September 26, 2025 • 33 mins
SEASON 9 BEGINS FRIDAY OCTOBER 31ST
What happens when ordinary people insist the familiar world around them has suddenly become something else entirely? When witnesses claim the present has slipped away, leaving them stranded in moments that shouldn't exist?
In the 1950s, two separate incidents in Britain left ordinary people with extraordinary stories to tell. A woman walking home alone on a winter's night would later claim she witnessed scenes that belonged to another age.
While, three young cadets on a routine exercise would insist they stumbled into a world that seemed frozen between life and death...
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here with Unexplained on an
end of season break. Will be dipping back into the
archive each week until season nine begins on Friday, October
thirty first. This week's episode explores one of the most
puzzling claims in all of paranormal research. Accounts so rare
and so strange that they challenge our very understanding of
(00:21):
reality itself. What happens when ordinary people insist the familiar
world around them has suddenly become something else? Entirely when
witnesses claim the present has slipped away, leaving them stranded
in moments that shouldn't exist. In the nineteen fifties, two
separate incidents in Britain left ordinary people with extraordinary stories
(00:45):
to tell. A woman walking home alone on a winter's
night would later claim she witnessed scenes that belonged to
another age, while three young cadets on a routine exercise
would insist that they stumbled into a world that seemed
frozen in time. This is Unexplained, Season two, episode two,
(01:07):
Time out of Joint. It has long been accepted that
time as we know it, or at the very least
in the sense that we experience it, is not what
(01:28):
it seems, or, as Albert Einstein put it, the past,
the present, and the future is but a stubborn, persistent illusion.
It would seem that we have long been mesmerized by
the notion of traveling through time, whether it be to
write a past wrong or merely to escape our present reality.
(01:51):
But it wasn't until Einstein's special relativity introduced us to
the tantalizing concept of space, time, and the fourth dimension
that such notions were given mathematical credibility. No longer was
time a mere subjective unit of measurement, but suddenly we
were invited to imagine it as a space within which
(02:11):
we might move, a theory that, as the earlier quote suggests,
did awagh entirely with any notion of past, present and future. Or,
to be clearer, as physicist Max Tegmark notes, time is
not an illusion, but the flow of time is for
much in the way that matter may appear differently from
(02:33):
one observer to the next. So two, according to Einstein,
does time. Incidentally, although the concept of space time is
often linked with Einstein, it was actually his teacher Hermann
Minkowski who first proposed the idea back in nineteen o
eight in a paper titled Space and Time. Remarkably, author
(02:56):
Edgar Allan Poe is believed to have come to the
same realization himself as far back as eighteen forty eight,
writing in an essay titled Eureka, that space and duration
are one. Certainly, it is an area that has been
well explored in fiction. The Oddly Unsettling nineteen seventies television
(03:17):
show Sapphire and Steel and Joan Lindsay's Haunting and Mesmeric
Picnic at Hanging Rock are two of my favorite accounts
of one such temporal corruption that is equal parts fascinating
and terrifying. The notion of the time slip you're listening
to unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. To paranormal researchers,
(03:49):
the fabled time slip is considered to be the rarest
of all documented paranormal experience, the most well known account
of such an event being the Mobile jor Dan incident.
The event is alleged to have occurred on Saturday, August tenth,
nineteen oh one, at the Palace of Versailles in France,
when two British women visiting the palace on a day
(04:11):
trip claimed to have found themselves inexplicably transported back to
the late eighteenth century to be surrounded by palace courtiers
and even at one point crossing paths with Mary Antoinette.
The women, Charlotte Moberley and Eleanor Jordan, were both well
educated and had no obvious reason to fabricate the events,
(04:33):
and published a book of their account in nineteen eleven,
which was predictably met with much ridicule. There are two
accounts of alleged time slips that took place in Britain
in the nineteen fifties. The writer and longtime member of
the Society of Psychical Research Andrew Mackenzie documented both the
(04:53):
events in his nineteen ninety seven book Adventures in Time.
For Mackenzie, the accounts were nothing ne less than two
of the most convincing that he had ever come across,
mysteries that remained to this day unexplained. On Monday, January second,
(05:17):
nineteen fifty, as the new decade entered its third day,
so two did the New year's celebrations. As is customary
in Scotland. In a small house in the town of
Brecon in the eastern County of Angus, a cocktail party
is coming to an end. Sensing that the party was
beginning to wind down, one of the guests, fifty five
(05:39):
year old miss Elizabeth Smith, decided to call it a night.
It was, after all, getting late, and Elizabeth wasn't much
relishing the ten mile drive back to her house in
leatherm After saying goodbye to her friends, she collected her
small terrier dog that she had brought with her, and
together they climbed into her car in preparation for the
(06:01):
journey home. It had been a relatively mild winter, but
the last few days had seen a light dusting of
snow along much of the East Coast, snow that by
nightfall on the second had turned steadily to ice. Undeterred,
Elizabeth switched on the engine and pulled off into the night.
(06:23):
A short time later, not more than two miles outside
of Brecon, Elizabeth lost control of the car, span off
the road, and plummeted straight into a ditch. Miraculously, neither
Elizabeth nor her small canine companion were harmed, but the
car was completely written off. Relieved and more than a
(06:46):
little dazed. With the temperature outside steadily dropping, Elizabeth knew
she had only two options. Returned to her friend's home,
or strike out on the eight mile journey back to leatherm.
Deciding on the latter, Elizabeth gathered her things and, together
with her dock, she set out on the long walk home.
