“MYSTERIOUS TIME SLIPS” and More Strange Paranormal Stories! #WeirdDarkness
Listen to ““MYSTERIOUS TIME SLIPS” and More Strange Paranormal Stories! #WeirdDarkness” on Spreaker.
IN THIS EPISODE: Time is thought to be unstoppable. The past is gone — and the future is unknown. Or is it? (The Mystery of Time Slips) *** You may know them as tiny statues in your garden, but real gnomes are said to be fantastical creatures that harbor the secrets of the elements of the Earth. (Supernatural Gnomes) *** Mrs. Meiar was amiable and lived peaceably with her neighbors, but Christian—known locally as Devil Meiar—was regarded as the wickedest man in Ripley County, Indiana. (Righteous Retribution) *** So, what was it? An overactive imagination? A ghost? A succubus? What happened to this woman’s boyfriend? (My Boyfriend’s Ghostly Lover) *** For four months the hills of L.A. were littered with the bodies of women and girls aged 12 to 28. It was the work of two insatiable killers, though they were recognized as a single monster one and the same: the Hillside Strangler. (Horror of the Hillside Stranglers)
SOURCES AND REFERENCES FROM THE EPISODE…
“The Horror of the Hillside Stranglers” by Mark Oliver: https://tinyurl.com/sxounwl
“Supernatural Gnomes” by A. Sutherland: https://tinyurl.com/v7xxjfm
“Righteous Retribution” by Robert Wilhelm: https://tinyurl.com/yb9x7h78
“My Boyfriend’s Ghostly Lover” by G. Michael Vasey from the book “Seduction of the Innocents”: https://amzn.to/2SrprKv
“The Mystery of Time Slips” by Tim Swartz: https://tinyurl.com/5vmqbeh
Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music Library.
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“I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness.” — John 12:46
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Originally aired: November, 2018
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:
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INTRODUCTION=====
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of 1996, Frank and his wife, Carol was visiting Liverpool’s Bold Street area for some shopping. At Central Station, the pair split up; Carol went to Dillons Bookshop and Frank went to HMV to look for a CD he wanted. As he walked up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office/Café building that lead onto Bold Street, Frank suddenly noticed he had entered a strange “oasis of quietness.” Suddenly, a small box van that looked like something out of the 1950s sped across his path, honking its horn as it narrowly missed him. Frank noticed the name on the van’s side: “Caplan’s.” When he looked down, the confused policeman saw that he was unexpectedly standing in the road. The off-duty policeman crossed the road and saw that Dillons Book Store now had “Cripps” over its entrances. More confused, he looked in to see not books, but women’s handbags and shoes. Looking around, Frank realized people were dressed in clothes that appeared to be from the 1940s. Suddenly, he spotted a young girl in her early 20’s dressed in a lime-colored sleeveless top. The handbag she was carrying had a popular brand name on it, which reassured the policeman that maybe he was still partly in 1996. It was a paradox, but he was relieved, and he followed the girl into Cripps. As the pair went inside, Frank watched in amazement as the interior of the building completely changed in a flash to that of Dillons Bookshop of 1996. The girl turned to leave and Frank lightly grasped the girl’s arm to attract attention and said, “Did you see that?” She replied, “Yeah! I thought it was a clothes shop. I was going to look around, but it’s a bookshop.” It was later determined that Cripps and Caplan’s were businesses based in Liverpool during the 1950s.
I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness.
SHOW OPEN=====
Welcome, Weirdos – I’m Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Here you’ll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained.
Coming up in this episode…
Time is thought to be unstoppable. The past is gone — and the future is unknown. Or is it? (The Mystery of Time Slips)
You may know them as tiny statues in your garden, but real gnomes are said to be fantastical creatures that harbor the secrets of the elements of the Earth. (Supernatural Gnomes)
Mrs. Meiar was amiable and lived peaceably with her neighbors, but Christian—known locally as Devil Meiar—was regarded as the wickedest man in Ripley County, Indiana. (Righteous Retribution)
So, what was it? An overactive imagination? A ghost? A succubus? What happened to this woman’s boyfriend? (My Boyfriend’s Ghostly Lover)
But first… for four months the hills of L.A. were littered with the bodies of women and girls aged 12 to 28. It was the work of two insatiable killers, though they were recognized as a single monster one and the same: the Hillside Strangler. We begin with that story. (Horror of the Hillside Stranglers)
If you’re new here, welcome to the show! While you’re listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, enter contests, to connect with me on social media, plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you’re struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.
