When I first stumbled upon the phenomenon of ten amazing slips during a dreary university board meeting, I was instantly hooked. The notion that ordinary folks could be whisked away to a different century – sometimes for only a few minutes, sometimes for hours – seemed straight out of a novel. The accounts share common threads: a sudden, oppressive quiet, a feeling of being flattened or drained, and often an invisible crowd that brushes past. While most slips thrust people into the past, a handful even catapulted them forward. Below, we dive into the most compelling cases, ranked from ten down to one.
ten amazing slips Overview
10 Kersey in Suffolk: A Medieval Visit in 1957
On a crisp autumn Sunday in 1957, three trainee soldiers found themselves stepping into what felt like a living history book. As they entered the village of Kersey, the landscape seemed to revert to medieval times – even the grass appeared to bloom with spring’s fresh hues, despite it being late autumn. The church tower loomed overhead, its bells ringing before abruptly falling silent about a hundred yards away, leaving the air eerily still, bereft of any bird song or wind rustle.
The soldiers described houses that looked centuries older, completely devoid of modern fixtures such as TV aerials, telegraph wires, or streetlamps. At a nearby stream, white ducks swam silently, almost like lifeless decoys. Peering through tiny cottage windows revealed a butcher’s shop filled with three ancient, green‑tinged ox carcasses shrouded in cobwebs. As they crouched by a bridge, a chilling sense of ‘eerie sadness’ morphed into a perception of outright malevolence, as though unseen eyes watched them. After roughly twenty‑five minutes, the church bells rang again, and smoke began to rise from chimneys that had previously been invisible. Modern photographs confirm that the church never vanished, suggesting the soldiers slipped back to a period before its twelfth‑century construction.
9 A Police Officer in Liverpool
On Saturday, 7 July 1996, off‑duty constable Frank headed toward Dillon’s bookshop to meet his wife. Suddenly, a small 1950s‑style van emblazoned with “Caplan’s” honked at him, and he realized the road he was on had become a bustling traffic lane, whereas Bold Street was pedestrian‑only in 1996. Across the way, Dillon’s had morphed into “Cripps,” and pedestrians wore fashions straight out of the 1940s and 1950s.
Frank followed a woman in contemporary attire into the shop, noting the modern logo on her handbag, only for the shop to revert to Dillon’s. The woman appeared equally perplexed and voiced her confusion to Frank. The case stands out because police training demands keen observation, yet both Frank and the female witness saw the same anachronistic scene. After the story aired on live radio, callers verified that Cripps had indeed occupied the premises in the fifties and that a Caplan’s firm existed locally at the time, sparking a flood of similar Bold Street reports.
8 Watching Baseball from the Past
In the early 1920s, siblings Robbie and Ann from Flackton, Arkansas, took a shortcut through a pine wood while the town’s residents were gathered at a baseball game. They emerged beside a stream they’d never seen before, only to find the surrounding countryside transformed: the familiar scrubby undergrowth and knobby pines gave way to towering vegetation, strange weeds, and an unsettling silence that echoed the 1957 Kersey soldiers’ experience.
The duo noted that the ferns were “dozens of times larger” than any they’d previously encountered. On a modest rise, they spied a distant ball diamond and heard muffled, tinny voices from the game, as if the sound were filtered through a veil. They watched the match until its conclusion, then crossed the unfamiliar stream back to their own world, where the dream‑like landscape vanished without a trace. Their story highlights how time‑slip victims sometimes glimpse their own era’s future scene while stranded in a past setting.
7 Five Lost Hours
Jenny Randle’s book “Time Storms” recounts the 1973 ordeal of Paul, a 21‑year‑old who, after a late‑night dance, was driving through Little Houghton in the English Midlands. Shortly after passing the village church clock, he lost all sense of time. When he regained consciousness, he was on foot miles away in Bromham, his car missing, his clothes soaked despite the absence of rain, and the clock now reading 7 am.
A friend later located Paul’s vehicle in a muddy field near Turvey, its tires leaving no tracks and the gate locked. Critics might label the incident a blackout, yet the precise disappearance of the car and lack of physical evidence challenge that view. Similar accounts, such as Paul Rainbow’s 1988 experience involving a sudden motorcycle failure, an eerie white egg‑shaped glow, and a half‑hour loss, reinforce the notion of forward‑moving time slips. Both cases underscore the baffling nature of these temporal displacements.
6 Wuthering Heights
In the summer of 1959, British actor Alan Helm, accustomed to strolling the moors near Haworth, ventured to the ruin known as Top Withins. While there, he spotted a man in a deerstalker hat brandishing a shotgun. When the figure vanished, Helm headed toward the ruin, only to find himself looking down on a large Georgian farmhouse.