(07:06):
At first, Elizabeth was at ease, taking the deserted country
lane back towards her village. She felt safe with her
dog by her side, cheerily keeping her company. But it
was hard to ignore the strange sense of foreboding that
is wont to arise when you were out in the wilderness,
with no lights to be seen, and even the moon
declines to reveal itself. Such was the thickness of cloud
(07:31):
it was difficult even to make out the contours of
the surrounding fields, save for the dark silhouettes of hedgerows
and trees dotted about like thick, formless shadows. It wasn't
long before the eerie quietude of the night started to
gnaw away at her nerves, so much so that Elizabeth
neglected to take the well trodden short cut through the field.
(07:55):
Better to stick to the open country, she thought, than
venture nearer to the ominous looking woodland to her left.
With the temperature dropping even further, Elizabeth and her little
dog plowed on gallantly towards their destination. Roughly two miles
from Leathern Elizabeth's dog began to tire, leaving Smith with
(08:16):
little choice but to pick him up and carry him
on her shoulders. Less than half a mile later, Smith
was hugely relieved when she was able to make out
the distant rise of Dunnichen Hill, a clear sign that
she was almost home. And so it was with little
surprise when she saw a few small lights in the distance.
(08:39):
Only there was something odd about them. Firstly, it was strange,
she thought, why so many lights would be on when
it was almost two o'clock in the morning. But what
was perhaps even more unusual was that the lights, unless
she was mistaken, appeared to be moving. A short time
(09:00):
time later, not only had the number of lights increased dramatically,
but she soon realized with some surprise that each of
the lights were being held aloft in the air by strange,
shadowy figures. The lights were in fact flaming torches, being
held aloft by men wearing dark tunics with roll collars
(09:21):
and tights. What was also odd was the manner in
which they were moving. Rather than walking straight across the field,
they seemed to be skirting in a semicircle around the
bottom of it. But then the figures disappeared, only to
be replaced by another set of men in the field
to her left, who were this time close enough for
(09:43):
her to notice that the torches seemed to be strangely
red in colour. At this point, Elizabeth's dog, sensing the
peculiarity of the occasion, began to bark, much to Elizabeth's alarm.
Trying to ignore the strange men, she hurryrried on towards home.
But the most extraordinary vision was yet to come. Not
(10:12):
long after, a third set of men appeared, even closer
than the previous groups. She could see them clearly now
as they made their way through the field, just like before,
with their burning torches held aloft. But they weren't merely
marching as she had first thought. This group seemed to
be moving much more diligently and with purpose throughout the field.
(10:36):
Elizabeth wondered why it was that they would stop from
time to time, bringing the torches close to the ground,
and that was when she saw them, the bloodied corpses
of the dead. It was as if she had wandered
into the aftermath of some great and ancient battle. The
field was littered with them. The men with torches were
(10:59):
clearly scared, carrying the ground to see if anyone was
left alive, turning the bodies over in the darkness to
check for signs of life. Smith and her dog eventually
made it home safe and sound, but unsurprisingly, the ghosts
of those dead never truly left her. However, it wasn't
(11:19):
until a further twenty years later that Smith's account of
the extraordinary event was formally recorded. The task was taken
up by fifty four year old doctor James mccague, a
much respected and well loved psychologist and contemporary of Andrew
McKenzie at the Society for Psychical Research. In the intervening years,
(11:41):
Smith had come to the realization that what she had
seen had indeed something to do with an ancient battle
once fought on the very land she had walked across.
After spending some considerable time interviewing Smith, macag was left
with little doubt that she had somehow slipped back in
time and witnessed the aftermath of a brutal and bloody
(12:01):
battle known as the Battle of Necton's Mere. The battle
occurred in six hundred and eighty five, a d between
the Picts, an enigmatic tribal people from what is now
the north and east of Scotland, and the Northumbrians. Fifty
years previously, the Kingdom of Northumbria, led by King Edwin,
(12:22):
had risen to become the most powerful in all of
the British isles, but by the end of the seventh
century the kingdom had diminished considerably, thanks largely to the
disastrous defeat they suffered at the hands of the Picts
at the Battle of Necton's Mere. Macaque found Smith, who
at one time had been the president of her local
(12:43):
women's rural Institute, to be an extremely credible witness, concluding
that her recollections of the Knight's events were at the
very least genuine to her, and a few elements of
the story stood out. In particular, insistence that the torches
had been read was puzzling at first, until Andrew Mackenzie
(13:06):
later made a discovery that was believed to have not
been known by Smith at the time. He discovered that
torches of that era were often made from the resinous
roots of Scott's fur, which in their natural state do
indeed have a distinctive red colour. Macagu was especially intrigued
by Smith's description of the movement of the men who
(13:27):
seemed to be walking in a curve around the field,
and so it was with some surprise when he discovered
that back in the seventh century the field had in
fact been a small lock that had later been drained
and turned into farmland. His startling conclusion was that perhaps
the apparitions had merely been walking around the lock to
(13:47):
get to their fallen comrades. This revelation, he believed, was
ultimate proof of Smith's story, since it demonstrated that the
apparitions must have come from a time before the lock
had been Our second tale takes place only seven years
(14:10):
later in the county of Suffolk, in the southeast of England.
It is the birthplace of the Infamous, which find a
General Matthew Hopkins, whose reign of terror in the sixteen
forties resulted in many local women being murdered due to
egregious accusations of witchcraft. Nowadays, however, it is perhaps better
(14:31):
known for its tranquil wetlands and rich arable soil. It
is a county that echoes with bird song and the
music of rafe Vaughn Williams. A place where the earth
is as dark and rich as the sky is wide,
a place perhaps best summed up by W. G. Seaboard's
exquisite travelog The Rings of Saturn. And so it is
(14:55):
to that place that we now travel. It is Sunday
morning in o October nineteen fifty seven. Up above the
skylarks ascend, chirrup, whistle, and shake as below them, three
young boys, equipped with a map and a compass, are
steadily making their way across the countryside. They are taking
(15:15):
part in an orienteering exercise organized by the Royal Navy Cadets.