Now.. bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!
STORY: HILLSIDE STRANGLERS=====
The Hillside Strangler had left the bodies of some five young girls in the hills of L.A. within 30 days. By the end of their streak, they would have raped, tortured, and murdered some 10 women and girls between the ages of 28 and 12. to the horror of authorities and citizens alike, the Hillside Strangler was actually the work of two horrific men: Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono Jr.
Before their massacre abruptly stopped in February 1978, a nine-year-old boy found two of the stranglers’ victims. He was with his friends on an adventure, searching for buried treasure in the local dump’s trash heap. From afar, the boy would later tell the police that they just looked like mannequins.
That’s why he was willing to climb up over the filthy mattresses and get a close enough view to see what they really were: two little girls, one 12 and one 14 – neither much older than he – stripped naked and left to rot. They’d been there in the trash and the heat of the sun for a week. Their pretty young faces had started to decay and there were swarms of insects over them.
Those two young girls – Dolly Cepeda and Sonja Johnson – wouldn’t be the last to die. Before the sun went down that night, another body would be found.
The massacre did not start until Kenneth Bianchi and his cousin, Angelo Buono first got together in January 1976 when Bianchi moved from Rochester, N.Y. to live with his cousin, Buono, in Los Angeles. However, Bianchi would later be found responsible for several murders on his own.
As is the case with many a murderer, Bianchi had a troubled past. His mother was unstable and unable to care for him and so he was adopted. He was himself an unstable youth and later adult, who had difficulty holding down steady work.
But with his cousin, he landed on a money-making scheme that would grow into a murdering spree.
The older cousin, Angelo is believed to have acted as a sort of role model for the younger cousin, Kenneth, and subsequently was able to sway him. The child of divorced parents, Buono was raised by his mother. But from even an early age, Buono seemed to have loathed women. Though he married several times he proved to be an abusive husband.
Angelo Buono, consequently, hit on the heinous idea that would become a murder spree first: they would become pimps, he told his cousin, and bring in teenaged runaways no one would miss and force them to turn tricks.
Bianchi and Buono first took in two teenaged girls named Sabra Hannan and Becky Spears. Then, once they had them in Buono’s home, they locked them up and forced them to sell their bodies.
Bianchi and Buono were brutal. They beat the girls, pimped them, raped them, and beat them, even more, when they tried to resist. They locked them in their rooms and only let them leave when they begged for permission.
Sabra enlisted the help of a lawyer named David Wood. Both women made successful escapes.
“I was tired of getting beat up, tired of all the threats, and tired of engaging in prostitution,” Sabra would tell a jury years later when the men who had tortured her were put on trial for murder.
She was lucky that she got away because not long after she left, Bianchi and Buono’s violent tendencies only worsened.
Their first murder came a little after Sabra and Becky’s escape. Determined to keep their pimping business alive, Bianchi and Buono paid a prostitute name Deborah Noble for a “trick list” with the names and numbers of customers in L.A. Noble showed up at their house with another prostitute, Yolanda Washington, and sold them a phony list. Bianchi and Buono quickly realized this and wanted vengeance.
They knew where to find Yolanda, who had told them where she often worked.
Yolanda Washington’s body was found naked on a hillside near the Ventura Freeway on Oct. 18, 1977. She’d been tied up with fabric around the neck, wrists, and legs, and pinned down. She’d been violently raped and then her body had been washed cleaned to remove the evidence and left naked on the hill.
A music store owner named Ronald LeMieux was the last person to see her alive. He’d later testify that two men flashing police badges had pulled her off the street, handcuffed her, and pushed her into the back seat of an unmarked car.
That would become Bianchi and Buono’s trademark for most of their murders: they would pretend they were cops, flash a fake badge, and tell a woman she was coming downtown. Then they’d take her to Angelo Buono’s upholstery shop and make sure she was never seen again.
Less than two weeks later, the Hillside Stranglers struck again. This time they killed a 15-year-old runaway who’d been surviving by selling her body on the streets. Her body turned up on Nov. 1, 1997, dumped in a residential area in La Crescenta.
A waitress named Lissa Kastin turned up next, just five days later, and she was the first woman they killed who wasn’t a prostitute. On Nov. 20, the bodies of Dolly Cepeda, Sonja Johnson, and Kristina Weckler all turned up on the same day.