He knocked on the door, peered inside to see a table set for lunch, and smelled livestock, yet the barn itself was empty. Turning back to Top Withins, the ruin had disappeared entirely. A fleeting glimpse of the deerstalker man later confirmed the surreal nature of the episode. Helm checked his watch, which had stopped at 1:45 pm; moments later, before the curtain rose, it displayed the correct time of 5:45 pm, despite never having been rewound. The incident demonstrates how a familiar landscape can instantly shift into a different epoch.
5 Fast Forward: Chile, 1977
Jenny Randles documents a 24 April 1977 training exercise in Chile’s high‑altitude plateau of Pampa Lluscuma. Corporal Armando Valdés led a small unit when, just before 4 am, soldier Rosales reported two violet lights descending the mountainside, accompanied by an odd glow beneath their feet. Valdés investigated the luminous phenomenon at 4:15 am, only to disappear before his comrades could react.
Moments later, the violet glow intensified, and at 4:30 am Valdés reappeared, disoriented and sleep‑walking, collapsing on the ground. By dawn, his beard had grown several days, and his watch, which had stopped at 4:30 am, now displayed the date 30 April. Valdés suffered memory loss and severe motor impairment, unable to open doors—a symptom reported in many time‑slip narratives. CIA interviewers found his account consistent, and some investigators suggest a UFO encounter may explain the bizarre events.
4 The Phantom Houses of Rougham in Suffolk
In October 1926, teacher Miss Ruth Wynne and a pupil walked toward Bradfield St George, only to encounter the imposing walls and wrought‑iron gates of a grand Georgian house hidden among towering trees. When they returned in spring, the entire structure had vanished, a fact they reported to Labour MP Sir Ernest Bennett.
Earlier, in June 1912, a young boy named James Cobbold, assisting butcher George Waylett with deliveries, experienced a similar phenomenon. While riding along Kingshall Street, a sudden cold gust and a loud “whoosh!” sent the pony rearing and Waylett tumbling. For a brief instant, a three‑storey Georgian house with elaborate gardens materialized before a mist swallowed it, leaving Waylett exclaiming, “That bloody house! That’s about the third time I’ve seen that happen.” These phantom appearances hint at a recurring spatial‑temporal distortion in the Suffolk countryside.
3 Versailles
On 10 August 1901, Oxford scholars Eleanor Jourdain and Charlotte Anne Moberly visited the gardens of Versailles. As they approached a wooded area, the scenery turned unnaturally flat, as if woven into a tapestry. A gentleman dressed in 18th‑century attire blocked their path, politely explaining they were forbidden to proceed, his French “faut” pronounced oddly.
Later, on 2 January 1902, Jourdain felt the same oppressive unreality while crossing a bridge. She heard the rustle of silk dresses behind her, sensed a crowd of unseen people, and caught faint whispers of “Monsieur et Madame” near her ear. A distant band’s music drifted, yet records showed no band performed on that date. Their detailed recollections, corroborated by historical research, suggest a genuine temporal overlay onto the historic palace grounds.
2 The Armies of the Dead
On the evening of 28 June 1812, at roughly 7‑8 pm, Anthony Jackson and 15‑year‑old Martin Turner were walking the fields of Haverah Park near Ripley, Yorkshire. Turner shouted, “What a quantity of beast!” only for Jackson to reply, “Lord bless us! They are not beast, they are men!” A formation of soldiers in white uniforms, led by a scarlet‑clad figure, marched across the hill about a hundred yards away.
A second, darker‑clad army appeared behind the first, forming an L‑shape. The two groups passed without hostility, then vanished behind the hill, leaving a thick plume of smoke that obscured nearby cattle for two minutes. Turner later recalled the gleam of the white soldiers’ weapons in the fading light. The mysterious “smoke” echoed the mist that shrouded the phantom house in Rougham, reinforcing a pattern of ethereal, militaristic apparitions.
1 A Fairy Fair in Seventeenth‑Century England
In 1635, a rider traversing Black Down near Taunton, Somerset, spotted a bustling fair on the hillside – pewterers, shoemakers, pedlars, and stalls laden with trinkets, fruit, and drink. The scene clashed with the season, as no fair should have been held then. When the rider entered the crowd, everything turned opaque, as if passing through a dense throng of invisible people, until he emerged a short distance away and the vision restored itself.
Overwhelmed, the rider felt a sharp pain and hurried home, only to develop a lingering lameness on one side that persisted for years, reminiscent of a partial stroke. The sensation of invisible crowds mirrors the earlier Versailles experience. Such physical aftereffects, alongside the pervasive flatness, silence, and sudden cold reported across centuries, form a striking common thread among time‑slip testimonies.
Top 10 Out‑Of‑Place Artefacts
About The Author: Richard Sugg has authored thirteen books, ranging from ghost story collections to scholarly works on corpse medicine and fairy folklore. He shares his research through daily videos on Twitter and Instagram, inviting readers to explore the uncanny corners of history.