ-R: Well I suppose when you think about it, there are
various explanations you could offer beyond the ones we’ve talked about. The
idea it’s a recording of the dead abbot or prior, sorry, prior wasn’t it, this
recording of him re-enacting. Or, possibly, because we had the thing of the
priory being more real as we left it, as if it was becoming, coming into
existence around us or somehow very close. Timeslip, I don’t know.
DL: But the physical thing to me was the staircase. I mean I
can’t think of any reasonable explanation for that. It’s not a ghost. It’s an
inanimate object.
CJ-R: But if you have the ghost of a man on a horse, you
have to have the horse. And if you have a ghost of a horse and carriage, you
have to have the carriage. The carriage doesn’t have to have a soul or a
spirit, but it still appears. And therefore the ghost on the stairs wouldn’t
have made sense unless we’d seen the stairs. And so that the stairs might even
be added by our own minds to explain how the figure was coming down.
DL: Possibly, yes.
CJ-R: We actually did the window dressing for the experience
we were having. Axel what did you think about the place becoming more real as
we left?
AJ: I wouldn’t have said it would just be caused by the
fear, because it was a lot more.. .this is not an imposing place, it’s not something
I’d find imposing
(someone interrupts): But it seemed it at the time
AJ: And I think that was possibly due to, I think the time
slip theory does account for that a lot more effectively. Just the fact that we
were being -
CJ-R: …as if we were partially slipping back, that we were
closer than -
AJ: That’s right, yeah. As though we were much closer to
this time period when it happened, when it was a functioning abbey, or a priory
rather.
CJ-R: […] there were famous cases. But in many of those,
people experience a dreamlike state, an altered state of consciousness, and
often felt depressed…
Narrator: has had a powerful effect on the shape of Chris’s
life. He is now involved in research into the nature of consciousness. He has
also spent some time digging into the history of Thetford, and has come up with
a murder story.
CJ-R: What actually happened was in the late 14th
Century a prior, who was actually - those are the prior’s quarters where we saw it,
and there was historically a staircase going up at that location. And the prior
was murdered by one of his monks, who was from France, who he had refused permission
to return to his home territory, so to speak. And the monk repeatedly stabbed
the prior in the stomach and chest, and after the death of the prior, within
the prior’s quarters, the monk was taken to Norwich castle, where he was
branded, his eyes were put out and he was incarcerated for the rest of his life
in the dungeon under Norwich castle. This is a matter of historical record, we
actually found this out after you’d left. When we actually went to the library
and conducted research. But we didn’t know that at the time. And that
information was only available, as far as we’d been able to find out, in a late
19th Century book on the history of Thetford, which has a small
reference to it. So it’s not a popularly known fact. So there’s no way we could
have heard that information and forgotten about it, and then later on,
interpreted it because we suddenly realised we were in the right location for
the story.
Narrator: Is it possible to travel in time? That was the
question we started with. Noone would claim that these events provide a
complete answer to that question. But they do suggest that time is by no means
as simple as the relentless onward ticking of the clock would have us believe.
There are, it seems, ripples and discontinuities in time, parallel existences
running alongside our own. It would seem possible for any one of us to turn a
corner or pass through a door and suddenly find ourselves in a strange and
alien world.