The manner of death for Weckler was found to be particularly troubling, as investigators found that the Stranglers had experimented with injecting her with household surface cleaners.
Women in L.A. learned to live in fear. One woman, named Kimberly Martin, joined a call girl agency hoping that they’d keep her safe. But instead, the agency accepted a call from two men using a pay phone and sent her out to her death.
Martin’s body was found on Dec. 14, 1977. She was found nude, strangled, and with electrical burns on her palms. She was 18-years-old and she was the ninth victim of the Hillside Stranglers.
There would be a little more than two months of peace before the killers would strike a tenth and final time, leaving the body of a woman named Cindy Hudspeth in the truck of her Datsun, inches from the edge of a cliff.
Then, suddenly, in February 1978, the massacre stopped.
Kenneth Bianchi had left L.A. just as the spree finished. He had fallen in love and spent much of his time in L.A. trying to win the hand of a woman named Kelli Boyd in marriage.
Boyd never agreed to marry him, but she did give him a son. She gave birth to their boy Ryan just days after the Hillside Strangler struck for the final time. Weeks after giving birth, Kelli Boyd broke things off with Bianchi and moved to Washington State, and in May 1978, Bianchi followed her to Bellingham, Washington.
But the killer in Bianchi seemed insatiable.
On Jan. 12, 1979, Bianchi kidnapped and murdered two young students at Western Washington University.
Without Angelo Buono helping him, Bianchi was clumsy about covering his tracks. The police caught him the next day.
He’d killed the women in Washington the same way he’d killed those girls in L.A., and when the police pulled him in, they found that he was still carrying a California driver’s license. Kenneth Bianchi, they quickly realized, was one half of the Hillside Strangler.
When they threatened him with capital punishment, Bianchi broke down and gave up his partner, Angelo Buono. During his trial, Bianchi tried to plead insanity and stated that he had multiple personality disorder. The court didn’t buy it.
Bianchi pleaded guilty to the Washington murders and five of the California murders and testified against his cousin to avoid the death penalty. He consequently received six life sentences where Buono received life without parole. The jury ultimately voted against capital punishment.
With his final words to the court, the presiding judge, Ronald George, cursed the rules that kept him from sentencing them to death.
“Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi slowly squeezed out of their victims their last breath of air and their promise for a future life. And all for what? The momentary sadistic thrill of enjoying a brief perverted sexual satisfaction and the venting of their hatred for women,” the judge railed. “If ever there was a case where the death penalty is appropriate, this is the case.”
Buono died while imprisoned in 2002, Bianchi is still living out his sentence after marrying a Louisiana pen pal in September 1989. His 2010 request for parole was denied.
BREAK=====
Up next… You may know them as tiny statues in your garden, but real gnomes are said to be fantastical creatures that harbor the secrets of the elements of the Earth. (Supernatural Gnomes)
Mrs. Meiar was amiable and lived peaceably with her neighbors, but Christian—known locally as Devil Meiar—was regarded as the wickedest man in Ripley County, Indiana. (Righteous Retribution)
So, what was it? An overactive imagination? A ghost? A succubus? What happened to this woman’s boyfriend? (My Boyfriend’s Ghostly Lover) These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns.
STORY: GNOMES=====
“The forces of nature are often classified according to one of four kinds of expression – earth, water, air, and fire. Operating at the most primal level with these expressions of force in the natural world are beings called elementals. Those working with the force of earth in the natural world are called gnomes…”
Gnomes are very ancient tiny spirits of the earth and mountains. They have accompanied people all through history and you can read about them in countless fairy and folk tales of almost all European countries, especially in Germanic and Scandinavian folklore, the legends of Ireland, Scotland and England.
In Europe’s Renaissance magic and alchemy, a gnome was introduced in the 16th century by Paracelsus, a Swiss German botanist, philosopher, astrologer, alchemist, and one of the most influential medical scientists in early modern Europe.
With the passage of time, gnomes have been adopted by more recent authors including those of modern fantasy literature.
The word comes from Renaissance Latin gnomus (meaning: “earth-dweller”) and according to Paracelsus’ description the spirits are much shorter than dwarves (only two spans, which is distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger, measured by a human hand).
They avoid interaction with humans but are known to maintain good relation-ships with birds, rabbits, foxes, hedgehogs, and squirrels. Folklore indicates that there are large gnome communities with male and female gnomes of all ages.