The boys, who are all fifteen and brand new recruits,
are William Lang from Perthshire in Scotland, Ray Baker from London,
and Michael Crowley from the County of Worcestershire. Today their
task is to locate a specific waypoint, record their findings
(15:39):
and then return to base camp to report back to
their superiors. Finally, after a few miles of trekking, the
boys were excitedly homing in on their mysterious destination. They
had been coming up a slight rise when they first
heard the sound of church bells as they approached the
top of the hill, they know to smoke rising from chimneys,
(16:02):
and the spire of a church towering prominently above a
small village. As they finally made it over the hill,
the rest of the small community was revealed to them below,
and with the boys in agreement that this was indeed
where they were supposed to be, they continued their journey
down into the village. But as they got nearer, something
(16:22):
very peculiar happened. Part Way into the village was a
small stream that flowed over the road. As they approached it,
they became aware that something wasn't quite right. It was
Michael who noticed it first, the silence. Only moments ago,
(16:43):
the church bells had been ringing and the sound of
bird song had filled the air, But now, as they
entered the village, the place was eerily silent, save for
the gentle trickling of the stream. As they carried on
over the ford, William noted that even the ducks seemed
unmoved by their arrival, and as for any sign of people,
(17:06):
the place was completely deserted. It was then that they
noticed the trees. Only a few minutes earlier, they were
surrounded by a countryside decorated with the reddish golden browns
of autumnal leaves, but the leaves on the trees in
the village were anything but. Here, the leaves appeared to
(17:26):
be vibrantly green, almost as if it were springtime. As
the boys walked on, a strange picture was beginning to emerge.
All of the houses looked as if they were from
another age, hand built and slightly crooked in design. Some
were timber framed, and others looked positively medieval. Looking around,
(17:52):
they saw no sign of street lights or even aerials
on the houses. There was also no smoke coming from
the chimneys as they had seen before entering the village,
and absolutely no sign of the church that had been
so visible from the hill. Whats More, the wind had
completely dropped, with not even the leaves rustling in the trees,
(18:14):
and there was no sign of anybody anywhere. The boys
made their way over to a building with a green
door and a large front window split into smaller panes
that had not been washed in some time. They pressed
their noses to the glass. Just like the rest of
(18:40):
the village. The shop was deserted, but at the back
of the room, hanging on meat hooks were the skinned
carcasses of three large cows, the meat green and moldy,
having long ago turned putrid. Unnerved by what they had seen,
and somewhat in a daze, the boys soon found themselves
(19:00):
staring through the window of another building, but again found
no sign of life inside. The rooms completely emptied of
all furniture. Ray and Michael suggested knocking on some of
the doors, but William refused to move. Ever since entering
the village, a strange feeling had fallen over him. It
(19:22):
was an overwhelming sense of sadness and the unmistakable sensation
that they were being watched by unseen and unfriendly eyes.
The three boys hurriedly made their way back up the
track to the top of the hill. Finally satisfied that
they had reached a safe distance, the boys turned back
(19:43):
and were amazed to find the village just as they
had seen it before. The smoke was again rising from
the chimneys, and the church spire stood tall and proud.
The autumnal colours had returned to the trees, and once
more the sound of the bells and bird song could
be heard all around a short time later, the boys
(20:06):
returned to base camp, and relayed their experiences to their
skeptical superiors. Despite their baffling description, the petty officers confirmed
the boys had indeed reached their designated waypoint. What they
had supposedly seen was the picturesque village of Cursey. It
wasn't until thirty years later that Michael Crowley and William Lang,
(20:30):
who by then were both living in Australia, contacted McKenzie
and relayed their extraordinary story. A few years later, mackenzie
revisited the village with Lang, and together they retraced just
what exactly had occurred that day, Much like doctor macarg
had been with Miss Smith in Scotland. Mackenzie was impressed
(20:52):
by Lang's sincerity and the detail of his description of
the events. Mackenzie ultimately came to the conclusion that what
the boys had experienced was not the Curzy of nineteen
fifty seven, but rather the village as it had been
in the fourteen twenties in the aftermath of the Great Plague.
(21:19):
Is it really possible that both the young Cadets and
Elizabeth Smith, and anyone else for that matter, could slip
unwittingly into another time? Perhaps not in the manner suggested
by Mackenzie, but in twenty eleven one man was to
make a remarkable claim that we might all, in a
sense be slipping in and out of time constantly. In
(21:43):
March of that year, a paper was published in the
Journal of Personality and Psychology titled Feeling the Future Experimental
Evidence for Anomalous retroactive Influences on Cognition and Effect. It
had been written by brilliant but controversial social psychologist of
Cornell University in the States, called Professor Darrell Bemm. The
(22:08):
paper was extraordinary from its opening line to its mind
boggling conclusion. After all, it isn't often that a paper
published in an elite journal begins with a definition of
sci which he described as the anomalous processes of information
or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of
known physical or biological mechanisms. It is even more of
(22:32):
a rarity that a paper would then go on to
prove that such phenomena, an area most associated with telepathy, clairvoyance,
and psychokinesis, might actually be real. The paper presented the
results from a number of experiments involving over one thousand volunteers.
One such test was to have the volunteers study a
(22:55):
list of words, from which they would later be asked
to try and recall as many of the words as possible.
Having completed this part of the experiment, the volunteers were
then given random words from the list that they were
then asked to type out as a counterintuitive act of reinforcement. Incredibly,
Bem's results seemed to suggest a direct correlation between the
(23:18):
words that the students had been able to recall and
the words that they were later asked to type out.
