A British man recalls a 'time slip' incident that occurred at a former girlfriend's venerable home. He was taken back to the Victorian period, later recognizing people in old photographs.
The following account was forwarded to me by my friends Cam & Kyle at Expanded Perspectives:
"My time slip story happened in the summer of 1987. One night, I experienced something that enabled me to see the world through someone else's eyes for no longer than a minute. It scared me senseless at the time and I have no explanation for the events all those years ago.
The backstory is this: My then girlfriend, we’ll call her Helen, lived in a big, former vicarage built around the 1800s, in a small village in Yorkshire, UK, some miles from my hometown. Her father was a wealthy guy who worked for the government. He bought the house for the family to live in a couple of years earlier and renovated it to bring it back to its former glory.
One August weekend Helen had the house to herself. Her brother and parents were somewhere else. She decided to have a small party. I was instructed to bring my buddy Tim along. It seemed that one of her friends had a “thing” for him and really wanted to meet him. So the party was me and Tim, my girlfriend and three of her mates from university, one of whom was the reason my friend was reluctantly set up to meet.
OK so the scene has been set, we turn up with a large quantity of beer and a attitude! I did my part by bringing Tim along to meet the girl. However, he then got drunk and embarrassed, and failed to fulfill his expected role of sweeping this very pretty, but rather dull young woman off her feet. He wasn’t concerned about romance and enjoyed himself in his own way. We were 20 and that night beer and silliness took over. It was a night I will never forget.
By midnight, the girls were all in Helen’s bedroom doing what girls do when things happen. They were ganging up together and probably having a group anti-men therapy session.
At this point Tim and I were ready to find somewhere to fall into deep sleep. We decided to worry about facing these disappointed women in the morning. I wasn’t drunk, but I drunk enough beer and didn't want to drive us home. I suggested we find a bed somewhere in this sprawling rambling old house. Now imagine a house with maybe 12 rooms upstairs. I knew the door to the bathroom and to Helen's room, but every other door was a mystery. Tim and I walked to the end of a passage and pushed open a door. The room was empty except for two small ancient iron beds squeezed against the wall and a few packing crates. There was no carpet on the floor and no other furniture. It was like a small store room but there were beds and we weren’t too fussy.
In our sleepy state, we just fell asleep.
The next thing I knew, I was sitting up in bed, looking out of the window opposite. The window had five bars, upright bars like an old jail. The sun was streaming into the room and it was blinding me. Outside the window, I could clearly see the branches of a large tree as they moved in what seemed to be a very windy morning. The next thing I realised was that the room was filled with furniture, very old-fashioned furniture. It seemed like a nursery with a rocking horse in the corner, but there was no ceiling electric light. Not sure why I looked up but I did and remembered there was no light. As I tried to make sense of where I was, I could hear people moving outside the room. I could also hear the distinct sound of china cups and plates chinking as people carried and served food.
I tried to get out of my bed but I was totally paralysed from the waist down. My legs wouldn’t move, and I panicked. I looked to my right and there was no other bed, snoring Tim. I was terrified. A door opened and a young woman walked into the room. She started speaking to me but no sound came out of her mouth, she was dressed like a servant from a period movie, there was no kindness or smiles. She came in and spoke to me (no idea what she said) and then left.
At this point I was shaking like a leaf and trying to figure out what to do next. I remember thinking I should check the time. I looked down at my watch and everything went dark. I could hear snoring and my digital watch showed it was 3.10 am. Wherever I had been, I was back where I needed to be. I leapt out of bed, felt for the light switch and turned it on. Everything was 1987 again, confirmed by the language from Tim who was woken up by the light. The rest of the night passed without incident.
First thing in the morning I was awoken (again) by the sunlight streaming through the window. This time there were no bars on the window, no tree limbs bending the shafts of light that streamed into the room. It was just an ordinary window.
I went downstairs, leaving Tim to sleep. Once the girls had poured me a coffee, I took it outside into the large garden. I needed to see where the tree had gone, the tree that I saw so clearly a few hours before. Helen and her friends followed me outside and I explained what had happened: that I had seen a huge old tree and bars on the window. The tree was gone. No tree stump anywhere near the building. I saw the small window of our room, and then we saw a rather hungover Tim smiling weakly, waving from the same window, who had heard us talking outside in the garden.
The story might have ended there. I believe that for a short period of maybe 30-45 seconds I swapped places with a former occupant of that room, at a time when there was no electric light, bars on the window, an old tree beyond the window and a rather unhappy servant whose voice was on mute.
After I told Helen everything, she went quiet and said nothing.
“Have you ever been to my dad’s study?"
I answered that I had not. She said follow me and we walked into a downstairs room where her dad worked and had his den. He collected documents and photographs from the house's history, to help him and the architect renovate it to its former glory. She pointed out a set of five old sepia photographs, which were framed on the wall. The earliest dated from about 1880, through maybe ten years (judging by the ages of the children) of presumably the same family. It shows the resident, the local vicar, sitting in the garden with his wife and family. He was dressed in Victorian dresses, sailor suits and starched collars. There were, I think, eight children and one was in an ancient wheelchair. They were all arranged in front of a huge oak tree, behind which the window of our “time slip room” clearly had bars. The boy in the wheelchair looked about 12 and was clearly very disabled. He didn’t appear in any of the later photos on the wall.
So that’s my story. People will say – yeah, the guy had been drinking (I had) but no amount of German beer and Marlboros (there were no drugs involved) would cause me to experience what I did. The weirdest thing about the whole event was that it felt “hyper real”, like everything was turned up on a TV – contrast, brightness, colour, everything except the volume on the grumpy servant. I will never forget how terrifying the whole thing was to me.
I haven't had anything like that happen to me again, nor do I want to repeat it. My experience left me fascinated by the time slip stories that I know you enjoy. However, I had a genuine wish to never again pass through whatever dimensional or time space curtain exists, and it really does exist." JR
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