They are very concerned with the products and treasures of the earth and usually live underground but they also like caves, and other dwellings located close to surface.
Gnome tunnels lead to mysterious and strange dark places in the mountains.
It is said that the gnomes are very sensitive to the sun’s rays, which momentarily change them into stone.
In ancient and medieval mythologies, gnomes are often associated with dwarves guarding mines and subterranean places full of treasures.
However, unlike dwarves, the gnomes usually live beneath human gardens and have a reputation for emerging during the night to do some useful gardening and they enrich garden soil, making flowers and vegetables flourish.
Additionally, like for example in Norway, gnomes bring gifts.
In the mythology of the peoples of Europe, the gnomes live much longer than humans and possess supernatural powers such as the ability to move through solid earth with the same ease as people move through air.
The king of the gnome race, Gob, possessed a magic sword that is said to have influenced the melancholic temperament of man.
Gnomes know the secrets of all underground streams and rivers where water has properties unknown to human. In a way, gnomes are also experts on rocks and can determine their age and read the past from them. Gnomes are children of the mother of the earth, who protects their children from outside influences and leaves the gnomes community unchanged for thousands of years.
The earliest gnome statuary was produced in Thuringia, Germany, in the early nineteenth century and was based on German folklore. In 1849, an Englishman Sir Charles Isham brought about twenty beautiful and funny gnome figures to England and placed them in a rockery in the garden at Lamport Hall, Northamtonshire.
The earliest statues were carefully shaped, hand-painted terra-cotta and were very popular. In ancient beliefs, gnome statues welcomed and attracted real gnomes and other benevolent spirits.
By the 1960s, cheaper plastic and resin versions of gnomes were mass-produced. The old terra-cotta ones are now highly valuable treasures. Some people adore and collect garden gnome statues. Others can have completely opposite feelings toward them and they do not want to see them and feel justified to remove them from other people’s properties or even destroy them.
Gnomes are often mentioned in old folktales and play an important role in modern entertainment.
STORY: RIGHTEOUS RETRIBUTION=====
Shortly after the Civil War, Christian Meiar secured a questionable title to a farm in Ripley County, Indiana and moved there with his wife. The farm was located outside of Elrod, a town so small and isolated it was described simply as a “Post Office located fifteen miles northwest of Aurora.”
Mrs. Meiar was amiable and lived peaceably with her neighbors, but Christian—known locally as Devil Meiar—was regarded as the wickedest man in that part of the state. For twelve years he would bicker and fight with anyone he met, he never bathed and was horribly ugly, he frightened children, and women shunned him, not just because he was ugly but because he could not open his mouth without spewing the vilest blasphemy and vulgarity. When neighbors’ livestock strayed on his property Meiar would attack and kill or cripple the animals. And he would beat his wife, sometimes so badly that she would seek sanctuary at the home of their nearest neighbor, a quarter mile away.
In 1878, Mrs. Meiar was dying of cancer of the tongue and could no longer speak. To ease her pain, her husband would buy morphine, but would only buy five or ten cents’ worth at a time. When she could no longer work, Christian Meiar went to Cincinnati and returned with a woman named Lena Stagner and her 15-year-old son Will. Ostensibly, Mrs. Stagner was to serve as Mrs. Meiar’s nurse; neighbors believed she was to be the replacement when Mrs. Meiar died.
On Saturday April 13, 1878, Meiar sent Will Stagner to sleep at a neighbor’s house. The next day Meiar went to the home of John Cavender, casually explained that his wife had died and asked if Mrs. Cavender could come over to “help lay the old woman out” and dress the corpse.
Mrs. Cavender went to Meiar’s house and found his wife’s body sitting upright in a dilapidated rocking chair with her head bent forward on her chest. Meiar claimed that the cancer had eaten through an artery and she had bled to death, but the evidence did not bear this out. There was no trace of blood. A doctor who examined the body found broken ribs and blackened finger marks on the neck. Monday, without any ceremony Meiar had his wife’s body buried in a nearby churchyard.
The evening of the burial a vigilance committee was organized in the eastern section of Ripley County and they strongly urged Meiar to move away. Meiar refused. That evening Christian Meiar left the house and did not come home until the next morning. When he did return, Mrs. Stagner would later say, “he looked more like a turkey buzzard half plucked than anything else.” He was covered with tar and feathers and had been taken for a ride on a triangular shaped rail.