In essence, Bem had turned the notion of cause and
effect completely on its head. In another test, volunteers were
shown two curtain graphics on a computer screen, behind one
of which was a highly stimulant, erotic image. The volunteers
(23:41):
were then tasked with selecting correctly which curtain hid the
image completely. Random guesses would return a roughly fifty percent
success rate, but amazingly, Professor Bem recorded a fifty three
point one success rate. The difference may sound minimal, but
in statistical terms, it is dramatically significant. What Bem's paper
(24:05):
seemed to be saying was that everything we thought we
knew about the unidirectional nature of time was a fallacy.
Before long, however, there were suspicious rumblings amongst the scientific community.
Questions were asked about the validity of Bem's methodology and
the lack of any other findings that might link with
(24:28):
Bem's extraordinary claims, and ultimately, what distinguishes scientific theory from
fact is the reproducibility of the results. In two thousand twelve,
psychologists Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Chris French of the
Universities of Edinburgh, Hertfordshire and Goldsmith's respectively made an unsuccessful
(24:51):
attempt to replicate Professor Behm's findings. Their attempts were repeated
in the same year by Jeff Gallick of Carnegie Mellone University,
who also failed to replicate Professor Behm's results. It remains
to be seen whether Bem's findings will gain a wider credibility.
(25:11):
For what it's worth, Bem stands resolutely by his findings.
One perhaps more rational, but in some ways no less extraordinary.
Explanation for the bizarre accounts of Elizabeth Smith and the
Three Cadets is a phenomenon known as derealisation. The experience
(25:36):
is thought to be brought on by a dysfunction in
the occipital or temporal lobe of the brain. The condition
can often leave sufferers with a sense of disassociation from
the external world, whereby familiar places suddenly become alien and surreal.
Regardless of whether such a condition had afflicted Smith or
(25:58):
the young Boys, the suggestion brings to mind an intriguing
concept that I believe strikes at the heart of our
fascination with the notion of traveling back in time. The
term harntology was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in
his nineteen ninety three book Specters of marx The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.
(26:23):
The word is a portmanteau of the words haunting and ontology,
the philosophical study of the nature of being. For Derida,
the term is essentially a play on the temporality of ideas,
or more precisely, the impossibility of eradicating knowledge or ideas,
in this case, as they would pertain to Marxist philosophy.
(26:45):
Once they have been conceived, from the moment they exist,
they remain forever a part of our collective knowledge, haunting
our perception of both the past and the future, the
implication being that only by returning to a time before
the idea could we hope to imagine an alternate future
(27:06):
unshaped by that idea. And it is this that I
believe most resonates with us when fantasizing about the possibility
of traveling back in time. Not the fantasy that we
might exist in a different and more agreeable past, but
that by returning to that past we might realize a
different future. What tantalizes is the promise that our fate
(27:32):
could somehow be changed for the better, this currently being
an impossibility. To paraphrase the composer William Bazinski, we find
ourselves perversely left pining for futures that can never happen,
but continue to haunt us. Nonetheless, a concept that you
might say achieves physical form in the architecture around us,
(27:56):
perhaps no more strikingly than in places like the Barbercan
Center in London, a place now extant as a literal
Balladian testament to a vision of the future that never materialized.
Of course, change for the better, like all things, is
a relative term. For example, it is through concepts such
(28:17):
as horntology that we might better understand at least the
despotic fixation for burning books, or, in the recent case
of Isil, their destruction of ancient cultural artifacts. Such practices
form the practical reality of attempts to expunge the past
in the hope of creating a different future. The concept
(28:45):
of horntology was reinvigorated in the noughties by a number
of cultural theorists eager to apply the term to emergent
trends in art and pop culture, in particular with regards
to the growing sense that Western music and especially electronic music,
had reached an evolutionary could de sac. Perhaps most prominent
(29:06):
among them was the writer and theorist Mark Fischer, who
saw in the music of artists such as Burial or
the groups that perform under the ghost Box label, an
attempt to navigate away out of the culd de sac.
Fisher also recognized an unsettled nostalgia for the past that
in some ways was merely serving to reinvigorate the specters
(29:29):
of what those musicians saw as their many lost futures.
But what Fisher found most troubling, as mentioned in a
piece for the Fall two thousand twelve edition of Film Quarterly,
was the sense that we were losing the capacity to
conceive of a world radically different from the one in
which we currently live, that escape from the cul de
(29:52):
sac was an impossibility. And yet for those left despondent
at this notion, who mind for an escape from an
uncertain present, it is worth bearing in mind some of
the thoughts of Arthur Kessler, as addressed in his seminal
work The Ghost in the Machine. In a concept he
(30:12):
refers to as drawback to Leap, Kessler demonstrates that not
only is the history of evolution littered with cul de
sacs and dead ends, but that some of the greatest
revolutions in science, art, and biology were dependent on them.
That it isn't until periods of cumulative progress reached their
inevitable stagnation that we are left with no alternative but
(30:35):
to go back and find a new way out, as exemplified,
for example, by the way in which Pablo Picasso's reversal
to primitivism enabled him to forge a brand new paradigm
in cubism. So for anyone feeling afraid that the future
they invested so much hope in seems to be disappearing
(30:57):
before their eyes, worry not that it is the end.
Not only might it merely be the drawback before the leap,
but also remember that the past, present, and future is now.
