The Mammoth Encyclopedia of Unsolved Mysteries (96 page)

From the purely practical point of view, the chief problem of human existence is individual lack of purpose. In those curious moments of relaxation or sudden happiness that we all experience at intervals, we can
see
that it is stupid to lose purpose and direction, and that if only we could learn to summon this insight
at will
, this fatal tendency to forgetfulness could be permanently eradicated, and life would be transformed. It is obvious in such moments that if we could train ourselves to behave
as if
there were hidden meanings lurking behind the blank face of the present, the problem would be solved. If “synchronicities” can produce that sense of meaning and purpose, then it is obviously sensible for us to behave
as if
they were meaningful coincidences, and to ignore the question of their scientific validity.

55

Time in Disarray

Time Slips and Precognitions

The late Ivan T. Sanderson, the eminent naturalist and scientist, once had a curious experience of Paris. But it was the Paris not of today, but of five centuries ago; and, to make the story still more paradoxical, it happened in Haiti.

Before beginning his account (in
More
“Things”
), Sanderson is careful to note that he has never taken any interest in “the occult” – not because he actively disbelieves in it, but because “I have only one life to lead . . . and I’ve been far too busy trying to catch up with the more pragmatic facts of it”.

Sanderson and his wife were living in a small village named Pont Beudet in Haiti; together with his assistant Frederick G. Allsop, he was engaged in a biological survey. One beautiful evening the three of them decided to drive to Lake Azuey in their ancient Rolls-Royce. Taking a short cut down an old dirt road, they drove into a squashy mass of mud, and went in up to their axles. They got out and began to walk. They walked through most of the night until they were exhausted. They encountered a car with an American doctor on his way to a case, but he had no room for three of them; he promised to try and pick them up on his way back. They plodded on in the moonlight. Then:

When eventually they arrived back home they were surprised to find that their servant woman had a hot meal waiting for them, and a large bowl of hot water, in which she insisted on washing Mrs Sanderson’s feet; the head man had prepared hot baths for Sanderson and Fred Allsop. They would not explain how they knew that Sanderson and his companions would be back at dawn. But one of the young men in the
village later said to Sanderson: “You saw things, didn’t you? You don’t believe it, but you could
always
see things if you wanted to.”

Sanderson had obviously experienced a kind of “time slip” into the past, and there are dozens – perhaps hundreds – of other recorded examples, the most famous undoubtedly being that of the two English ladies, Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Moberly, who in August 1901, walking in the gardens at Versailles, found themselves back in Versailles in 1789, just before the downfall of Louis XVI. Ten years later, their book describing their experience caused a sensation because it was so obvious that the two ladies – principals of an Oxford college – were of unquestioned integrity. Professor C.E.M. Joad, speaking about their “adventure”, used the phrase “the undoubted queerness of time”. But he made no attempt to explain the mechanism of “time slips”.

In my book
Mysteries
I record an equally remarkable example, taken directly from the person concerned, Mrs Jane O’Neill of Cambridge. In 1973 she was the first person to arrive at the scene of a serious accident, and helped injured passengers out of the wrecked bus. Later she began to suffer from insomnia, and the doctor told her this was due to shock. On holiday with a friend in Norfolk, she began experiencing “visions” – sudden vivid pictures that lasted just a few seconds. After one of these she told her friend, “I have just seen you in the galleys”, and the friend replied: “That’s not surprising. My ancestors were Huguenots and were punished by being sent to the galleys.”

But the most remarkable event took place on a visit to Fotheringay church. She stood for some time in front of the picture of the Crucifixion behind the altar. Later, when she commented on it back in the hotel room, her friend asked: “What picture?” A year later, when they revisited the church, the inside seemed quite different from the first visit, and there was no picture behind the altar. She wrote to Joan Forman, an expert on “time slips”, and through her contacted an antiquarian who was able to tell her that what she had seen had been the church as it
had
been before it had been pulled down in 1553.

Both Sanderson and Jane O’Neill were convinced that what they were looking at was real, not a hallucination, although the Sandersons felt dizzy when they tried to run. One of Jane O’Neill’s “visions” was of two figures walking beside a lake, “and I knew, though I don’t know why, that one of them was Margaret Roper”, the daughter of Sir Thomas More. Sanderson and his wife “knew” that they were looking at fifteenth-century Paris. So it seems clear that the vision was not some simple objective hallucination, like a mirage in the desert, but was due to some extent to their own minds. Sanderson and his wife presumably
shared it because of some telepathic rapport of the kind that often develops between married couples. But this fails to explain why they saw Paris in Haiti. (Haiti was, of course, French, but not until the eighteenth century.)