On Tuesday Maier went to Versailles, the county seat, and swore out warrants against John M. Cavender and Joshua Hess for assault and battery and charged them with being members of the vigilance committee. On Wednesday they answered the charge and were acquitted.
On Thursday evening, Lena Stagner and her son were persuaded to leave the house and spend the night with neighbors. When they returned the next morning, they found Christian Miear in the front room hanging by the neck at the end of a length of clothesline, the other end passed through a ring attached to the ceiling. The Cincinnati Enquirer’s gruesome description of the corpse was reprinted in several newspapers:
“From the mouth protruded the blackened and swollen tongue, into which his wolfish teeth had cut. His eyeballs were naked of the lids and appeared as if about to pop from their sockets. The face was black and swollen, and occasionally a clammy mucus dripped from the ghastly and cavernous mouth.”
STORY: MY BOYFRIEND’S GHOSTLY LOVER=====
Shortly after my boyfriend and I started going out, he told me about this experience:
He was in the shower when he heard a knock at the door and a woman’s voice saying, “Hello.” He was alone in the house at the time, and there aren’t any women living at his house, so he didn’t bother to get out of the shower to investigate; however, when he did get out, he verified that no one had come home.
A few weeks later, he woke up in the middle of the night and he swears that he felt someone “having their way” with him. He was pretty explicit in his description. He insists that it was the same woman who had said hello to him having sex with him, and that she was a ghost.
I am a very skeptical person and this story seemed a little preposterous to me. I have tried to explain it as a dream, him hearing things, and such, but he insists that this stuff actually happened. Being an X-Files and Buffy The Vampire Slayer junkie, my next thought was “Succubus!” but I remained skeptical, until about a month after we started going out.
We were at my house and had just turned off the light and were about to go to sleep. I had my eyes closed when I distinctly heard a woman laughing. It sounded like it came from a few feet above my head. I opened my eyes, and naturally, nothing was there. Since I was tired, couldn’t see anything, and my boyfriend apparently hadn’t heard anything, I went to sleep. I told my boyfriend about this experience recently, and he was adamant that it was his ghost.
I have thought about this experience many times and haven’t been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. It’s possible that it was my mind playing tricks on me as I was getting ready to go to sleep, but I have never had an auditory hallucination like this. I barely ever even hear sounds in my dreams. Besides, it sounded so real. I could pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. I have a female roommate who has the next room down from me, and we share a wall, which the head of my bed is against. I thought maybe it was her laughing, but I know her laugh and this one was totally different. It was a sort of flirty, short laugh. I was worried that maybe my succubus suspicions were correct, since I’ve heard that they get jealous when their men/prey take human lovers, but I didn’t feel any negative energy. Nothing like this has happened since.
So, what was it? An overactive imagination? A ghost? A succubus? Does anyone even believe in those anymore?
BREAK=====
When Weird Darkness returns… Time is thought to be unstoppable. The past is gone — and the future is unknown. Or is it? We’ll look at the mystery of time slips, up next.
STORY: MYSTERY OF TIME SLIPS=====
Time is a funny thing. There never seems to be enough — yet there is an infinite amount. Time slips through moment upon second into eternity past; yet present, to begin the future.
Time is thought to be unstoppable in its relentless push towards the future. Humans perceive themselves as bound up in time as an insect in amber. Forever imprisoned and forced to reconcile with the regularity and inevitability of change. The past is gone — the present, fleeting — and the future is unknown. Or is it?
If a Merseyside policeman by the name of Frank was asked, he may have an entirely different opinion on the subject of time.
On a sunny Saturday afternoon in July of 1996, Frank and his wife, Carol was visiting Liverpool’s Bold Street area for some shopping. At Central Station, the pair split up; Carol went to Dillons Bookshop and Frank went to HMV to look for a CD he wanted. As he walked up the incline near the Lyceum Post Office/Café building that lead onto Bold Street, Frank suddenly noticed he had entered a strange “oasis of quietness.”
Suddenly, a small box van that looked like something out of the 1950s sped across his path, honking its horn as it narrowly missed him. Frank noticed the name on the van’s side: “Caplan’s.” When he looked down, the confused policeman saw that he was unexpectedly standing in the road. The off-duty policeman crossed the road and saw that Dillons Book Store now had “Cripps” over its entrances. More confused, he looked in to see not books, but women’s handbags and shoes.