Perhaps those lost futures aren't specters after all, but real
attainable spaces just waiting for you to arrive. Thank you
(31:29):
as ever for listening. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
(31:53):
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding this stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation or a story of your own you'd
like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained
podcast dot com and reaches online through X and Blue
Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com,
(32:16):
Forward Slash Unexplained Podcast h
Hello, it's Richard McLean Smith here with Unexplained on an
end of season break. Will be dipping back into the
archive each week until season nine begins on Friday, October
thirty first. This week's episode explores one of the most
puzzling claims in all of paranormal research. Accounts so rare
and so strange that they challenge our very understanding of
(00:21):
reality itself. What happens when ordinary people insist the familiar
world around them has suddenly become something else? Entirely when
witnesses claim the present has slipped away, leaving them stranded
in moments that shouldn't exist. In the nineteen fifties, two
separate incidents in Britain left ordinary people with extraordinary stories
(00:45):
to tell. A woman walking home alone on a winter's
night would later claim she witnessed scenes that belonged to
another age, while three young cadets on a routine exercise
would insist that they stumbled into a world that seemed
frozen in time. This is Unexplained, Season two, episode two,
(01:07):
Time out of Joint. It has long been accepted that
time as we know it, or at the very least
in the sense that we experience it, is not what
(01:28):
it seems, or, as Albert Einstein put it, the past,
the present, and the future is but a stubborn, persistent illusion.
It would seem that we have long been mesmerized by
the notion of traveling through time, whether it be to
write a past wrong or merely to escape our present reality.
(01:51):
But it wasn't until Einstein's special relativity introduced us to
the tantalizing concept of space, time, and the fourth dimension
that such notions were given mathematical credibility. No longer was
time a mere subjective unit of measurement, but suddenly we
were invited to imagine it as a space within which
(02:11):
we might move, a theory that, as the earlier quote suggests,
did awagh entirely with any notion of past, present and future. Or,
to be clearer, as physicist Max Tegmark notes, time is
not an illusion, but the flow of time is for
much in the way that matter may appear differently from
(02:33):
one observer to the next. So two, according to Einstein,
does time. Incidentally, although the concept of space time is
often linked with Einstein, it was actually his teacher Hermann
Minkowski who first proposed the idea back in nineteen o
eight in a paper titled Space and Time. Remarkably, author
(02:56):
Edgar Allan Poe is believed to have come to the
same realization himself as far back as eighteen forty eight,
writing in an essay titled Eureka, that space and duration
are one. Certainly, it is an area that has been
well explored in fiction. The Oddly Unsettling nineteen seventies television
(03:17):
show Sapphire and Steel and Joan Lindsay's Haunting and Mesmeric
Picnic at Hanging Rock are two of my favorite accounts
of one such temporal corruption that is equal parts fascinating
and terrifying. The notion of the time slip you're listening
to unexplained and I'm Richard mc lean smith. To paranormal researchers,
(03:49):
the fabled time slip is considered to be the rarest
of all documented paranormal experience, the most well known account
of such an event being the Mobile jor Dan incident.
The event is alleged to have occurred on Saturday, August tenth,
nineteen oh one, at the Palace of Versailles in France,
when two British women visiting the palace on a day
(04:11):
trip claimed to have found themselves inexplicably transported back to
the late eighteenth century to be surrounded by palace courtiers
and even at one point crossing paths with Mary Antoinette.
The women, Charlotte Moberley and Eleanor Jordan, were both well
educated and had no obvious reason to fabricate the events,
(04:33):
and published a book of their account in nineteen eleven,
which was predictably met with much ridicule. There are two
accounts of alleged time slips that took place in Britain
in the nineteen fifties. The writer and longtime member of
the Society of Psychical Research Andrew Mackenzie documented both the
(04:53):
events in his nineteen ninety seven book Adventures in Time.
For Mackenzie, the accounts were nothing ne less than two
of the most convincing that he had ever come across,
mysteries that remained to this day unexplained. On Monday, January second,
(05:17):
nineteen fifty, as the new decade entered its third day,
so two did the New year's celebrations. As is customary
in Scotland. In a small house in the town of
Brecon in the eastern County of Angus, a cocktail party
is coming to an end. Sensing that the party was
beginning to wind down, one of the guests, fifty five
(05:39):
year old miss Elizabeth Smith, decided to call it a night.
It was, after all, getting late, and Elizabeth wasn't much
relishing the ten mile drive back to her house in
leatherm After saying goodbye to her friends, she collected her
small terrier dog that she had brought with her, and
together they climbed into her car in preparation for the
(06:01):
journey home. It had been a relatively mild winter, but
the last few days had seen a light dusting of
snow along much of the East Coast, snow that by
nightfall on the second had turned steadily to ice. Undeterred,
Elizabeth switched on the engine and pulled off into the night.
(06:23):
A short time later, not more than two miles outside
of Brecon, Elizabeth lost control of the car, span off
the road, and plummeted straight into a ditch. Miraculously, neither
Elizabeth nor her small canine companion were harmed, but the
car was completely written off. Relieved and more than a
(06:46):
little dazed. With the temperature outside steadily dropping, Elizabeth knew
she had only two options. Returned to her friend's home,
or strike out on the eight mile journey back to leatherm.
Deciding on the latter, Elizabeth gathered her things and, together
with her dock, she set out on the long walk home.
(07:06):
At first, Elizabeth was at ease, taking the deserted country
lane back towards her village. She felt safe with her
dog by her side, cheerily keeping her company. But it
was hard to ignore the strange sense of foreboding that
is wont to arise when you were out in the wilderness,
with no lights to be seen, and even the moon
declines to reveal itself. Such was the thickness of cloud
(07:31):
it was difficult even to make out the contours of
the surrounding fields, save for the dark silhouettes of hedgerows
and trees dotted about like thick, formless shadows. It wasn't
long before the eerie quietude of the night started to
gnaw away at her nerves, so much so that Elizabeth
neglected to take the well trodden short cut through the field.
