Danny Robins' paranormal cold cases: time travel

BBC Radio’s Danny Robins speaks to a woman who travelled in time, entering a shop in 1993 and coming out onto a bustling street last seen a century earlier

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Published: June 1, 2024 at 8:20 AM

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Have you ever wanted to travel in time? Since you’re reading a magazine about history, I’ll hazard a guess the answer is yes. It’s the stuff of childhood fantasy, but... what if it can really happen? I’ve received quite a few emails about experiences that paranormal experts call ‘timeslips’: the sensation of briefly slipping from your current, everyday existence into a moment in the past. If we consider ghosts to be the dead returning from the past to haunt us, then timeslips are, in some ways, the reverse. We become the ghost plunged from the present into a historic situation.

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One email sticks out. Laura’s story took place in the autumn of 1993. She was 14 years old, living in Essex, and she and her best friend were obsessed with music. Craving ‘grown-up’ freedoms, they’d persuade their parents to let them go into central London to buy CDs. They had a routine: Burger King for breakfast, then hours browsing the shops. One day, though, Laura’s friend was unwell. “I lied to my parents,” Laura says, not wanting her day to be ruined. “I was desperate to buy a particular CD and went on my own, which was forbidden.”

Oxford Street as it looked in the late Victorian era. Horse drawn carriages line the street

London’s Oxford Street as it looked in the late Victorian era... and reminiscent of what Laura saw in the 1990s. (Photo by English Heritage/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Laura followed the normal pattern, finding herself post-Burger King in the flagship HMV on Oxford Street, and this, she tells me, “is when things get interesting”. As she stepped out of the music store clutching her purchases, things were not normal at all. “Instead of the usual buses, cars and people, I saw horse-drawn carriages, hansom cabs, people in old-fashioned dress scuttling across the road; women walking with baskets selling apples, and, I believe, a hot chestnut stall,” she tells me.

Alternate realities

“This was totally immersive. Instead of petrol fumes, it smelt of horses; the smell of dung and wee.” It lasted about a minute, which may not sound long, but imagine feeling like you had been plunged into an alternate reality for 60 seconds – it’s long enough! While, on paper, it does seem impossible for a teenage girl to be transported to Victorian London, Laura is not alone. There are many accounts of similar experiences.

One of the most famous is ‘The Moberly-Jourdain Incident’. On 10 August 1901, two English schoolteachers, Charlotte Anne Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, visited the Palace of Versailles in Paris. While there, they experienced a feeling of “oppression” come over them. “Everything suddenly looked unnatural” and they witnessed people wearing what they believed to be the clothes of pre-revolutionary 1700s France, and saw buildings that were no longer there.

Read other instalments of Danny Robins' series: A holiday from hell A Highlands horror story A Walthamstow folk demon The haunting behind The Conjuring 2

Their most sensational claim was that they’d seen the queen, Marie Antoinette, herself. Some commentators at the time suggested they’d inadvertently wandered across a group of French socialites holding a fancy dress party, but there was enough oddness to the pair’s story for it to retain a hold on the public imagination.

There have been many more stories since. There’s a particular road in Liverpool, Bold Street, notorious for timeslips. In 1996, an off-duty policeman shopping with his wife believed he’d been transported to the 1950s and saw all the shops transformed to how they were back then.

I can’t explain timeslips myself yet, but Laura’s words ring in my ears – “It happens, Danny. It’s like something in the universe shifts. We get a glimpse of life gone by.”

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This article was first published in the September 2022 issue of BBC History Revealed

Find out more

From ghostly phantoms to UFOs, The Battersea Poltergeist's Danny Robins investigates real-life stories of paranormal encounters on his BBC Radio 4 podcast Uncanny. Episodes available now on BBC Sounds

Authors

Danny Robins

Danny Robins is a writer, broadcaster and journalist. He has presented podcasts including 'The Witch Farm'.

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