Looking around, Frank realized people were dressed in clothes that appeared to be from the 1940s. Suddenly, he spotted a young girl in her early 20’s dressed in a lime-colored sleeveless top. The handbag she was carrying had a popular brand name on it, which reassured the policeman that maybe he was still partly in 1996. It was a paradox, but he was relieved, and he followed the girl into Cripps.
As the pair went inside, Frank watched in amazement as the interior of the building completely changed in a flash to that of Dillons Bookshop of 1996. The girl turned to leave and Frank lightly grasped the girl’s arm to attract attention and said, “Did you see that?”
She replied, “Yeah! I thought it was a clothes shop. I was going to look around, but it’s a bookshop.”
It was later determined that Cripps and Caplan’s were businesses based in Liverpool during the 1950s. Whether these businesses were based in the locations specified in the story has not been confirmed.
Frank’s experience is not that unusual in the realm of strange phenomenon. There is even a name given to such events — time slips.
A time slip is an event where it appears that some other era has briefly intruded on the present. A time slip seems to be spontaneous in nature and localization, but there are places on the planet that seem to be more prone than others to time slip events. As well, some people may be more inclined to experience time slips than others. If time then is the unmovable force that physicists say it is, why do some people have experiences that seem to flaunt this concept?
Much of ancient Greek philosophy was concerned with understanding the concept of eternity, and the subject of time is central to all the world’s religions and cultures. Can the flow of time be stopped or slowed? Certainly some mystics thought so. Angelus Silesius, a 17th-century philosopher and poet, thought the flow of time could be suspended by mental powers:
Time is of your own making;
its clock ticks in your head.
The moment you stop thought
time too stops dead.
The line between science and mysticism sometimes grows thin. Today physicists would agree that time is one of the strangest properties of our universe. In fact, there is a story circulating among scientists of an immigrant to America who has lost his watch. He walks up to a man on a New York street and asks, “Please, Sir, what is time?” The scientist replies, “I’m sorry, you’ll have to ask a philosopher. I’m just a physicist.”
Time travel, according to modern scientific theory, may still be beyond our grasp. Yet for a number of people who have had unusual time slip experiences, time may be easier to circumnavigate than expected.
A classic example of a time slip can be seen in a note from Lyn in Australia. Lyn had read the book, Time Travel: A How-To Insiders Guide, (Global Communications, 1999) and thought her experience was similar to others featured in the book.
In 1997 Lyn lived in a small outback town that was built in 1947 and had changed little since that time.
“I was driving toward the main intersection of the town, when suddenly I felt a change in the air. It wasn’t the classic colder feeling, but a change, like a shift in atmosphere. The air felt denser somehow. As I slowed at the intersection, I seemed to be suddenly transported back in time to approximately 1950. The road was dirt, the trees were gone and coming toward me to cross the intersection was an old black car, something like a Vanguard or old FJ Holden. As the car passed through the intersection the driver was looking back at me in total astonishment before he accelerated. From what I could see he was dressed in similar 1950s fashion, complete with hat.
“This whole episode lasted perhaps 20 seconds and was repeated at least 5 times during my time there, always at the exact spot. I tried to make out the registration plate number but the car was covered in dust.”
Lyn wondered if there is someone out there still living who remembers seeing a strange sight at the intersection back in the 50s…of a weird car with a bug-eyed woman at the wheel.
Derek E. tells another interesting time slip story. When he was a child, his father was a taxi driver in Glasgow, Scotland. One day in the late 1960s, Derek’s father was driving in the north of the city along Maryhill Road near Queen’s Cross, one of the older parts of town and once its own separate community outside the city.
“One minute it was now,” Derek wrote, “cars, buses, modern clothes, tarmac roads etc. – and the next thing my dad knew he was in some earlier time. It was certainly pre-Victorian given the clothes he described people wearing, horses, rough road, lower buildings, people in rough clothes and bonnets etc. It lasted as long as it took him to be aware of it and then it vanished and he was back in ‘now.'”
Derek also reported that in the 1980’s, he and his wife were on a driving holiday in the North York Moors in England. They went to a tiny coastal village called Staithes, which had a steep winding and narrowing road down to the harbor, with the entrance to the houses and narrow footway at a higher level of three or four feet.