(07:55):
Better to stick to the open country, she thought, than
venture nearer to the ominous looking woodland to her left.
With the temperature dropping even further, Elizabeth and her little
dog plowed on gallantly towards their destination. Roughly two miles
from Leathern Elizabeth's dog began to tire, leaving Smith with
(08:16):
little choice but to pick him up and carry him
on her shoulders. Less than half a mile later, Smith
was hugely relieved when she was able to make out
the distant rise of Dunnichen Hill, a clear sign that
she was almost home. And so it was with little
surprise when she saw a few small lights in the distance.
(08:39):
Only there was something odd about them. Firstly, it was strange,
she thought, why so many lights would be on when
it was almost two o'clock in the morning. But what
was perhaps even more unusual was that the lights, unless
she was mistaken, appeared to be moving. A short time
(09:00):
time later, not only had the number of lights increased dramatically,
but she soon realized with some surprise that each of
the lights were being held aloft in the air by strange,
shadowy figures. The lights were in fact flaming torches, being
held aloft by men wearing dark tunics with roll collars
(09:21):
and tights. What was also odd was the manner in
which they were moving. Rather than walking straight across the field,
they seemed to be skirting in a semicircle around the
bottom of it. But then the figures disappeared, only to
be replaced by another set of men in the field
to her left, who were this time close enough for
(09:43):
her to notice that the torches seemed to be strangely
red in colour. At this point, Elizabeth's dog, sensing the
peculiarity of the occasion, began to bark, much to Elizabeth's alarm.
Trying to ignore the strange men, she hurryrried on towards home.
But the most extraordinary vision was yet to come. Not
(10:12):
long after, a third set of men appeared, even closer
than the previous groups. She could see them clearly now
as they made their way through the field, just like before,
with their burning torches held aloft. But they weren't merely
marching as she had first thought. This group seemed to
be moving much more diligently and with purpose throughout the field.
(10:36):
Elizabeth wondered why it was that they would stop from
time to time, bringing the torches close to the ground,
and that was when she saw them, the bloodied corpses
of the dead. It was as if she had wandered
into the aftermath of some great and ancient battle. The
field was littered with them. The men with torches were
(10:59):
clearly scared, carrying the ground to see if anyone was
left alive, turning the bodies over in the darkness to
check for signs of life. Smith and her dog eventually
made it home safe and sound, but unsurprisingly, the ghosts
of those dead never truly left her. However, it wasn't
(11:19):
until a further twenty years later that Smith's account of
the extraordinary event was formally recorded. The task was taken
up by fifty four year old doctor James mccague, a
much respected and well loved psychologist and contemporary of Andrew
McKenzie at the Society for Psychical Research. In the intervening years,
(11:41):
Smith had come to the realization that what she had
seen had indeed something to do with an ancient battle
once fought on the very land she had walked across.
After spending some considerable time interviewing Smith, macag was left
with little doubt that she had somehow slipped back in
time and witnessed the aftermath of a brutal and bloody
(12:01):
battle known as the Battle of Necton's Mere. The battle
occurred in six hundred and eighty five, a d between
the Picts, an enigmatic tribal people from what is now
the north and east of Scotland, and the Northumbrians. Fifty
years previously, the Kingdom of Northumbria, led by King Edwin,
(12:22):
had risen to become the most powerful in all of
the British isles, but by the end of the seventh
century the kingdom had diminished considerably, thanks largely to the
disastrous defeat they suffered at the hands of the Picts
at the Battle of Necton's Mere. Macaque found Smith, who
at one time had been the president of her local
(12:43):
women's rural Institute, to be an extremely credible witness, concluding
that her recollections of the Knight's events were at the
very least genuine to her, and a few elements of
the story stood out. In particular, insistence that the torches
had been read was puzzling at first, until Andrew Mackenzie
(13:06):
later made a discovery that was believed to have not
been known by Smith at the time. He discovered that
torches of that era were often made from the resinous
roots of Scott's fur, which in their natural state do
indeed have a distinctive red colour. Macagu was especially intrigued
by Smith's description of the movement of the men who
(13:27):
seemed to be walking in a curve around the field,
and so it was with some surprise when he discovered
that back in the seventh century the field had in
fact been a small lock that had later been drained
and turned into farmland. His startling conclusion was that perhaps
the apparitions had merely been walking around the lock to
(13:47):
get to their fallen comrades. This revelation, he believed, was
ultimate proof of Smith's story, since it demonstrated that the
apparitions must have come from a time before the lock
had been Our second tale takes place only seven years
(14:10):
later in the county of Suffolk, in the southeast of England.
It is the birthplace of the Infamous, which find a
General Matthew Hopkins, whose reign of terror in the sixteen
forties resulted in many local women being murdered due to
egregious accusations of witchcraft. Nowadays, however, it is perhaps better
(14:31):
known for its tranquil wetlands and rich arable soil. It
is a county that echoes with bird song and the
music of rafe Vaughn Williams. A place where the earth
is as dark and rich as the sky is wide,
a place perhaps best summed up by W. G. Seaboard's
exquisite travelog The Rings of Saturn. And so it is
(14:55):
to that place that we now travel. It is Sunday
morning in o October nineteen fifty seven. Up above the
skylarks ascend, chirrup, whistle, and shake as below them, three
young boys, equipped with a map and a compass, are
steadily making their way across the countryside. They are taking
(15:15):
part in an orienteering exercise organized by the Royal Navy Cadets.
