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Time shifts can be caused by supernatural forces messing up our memories or by a new kind of thinking we haven’t discovered yet, writes Dr. PETER McCUE
There are cases where people claim to have experienced their environment as if they temporarily went back in time. Such incidents are often referred to as ‘time slips’.
Take, for example, a story told by Jenny Randles Slips in time and spacea book compiled and edited by the late Rosemary Guiley and published in 2019.
An old fashioned hotel
The case concerns two British couples who went on holiday to northern Spain in the autumn of 1979. They crossed the English Channel by ferry and then drove via France to their Spanish destination.
On the way, they spent a night in a quaint, old-fashioned hotel in France. There seemed to be no modern equipment, such as telephones and elevators, and the bedroom windows had wooden shutters, but no glass. In the morning they noticed two gendarmes dressed in decidedly old-fashioned uniforms.
The guests paid very little – the equivalent of only about three dollars – for their accommodation, food and drink. So it’s no surprise that on their way back they decided to stay there again. However, upon their return, they could not find the hotel, and photographs the two men had taken while they and their wives were supposedly there did not appear when their films were developed, and there were no spoiled negatives.
Did the foursome really go ‘back in time’? If so, and as Randles notes, it’s baffling that the hotel manager showed no surprise at their attire and their futuristic vehicle, accepting their 1979 currency.
Assuming the report is based on honest testimony, I suggest that the witnesses suffered from “psychic memory manipulation”: that their memories of their stay at the hotel were false memories imposed by a mischievous intelligence.
If so, they may have spent the night in a very ordinary accommodation, their memory of it suppressed or removed and replaced with a compelling – but false – memory of staying in an old-fashioned hotel.
Another possibility is that time slip experiences are hallucinatory constructs that represent how things were or could have been at the location in question.
Essentially, the only difference between a time-slip experience, where the observer’s general environment appears to momentarily revert to that of the past, and “seeing” a figure from the past (a “ghost”) in an unchanged present day environment, there can be one of degree. The underlying mechanisms may be the same.
If so, people with time-slip experiences may also be prone to more “ordinary” ghostly experiences. That may have been the case with a woman I shall call Helen. Her experiences are discussed below.
Perhaps events can leave a physical or quasi-physical imprint on a place, and perhaps this can then stimulate a time-slip experience or ghostly sighting if a potential witness is sufficiently ‘psychic’.
Alternatively, the process could be more ‘mental’: contemporary images and sounds could act as cues for retrieving images or memories from a collective unconscious mind or database, if such exists, with the images or memories then manifesting. himself through hallucinations.
Helen’s story
Helen had something like a time-slip experience on a Scottish island, though the vision she saw didn’t completely negate her perception of her current surroundings.
The event had an emotional impact on her and there was an interesting sequel. I heard of her experiences about 22 years ago and reported them in the December/January 2001/2 issue of The Psi Report, a newsletter of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research.
The main incident reportedly happened several years before Helen contacted me. For many years she and her husband (now deceased) holidayed on Luing, a small island off the mainland coast of Argyll in western Scotland. Luing is located a few miles southeast of the Isle of Mull. They rented a cottage in the northern part of the island. It was under a hill, with an old church on top, which later became a holiday home.
“[We] were there during [a] wonderfully hot summer. The island is a source of peace, which was suddenly disturbed by the sound of a helicopter coming and going…[I] I climbed up the hill, sat on a rock in front of the former church and watched [the] procedure. [The helicopter] was on a ‘supply drop’ to a smaller island… Suddenly I felt icy cold, and it was as if a tunnel opened right in front of me, a tunnel of deep, swirling fog, dark night and a… terrible storm. In this whirling maelstrom, below me, from the sea, a sailing ship appeared, [an] old galleon, [with its] sailing adrift [and] mast broken.
“I remember thinking, ‘My God, she’s going to hit!’ I also noticed that it was still a beautiful day on both sides of this tunnel. I couldn’t hear a sound. There were no cottages built over the years, and the coastline itself went further into the sea [is the case nowadays]. I felt no fear, only terrible, terrible sadness [about being unable] to avoid the tragedy. Suddenly on the now wrecked deck, near the broken rails, appeared a female figure in a cloak, with her arm around a small child, whom I was sure was. Then I heard an anguished cry, and the ship broke upon the rocks.
“As suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared. The day was perfect again. I sat there for a while, utterly shocked. When I came back to my husband, he said I was white as a sheet! He was not surprised when I told him what I had seen. I know I’m psychic, just like my mother and grandmother…
“Since then I’ve done some research, and [I] to believe [that the ship I saw was] one of Cromwell’s warships… Three were sent from Liverpool in 1657 to the toe of Mull, the last Stuart stronghold. Their aim was to besiege the castle and thereby overthrow the latter [of the] Stuarts. A [ship] had to sail into a small harbor for repairs.
‘One of them reached the shoreline of Mull, below the castle, but as they prepared their weapons, a great storm suddenly blew up. [and the ship capsized, the wreck having since been found and documented]. The third ship disappeared without a trace, although some believe [that] it crashed off the coast of Luing, lost and disoriented by the fog…I feel extremely shocked thinking about it [that] This could very well be the ship I saw… I still feel very strongly that it was a cry for help from the past. It never left me. I feel like I failed in some way. I have since taken a picture of the scene as I saw it. It hangs on the wall in my living room.”
Helen reported that a few months before contacting me, she was awakened from a deep sleep at around 2:00 AM by someone shaking her shoulder. She felt no fear. She turned on her back and looked up into the face of a tall, thin man dressed in a Cromwellian period uniform. He had long blond hair that looked very wet. She remembered asking out loud, “Who the hell are you?” There was no answer, but her bedroom faded and she found herself in a wooden ship’s cabin, with a very high wooden bed opposite her.
“I saw this man gently trying to wake up a sleeping woman. She woke up and half sat up. [She was a pretty girl, with long auburn hair.] I could see her very clearly. I also heard his voice, very soft, but very firm, tell her to hurry [and] put on her cloak and come on deck. The ship was about to sink. The place [then] pale.”
As for what she saw of Luing, Helen was unaware that anyone else had seen the ghost ship. Given the lack of confirmation, her report wouldn’t convince a die-hard skeptic that she’d experienced anything paranormal. But there are stories of collective time-slip experiences, and the lack of confirmation doesn’t necessarily mean nothing paranormal happened.
As for Helen’s nighttime experience of waking up to see a man in Cromwellian garb and then finding herself in a ship’s cabin, a skeptic might suggest that she had identified with the woman she had “seen” during her first experience and that the subsequent nocturnal experiences occurred in a dream state or hallucination on the borderline between sleep and wakefulness.
Among other interesting experiences, Helen related that when she was 25: ‘I felt a presence in a flat we lived in at the time… I knew it was an old man, a shadowy shape. My three-year-old daughter asked, ‘Who is that old man?’”
More recently, her son had a near-fatal accident while browsing an antique shop: “…I knew it. A friend with me said [that] I turned pale and said his name. It was the exact time of the accident.”
What do you think are the reasons behind time shifts? Tell us your thoughts on this article in the comments below!