“We parked at the top of the village, hamlet really, where the tourist buses and cars had to stop and made our way down on foot. What I remember is a brilliantly sunny day with lots of other people around, but as we made our way down, it just suddenly seemed as if no one else were there but my wife and me. An old woman appeared on the footway opposite us. It became cooler and duller. She asked, in what seemed to me an old-fashioned and very polite way, what year it was. Now lots of old people get confused and it could have been that, but what I remember vividly is her black clothes – handmade, rough and with hand-sewn buttons – really big compared with modern ones. Her shoes were very old fashioned with much higher and chunkier heels than you’d see an older person wearing nowadays. In the time it took me to turn to my wife and say, ‘Did you see that?’ she was gone. The sun was back and so were all the people. My wife had also seen the same old woman and felt the same chill.”
Derek’s experience seems strikingly similar to traditional ghost stories. Many ghost sightings are readly explained as individuals who appear out of their normal location or time; but often the ghost also seems to change the surroundings of the witness, giving the impression of a time slip. What is open to question is whether these are glimpses into another time or does the witness or the ghost actually travel in time? Perhaps it is simply different sides of the same coin.
Martin Jeffrey, co-editor with Louise Jeffrey of the website www.mysterymag.com, speculates that time slips can be recreated or induced using a “trigger factor,” which “…occurs when one is interested in his surroundings but is not concentrating on them; a slip occurs at a precise place and moment and the witness is thrust seemingly into another time.”
Jeffrey cites the case of Alice Pollock, who at Leeds Castle in Kent “experienced what could be called a ‘classic’ time slip. Alice was experimenting in Henry VIII’s rooms by touching objects in an attempt to experience events from another time. After a period of receiving no impressions whatsoever, the room suddenly changed. It lost its modern, comfortable appearance to become cold and bare. The carpet had disappeared and there were now logs burning on the fire. A tall woman in a white dress was walking up and down the room; her face seemed to be in deep concentration. Not long after, the room returned to its original state.
Later research found that the rooms had been the prison of Queen Joan of Navarre, Henry V’s stepmother, who had been accused of witchcraft by her husband.
It could be that the witness triggers time slips, whether they blank their mind at a precise moment and the slip occurs, or the witness touches something that holds the memory of a previous time.
“The simplest explanation is probably the psychometric hypothesis,” noted Colin Wilson and John Grant in The Directory of Possibilities. “In the mid-nineteenth century, Dr. Joseph Rodes Buchanan of the Covington Medical Institute performed experiments that convinced him that certain of his students could hold letters in their hands and accurately describe the character of the writer. He became convinced that all objects carry their ‘history’ photographed in them. Buchanan wrote: ‘The past is entombed in the present. The discoveries of psychometry will enable us to explore the history of Man as those of geology enable us to explore the history of Earth.’ Clearly, psychometry may be seen as a form of time slip.”
The classic of time slip tales occurred in August 1901, when two Englishwomen on holiday, Annie Moberly, Principal of St. Hugh’s College in Oxford and Dr. Eleanor Frances Jourdain, visited Paris. After a short stay in the capital, they went on to Versailles.
After visiting the palace they began searching for the Petit Trianon but became lost. As they wandered the grounds, both women began to feel strange, as if a heavy mood was oppressing their spirits. Two men dressed in “long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats” suddenly appeared and directed the women to the Petit Trianon. They strolled up to an isolated cottage where a woman and a 12- or 13-year-old girl were standing at the doorway, both wearing white kerchiefs fastened under their bodices. The woman was standing at the top of the steps, holding a jug and leaning slightly forwards, while the girl stood beneath her, looking up at her and stretching out her empty hands.
“She might have been just going to take the jug or have just given it up I remember that both seemed to pause for an instant, as in a motion picture,” Dr. Jourdain would later write.
The two Oxford ladies went on their way and soon reached a pavilion that stood in the middle of an enclosure. The place had an unusual air about it and the atmosphere was depressing and unpleasant. A man was sitting outside the pavilion, his face repulsively disfigured by smallpox, wearing a coat and a straw hat. He seemed not to notice the two women; at any rate, he paid no attention to them.
The Englishwomen walked on in silence and after a while reached a small country house with shuttered windows and terraces on either side. A lady was sitting on the lawn with her back to the house. She held a large sheet of paper or cardboard in her hand and seemed to be working at or looking at a drawing. She wore a summer dress with a long bodice and a very full, apparently short skirt, which was extremely unusual. She had a pale green fichu or kerchief draped around her shoulders, and a large white hat covered her fair hair.