The boys, who are all fifteen and brand new recruits,
are William Lang from Perthshire in Scotland, Ray Baker from London,
and Michael Crowley from the County of Worcestershire. Today their
task is to locate a specific waypoint, record their findings
(15:39):
and then return to base camp to report back to
their superiors. Finally, after a few miles of trekking, the
boys were excitedly homing in on their mysterious destination. They
had been coming up a slight rise when they first
heard the sound of church bells as they approached the
top of the hill, they know to smoke rising from chimneys,
(16:02):
and the spire of a church towering prominently above a
small village. As they finally made it over the hill,
the rest of the small community was revealed to them below,
and with the boys in agreement that this was indeed
where they were supposed to be, they continued their journey
down into the village. But as they got nearer, something
(16:22):
very peculiar happened. Part Way into the village was a
small stream that flowed over the road. As they approached it,
they became aware that something wasn't quite right. It was
Michael who noticed it first, the silence. Only moments ago,
(16:43):
the church bells had been ringing and the sound of
bird song had filled the air, But now, as they
entered the village, the place was eerily silent, save for
the gentle trickling of the stream. As they carried on
over the ford, William noted that even the ducks seemed
unmoved by their arrival, and as for any sign of people,
(17:06):
the place was completely deserted. It was then that they
noticed the trees. Only a few minutes earlier, they were
surrounded by a countryside decorated with the reddish golden browns
of autumnal leaves, but the leaves on the trees in
the village were anything but. Here, the leaves appeared to
(17:26):
be vibrantly green, almost as if it were springtime. As
the boys walked on, a strange picture was beginning to emerge.
All of the houses looked as if they were from
another age, hand built and slightly crooked in design. Some
were timber framed, and others looked positively medieval. Looking around,
(17:52):
they saw no sign of street lights or even aerials
on the houses. There was also no smoke coming from
the chimneys as they had seen before entering the village,
and absolutely no sign of the church that had been
so visible from the hill. Whats More, the wind had
completely dropped, with not even the leaves rustling in the trees,
(18:14):
and there was no sign of anybody anywhere. The boys
made their way over to a building with a green
door and a large front window split into smaller panes
that had not been washed in some time. They pressed
their noses to the glass. Just like the rest of
(18:40):
the village. The shop was deserted, but at the back
of the room, hanging on meat hooks were the skinned
carcasses of three large cows, the meat green and moldy,
having long ago turned putrid. Unnerved by what they had seen,
and somewhat in a daze, the boys soon found themselves
(19:00):
staring through the window of another building, but again found
no sign of life inside. The rooms completely emptied of
all furniture. Ray and Michael suggested knocking on some of
the doors, but William refused to move. Ever since entering
the village, a strange feeling had fallen over him. It
(19:22):
was an overwhelming sense of sadness and the unmistakable sensation
that they were being watched by unseen and unfriendly eyes.
The three boys hurriedly made their way back up the
track to the top of the hill. Finally satisfied that
they had reached a safe distance, the boys turned back
(19:43):
and were amazed to find the village just as they
had seen it before. The smoke was again rising from
the chimneys, and the church spire stood tall and proud.
The autumnal colours had returned to the trees, and once
more the sound of the bells and bird song could
be heard all around a short time later, the boys
(20:06):
returned to base camp, and relayed their experiences to their
skeptical superiors. Despite their baffling description, the petty officers confirmed
the boys had indeed reached their designated waypoint. What they
had supposedly seen was the picturesque village of Cursey. It
wasn't until thirty years later that Michael Crowley and William Lang,
(20:30):
who by then were both living in Australia, contacted McKenzie
and relayed their extraordinary story. A few years later, mackenzie
revisited the village with Lang, and together they retraced just
what exactly had occurred that day, Much like doctor macarg
had been with Miss Smith in Scotland. Mackenzie was impressed
(20:52):
by Lang's sincerity and the detail of his description of
the events. Mackenzie ultimately came to the conclusion that what
the boys had experienced was not the Curzy of nineteen
fifty seven, but rather the village as it had been
in the fourteen twenties in the aftermath of the Great Plague.
(21:19):
Is it really possible that both the young Cadets and
Elizabeth Smith, and anyone else for that matter, could slip
unwittingly into another time? Perhaps not in the manner suggested
by Mackenzie, but in twenty eleven one man was to
make a remarkable claim that we might all, in a
sense be slipping in and out of time constantly. In
(21:43):
March of that year, a paper was published in the
Journal of Personality and Psychology titled Feeling the Future Experimental
Evidence for Anomalous retroactive Influences on Cognition and Effect. It
had been written by brilliant but controversial social psychologist of
Cornell University in the States, called Professor Darrell Bemm. The
(22:08):
paper was extraordinary from its opening line to its mind
boggling conclusion. After all, it isn't often that a paper
published in an elite journal begins with a definition of
sci which he described as the anomalous processes of information
or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of
known physical or biological mechanisms. It is even more of
(22:32):
a rarity that a paper would then go on to
prove that such phenomena, an area most associated with telepathy, clairvoyance,
and psychokinesis, might actually be real. The paper presented the
results from a number of experiments involving over one thousand volunteers.
One such test was to have the volunteers study a
(22:55):
list of words, from which they would later be asked
to try and recall as many of the words as possible.
Having completed this part of the experiment, the volunteers were
then given random words from the list that they were
then asked to type out as a counterintuitive act of reinforcement. Incredibly,
Bem's results seemed to suggest a direct correlation between the
(23:18):
words that the students had been able to recall and
the words that they were later asked to type out.
In essence, Bem had turned the notion of cause and
effect completely on its head. In another test, volunteers were
shown two curtain graphics on a computer screen, behind one
of which was a highly stimulant, erotic image. The volunteers
(23:41):
were then tasked with selecting correctly which curtain hid the
image completely. Random guesses would return a roughly fifty percent
success rate, but amazingly, Professor Bem recorded a fifty three
point one success rate. The difference may sound minimal, but
in statistical terms, it is dramatically significant. What Bem's paper
(24:05):
seemed to be saying was that everything we thought we
knew about the unidirectional nature of time was a fallacy.
