Time Slips

On August 10, 1901, Charlotte Anne Moberly, principal of St. Hugh's College Oxford, and Eleanor Jourdain visited the Palace of Versailles. While walking through the Petit Trianon gardens, both women simultaneously experienced a profound change in atmosphere — a sense of oppressive stillness, as though they had stepped into a flat painting. The sounds of the gardens ceased.

The women encountered people in 18th-century dress at locations that, when they returned and consulted maps, turned out to correspond to garden features that had not existed since the French Revolution — bridges, kiosks, and paths demolished after Marie Antoinette's execution in 1793. One figure — a man in a broad-brimmed hat — struck both women as emanating powerful dread. When Jourdain looked away and back, he had vanished without time to have walked away.

Both women returned to Oxford without discussing the experience, each independently writing a detailed account. When they compared notes weeks later, their accounts were consistent in specifics — the same structures, the same figures at the same locations. They spent the following decade researching and concluded they had witnessed the scene as it existed in approximately 1792.

They published their account as "An Adventure" in 1911. The book attracted serious attention from historians and SPR researchers. Critics noted inconsistencies in their historical research but could not explain how two people simultaneously experienced an identical, internally consistent, historically verifiable alteration of their environment.

Bold Street in Liverpool has been the site of more reported time slip incidents than almost any other location in the UK. The street runs through an area with deep historical layering.

The most-cited account involves a retired police officer called Frank who in 1996 walked into Bold Street from a car park and found himself in what appeared to be the 1950s. The street's shops were replaced by period businesses. Pedestrians were dressed in mid-century clothing. He described being seen and reacted to by the people around him — he was not invisible but apparently present in the other time. He stepped into a modern department store he recognised, reached a point where the layout changed, and found himself back in the present.

Researchers Tom Slemen and Dave Eckhart collected dozens of Bold Street time slip accounts through local radio appeals in the 1990s and 2000s. Witnesses consistently described the same pre-1967 version of the street — shops that closed or were demolished decades ago, appearing intact and trading. Several witnesses reported brief interactions with people in the other time.

The consistency of the historical period — most witnesses describe a 1940s-1960s Bold Street — is considered significant. Researchers propose that the emotional weight of the area's wartime Blitz damage (1940-41) may create conditions for a specific type of residual temporal impression. The Bold Street cluster is one of the most geographically and temporally specific time slip phenomena on record.

York is built directly over the remains of Eboracum, a major Roman legionary fortress established in 71 AD. Over more than twenty years, consistent reports have emerged from one specific area — the Treasurer's House, near the Minster — describing Roman soldiers apparently walking below the present-day floor level.

The most-cited account was given by a young plumber named Harry Martindale who, in 1953, was working alone in the cellar when he heard a trumpet blast from inside the wall. He pressed himself into an alcove as a man carrying a trumpet emerged from the wall at knee level — walking on a surface below the cellar floor. Behind him came roughly twenty soldiers in Roman dress, short and dark-featured, carrying shields and speaking in a language Martindale did not recognise.

Martindale's account was initially dismissed, but subsequent archaeological excavation below the Treasurer's House discovered a Roman road running exactly where his figures had appeared — at a level approximately eighteen inches below the cellar floor, consistent with the knee-height truncation he described. The soldiers had been walking on the Roman road surface, visible to Martindale only from the knee up.

Multiple independent reports since 1953 have described figures at the same location and at the same knee-high truncation — witnesses with no knowledge of Martindale's account describing an identical phenomenon. The Treasurer's House is now a National Trust property that documents the reports as part of its official historical record.