At the end of the terraces was a second house. As the two women drew near, a door suddenly flew open and slammed shut again. A young man with the demeanor of a servant, but not wearing livery, came out. As the two Englishwomen thought they had trespassed on private property, they followed the man toward the Petit Trianon. Quite unexpectedly, from one moment to the next, they found themselves in the middle of a crowd–apparently a wedding party–all dressed in the fashions of 1901.
On their return to England, Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain discussed their trip and began to wonder about their experiences at the Petit Trianon. The two began to wonder if they had somehow seen the ghost of Marie Antoinette, or rather, if they had somehow telepathically entered into one of the Queen’s memories left behind in that location. As if to confirm their suspicion, Moberly came across a picture of Marie Antoinette drawn by the artist Wertmüller. To her astonishment it depicted the same sketching woman she had seen near the Petit Trianon. Even the clothes were the same.
Intrigued by the growing mystery, Jourdain returned to Versailles in January 1902 and discovered that she was unable to retrace their earlier steps. The grounds seemed mysteriously altered. She then learned that on October 5, 1789 Marie Antoinette had been sitting at the Petit Trianon when she first learned that a mob from Paris was marching towards the palace gates. Jourdain and Moberly decided that Marie Antoinette’s memory of this terrifying moment must have somehow lingered and persisted through the years, and it was into this memory that they had inadvertently stumbled.
What can be concluded then from these anecdotal tales? Did these people actually travel, albeit briefly, into the past to glimpse scenes that once were? Or were they caught up in a form of haunting where, like an old movie, they saw a scene that had somehow been implanted in a location and allowed to “play back” again for those sensitive enough to pick up the lingering impressions?
However, if time slips are a form of haunting, what explanation can be offered to the experience of a Mr. Squirrel, who in 1973 went into a stationer’s shop in Great Yarmouth to buy some envelopes. He was served by a woman in Edwardian dress and bought three dozen envelopes for a shilling. He noticed that the building was extremely silent — there was no traffic noise. On visiting the shop three weeks later, he found it completely changed and modernized; the assistant, an elderly lady, denied that there had been any other assistant in the shop the previous week. Even though the envelopes disintegrated quickly, Mr. Squirrel was able to track down the manufacturers, who said that such envelopes had ceased to be manufactured fifteen years before.
How can a haunting produce such physical evidence?
Time slips are “often accompanied by feelings of depression, eeriness and a marked sense of silence, deeper than normally experienced,” posits author Andrew MacKenzie in his book Adventures in Time: Encounters With the Past, drawing this conclusion based on the Versailles time slip accounts as well as his own interviews with people who have experienced the phenomenon.
“It is interesting to note that on August 10, 1901, the day of Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain’s experience, electrical storms were recorded over Europe and the atmosphere was heavy with electricity. Could this have led to an alteration in the local temporal field around Versailles?”
Perhaps there is a natural phenomenon that under the right conditions and location can produce briefly a doorway to another time and place. Even though this may sound outrageous, this natural “time machine” could show that modern concepts and perceptions of time need to be seriously reconsidered. It may be that the past and even the future might be closer then thought with current scientific theories. With the right frame of mind and the right natural conditions, the barriers of time and space that have traditionally kept mankind locked into place may finally be broken, allowing the mysteries of the world and the universe to be finally revealed.
SHOW CLOSE=====
Thanks for listening. If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can email me anytime with your questions or comments at darren@weirddarkness.com. WeirdDarkness.com is also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I’ve narrated, visit the store for Weird Darkness t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, phone cases, and more merchandise, sign up for monthly contests, find other podcasts that I host, and find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Also on the website, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell, you can click on TELL YOUR STORY. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com.
All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true (unless stated otherwise) and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes.
“The Horror of the Hillside Stranglers” by Mark Oliver for All That’s Interesting
“Supernatural Gnomes” by A. Sutherland for Ancient Pages
“Righteous Retribution” by Robert Wilhelm for Murder By Gaslight
“My Boyfriend’s Ghostly Lover” submitted by G. Michael Vasey from the book “Seduction of the Innocents”
“The Mystery of Time Slips” by Tim Swartz for UFO Review
WeirdDarkness® – is a production and trademark of Marlar House Productions.
Now that we’re coming out of the dark, I’ll leave you with a little light… “We do not dare to classify or compare ourselves with some who commend themselves. When they measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves, they are not wise.” – 2 Corinthians 10:12
And a final thought… “All of humanity’s problems stem from Man’s inability to sit quietly in a room.” – Blaise Pascal
I’m Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.
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