Before long, however, there were suspicious rumblings amongst the scientific community.
Questions were asked about the validity of Bem's methodology and
the lack of any other findings that might link with
(24:28):
Bem's extraordinary claims, and ultimately, what distinguishes scientific theory from
fact is the reproducibility of the results. In two thousand twelve,
psychologists Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Chris French of the
Universities of Edinburgh, Hertfordshire and Goldsmith's respectively made an unsuccessful
(24:51):
attempt to replicate Professor Behm's findings. Their attempts were repeated
in the same year by Jeff Gallick of Carnegie Mellone University,
who also failed to replicate Professor Behm's results. It remains
to be seen whether Bem's findings will gain a wider credibility.
(25:11):
For what it's worth, Bem stands resolutely by his findings.
One perhaps more rational, but in some ways no less extraordinary.
Explanation for the bizarre accounts of Elizabeth Smith and the
Three Cadets is a phenomenon known as derealisation. The experience
(25:36):
is thought to be brought on by a dysfunction in
the occipital or temporal lobe of the brain. The condition
can often leave sufferers with a sense of disassociation from
the external world, whereby familiar places suddenly become alien and surreal.
Regardless of whether such a condition had afflicted Smith or
(25:58):
the young Boys, the suggestion brings to mind an intriguing
concept that I believe strikes at the heart of our
fascination with the notion of traveling back in time. The
term harntology was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in
his nineteen ninety three book Specters of marx The State
of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International.
(26:23):
The word is a portmanteau of the words haunting and ontology,
the philosophical study of the nature of being. For Derida,
the term is essentially a play on the temporality of ideas,
or more precisely, the impossibility of eradicating knowledge or ideas,
in this case, as they would pertain to Marxist philosophy.
(26:45):
Once they have been conceived, from the moment they exist,
they remain forever a part of our collective knowledge, haunting
our perception of both the past and the future, the
implication being that only by returning to a time before
the idea could we hope to imagine an alternate future
(27:06):
unshaped by that idea. And it is this that I
believe most resonates with us when fantasizing about the possibility
of traveling back in time. Not the fantasy that we
might exist in a different and more agreeable past, but
that by returning to that past we might realize a
different future. What tantalizes is the promise that our fate
(27:32):
could somehow be changed for the better, this currently being
an impossibility. To paraphrase the composer William Bazinski, we find
ourselves perversely left pining for futures that can never happen,
but continue to haunt us. Nonetheless, a concept that you
might say achieves physical form in the architecture around us,
(27:56):
perhaps no more strikingly than in places like the Barbercan
Center in London, a place now extant as a literal
Balladian testament to a vision of the future that never materialized.
Of course, change for the better, like all things, is
a relative term. For example, it is through concepts such
(28:17):
as horntology that we might better understand at least the
despotic fixation for burning books, or, in the recent case
of Isil, their destruction of ancient cultural artifacts. Such practices
form the practical reality of attempts to expunge the past
in the hope of creating a different future. The concept
(28:45):
of horntology was reinvigorated in the noughties by a number
of cultural theorists eager to apply the term to emergent
trends in art and pop culture, in particular with regards
to the growing sense that Western music and especially electronic music,
had reached an evolutionary could de sac. Perhaps most prominent
(29:06):
among them was the writer and theorist Mark Fischer, who
saw in the music of artists such as Burial or
the groups that perform under the ghost Box label, an
attempt to navigate away out of the culd de sac.
Fisher also recognized an unsettled nostalgia for the past that
in some ways was merely serving to reinvigorate the specters
(29:29):
of what those musicians saw as their many lost futures.
But what Fisher found most troubling, as mentioned in a
piece for the Fall two thousand twelve edition of Film Quarterly,
was the sense that we were losing the capacity to
conceive of a world radically different from the one in
which we currently live, that escape from the cul de
(29:52):
sac was an impossibility. And yet for those left despondent
at this notion, who mind for an escape from an
uncertain present, it is worth bearing in mind some of
the thoughts of Arthur Kessler, as addressed in his seminal
work The Ghost in the Machine. In a concept he
(30:12):
refers to as drawback to Leap, Kessler demonstrates that not
only is the history of evolution littered with cul de
sacs and dead ends, but that some of the greatest
revolutions in science, art, and biology were dependent on them.
That it isn't until periods of cumulative progress reached their
inevitable stagnation that we are left with no alternative but
(30:35):
to go back and find a new way out, as exemplified,
for example, by the way in which Pablo Picasso's reversal
to primitivism enabled him to forge a brand new paradigm
in cubism. So for anyone feeling afraid that the future
they invested so much hope in seems to be disappearing
(30:57):
before their eyes, worry not that it is the end.
Not only might it merely be the drawback before the leap,
but also remember that the past, present, and future is now.
Perhaps those lost futures aren't specters after all, but real
attainable spaces just waiting for you to arrive. Thank you
(31:29):
as ever for listening. Unexplained as an AV Club Productions
podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of
the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me
Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now
available to buy worldwide. You can purchase from Amazon, Barnes
and Noble, Waterstones and other bookstores. Please subscribe to and
(31:53):
rate the show wherever you get your podcasts, and feel
free to get in touch with any thoughts or ideas
regarding this stories you've heard on the show. Perhaps you
have an explanation or a story of your own you'd
like to share. You can find out more at Unexplained
podcast dot com and reaches online through X and Blue
Sky at Unexplained Pod and Facebook at Facebook dot com,
(32:16):
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