In the mid-nineteenth century a theory of “time slips” was developed by two American professors, Joseph Rodes Buchanan and William Denton. Through his experiments with his students,
²⁴
Buchanan came to believe that human beings possess a faculty for “reading” the history of objects; he called this “psychometry” (see chapter 43). Denton tested his own students with all kinds of geological specimens, and found that the “sensitive” ones among them saw “mental pictures” that were closely related to the object they were holding (and which Denton wrapped in thick brown paper, so they could have no idea of what it was). A piece of lava brought “visions” of an exploding volcano; a fragment of meteor conjured up visions of outer space; a piece of dinosaur tooth brought visions of primeval forests. Denton was convinced that all human beings possess this faculty, which he described as “a telescope into the past”.

But while the “time slips” described by Sanderson and Jane O’Neill obviously have much in common with “psychometric” visions, they were unquestionably far more than mental pictures or impressions. Yet this is not to say that they were not mental pictures. After her experience of the accident, Jane O’Neill kept on “seeing” the injuries of the passengers; such visions are known as “eidetic imagery”. The scientist Nicola Tesla possessed it to such an extent that he could construct a dynamo in his mind and actually watch it running. After experimenting all day with images of the sun, Isaac Newton found that he could produce a visual hallucination of the sun by simply imagining it. Like the strange abilities of calculating prodigies (see chapter 26), this seems to be a faculty that all human beings possess, but that most of us never learn how to use. We may speculate that Jane O’Neill’s traumatic experience activated this dormant faculty, and that it somehow continued to operate spasmodically in the succeeding months. If the image of the sixteenth-century church was some kind of “eidetic image” floating in front of her eyes, there is no reason why she should have recognized it as a hallucination unless she tried to touch the picture above the altar; most of us accept the evidence of our senses without question. The same argument probably applies to the experience of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain at Versailles. They
saw
men and
women dressed in the style of Louis XVI (and assumed it was a rehearsal for a costume drama) but naturally, they did not try to touch them, or even to speak to them. (Being English, they would have required an introduction!)

Another “time slip” collected by Joan Forman offers us a further clue. Mrs Turrell-Clarke, of Wisley-cum-Pyrford in Surrey, was cycling along the modern road there on her way to evensong when the road suddenly became a field path, and
she seemed to be walking along it
. She was wearing a nun’s robes, and she saw a man dressed in the peasant dress of the thirteenth century, who stood aside to allow her to pass. A month later, sitting in the village church, she suddenly saw the church change to its original state, with earth floor, stone altar, lancet windows, and brown-habited monks intoning the same plainsong chant that was at present being sung by the choir in the “modern” church. At this moment Mrs Turrell-Clarke felt she was at the back of the church, watching the proceedings. So it seems clear that what happened was that her viewpoint changed, and she found herself
looking through someone else’s eyes
– the eyes of a lady walking along the road and the eyes of a woman standing at the back of the church. When Jane O’Neill found herself looking at Sir Thomas More’s daughter walking by a lake she wondered whether there might be some “family” connection, since her own unmarried name was Moore. She may even have suspected that she had somehow slipped back into a previous incarnation. Again, it seems clear that she was seeing the scene through someone else’s eyes – which explains how she knew that she was looking at Margaret Roper. And since the Sandersons knew they were looking at fifteenth-century Paris, we may assume that they were also looking through “someone else’s eyes”.

The late T.C. Lethbridge, a retired Cambridge don who devoted the last years of his life to studying the paranormal, came to the interesting conclusion that “ghosts” are in fact a kind of “tape recording”: that powerful emotions can “imprint” themselves on some sort of magnetic field, and that these “recordings” can be “picked up” by a person who is sensitive to them – for example, by a good dowser. (Dowsing involves sensitivity to the electromagnetic field of water.) Lethbridge himself, for example, experienced a strange feeling of foreboding and depression in a spot where the body of a suicide was concealed in a hollow tree. Joan Forman has also expressed her conviction that time slips “have some connection with the human electromagnetic field”. She herself was standing in the courtyard of Haddon Hall in Derbyshire when she saw a group of four children playing on the steps and yelling with laughter.
When she took a step forward the group vanished, but she later recognized one of the girls in an ancestral painting that hung on the walls. She also cites the experience of a Norwich teacher, Mrs Anne May, who was leaning against a monolith at the Clava Cairns, near Inverness, when she “saw” a group of men in shaggy tunics and cross-gartered trousers, dragging one of the monoliths over the turf; when a group of tourists walked into the glade the figures vanished; apparently Mrs May had caught a glimpse of the original bronze-age builders of the monolithic circle. Joan Forman believes that the contact with the monolith was the “trigger factor” that caused Mrs May to see her vision, and that in her own case it was the spot she was standing on.