Have you ever experienced a time slip?

[compositejoe]

Have you ever for example been somewhere and found something such as a cafe or an old looking area of a building, but when you leave and return to the same area, that area in the place has gone and it turns out to have never existed in the first place or had gone years ago?

Examples of time slips: (these experiences are mainly based in the United Kingdom, but I guess that similar experiences could have been reported in the United States).

The non-existant pub

My uncle was filming a documentary in Cornwall sometime back in the 80s. At the end of a day’s shooting, he and the rest of the small crew packed up and went looking for a pub so they could unwind and sink a few pints. It was a fine summer evening, with the light just beginning to fade and they came across a pub at the side of a small B road. To their surprise when they entered, the place was heaving with people all seemingly having a great time, although there were no cars parked outside and the pub was in an isolated spot with no other buildings in the immediate vicinity. There was someone playing the piano with people singing along to it, others playing darts and cards and uncle and the crew were warmly greeted, “Hello there! Come on in!” all that kind of thing. The landlord pulled their pints for them and refused to accept payment, saying they were on the house. They all went to sit down and got into an involved discussion about the day’s filiming and so forth, all the while people kept stopping by their table and greeting them, bringing drinks and offering cigarettes etc. Every time any member of the group tried to buy any of the customers a drink back, it was waved away with a, “No, no, there’s no need to do that!” Obviously they were all well impressed with this level of friendliness to a group of total strangers and they left to return to their hotel after a very convivial couple of hours.

Filming resumed the next day and when lunchtime arrived, uncle suggested that everyone return to the friendly roadside pub in the hope of a pint, a sandwich and returning some of the hospitality given the previous evening. There was one problem though … they couldn’t find the pub - it simply wasn’t there. They drove around and around the location, up and down little roads and lanes in the area where it had been and it had gone. Completely baffled, they retired to a restaurant in a small town and began to talk about the previous evening. They soon began to realise that there had been something ‘not quite right’ about the pub and its customers. They realised that they had not had any actual physical contact with anyone there as you would expect in a crowded place, bumping into people, brushing past them, inadvertently touching hands and so on. There had also been a distinct lack of any modern trimmings such as fruit machines, electric pumps, a television, a jukebox and … almost everyone had been in some kind of military uniform. Once filming had ended and uncle returned to Scotland, he did a bit of research and discovered there had been a number of airbases in the general area during WW2.

He’s returned to Cornwall on and off in the intervening years and has tried several times since to find the mysterious pub and its friendly customers, all to no avail. He can’t to this day explain exactly what it was they experienced that summer evening.

The non-existant cafe

Summer '81 I was in Piccadilly Circus and was quite distressed. A couple approached me, were sympathetic to what had happened and offered to take me for a coffee. We were right by a coffee shop but the woman said she knew a cafe in Piccadilly tube station so down we went, the entrance opposite The Regent Palace Hotel, and there was this little cafe tucked away right next to the stairs.

We were the only customers, there was a waitress in a pink gingham 50’s costume and an old woman at one end behind a counter on which there was a strange Heath Robinson contraption made of copper. I couldn’t work out what the hell it was, it stretched the length of the counter, and I felt very unnerved by the old woman who stared intently at me the whole time we were there. Everything about her seemed to be gray.

Something strange happened and I ran out of the cafe, up the stairs and straight into the arms of my boyfriend who I’d been looking for. The couple came out after me and the woman spoke to my boyfriend, said she was relieved I’d found him and commented on how odd the strange thing that had happened was.

A couple of years later I was in Piccadilly tube station with a friend and remembered the cafe, reflected on how I’d been up and down the stairs opposite The Regent Palace Hotel countless times and never so much as glanced at it, which was odd considering what had happened there. I asked the friend if he fancied a coffee and we headed for the cafe.

It wasn’t there. He said there’d never been a cafe there and I argued that there had been, it must have been bricked over…until he pointed out that the wall tiles were original and had been there since the station was built.

We checked every entrance to the station even though I knew for a fact which entrance it had been next to. The only thing resembling a cafe was the snack bar in the ticket hall. I was so distressed that my friend stopped a guard and asked if there used to be a cafe down there. The guard said no.

The non-existant hotel

A widely-publicised case from October 1979, concerned the Simpsons and the Gisbys, two English married couples driving through France en route to a holiday in Spain. They claimed to have stayed overnight at a curiously old-fashioned hotel and decided to break their return journey at the same hotel but were unable to find it. Photographs taken during their stay, which were in the middle of a roll of film, were missing, even from the negative strips, when the pictures were developed.

So has anybody here ever experienced a time slip then?

[Koxinga]

What’s the source for these stories?

[Tangent]

@Koxinga

What’s the source for these stories?

Drunk Englishmen, apparently.

[compositejoe]

@Koxinga

What’s the source for these stories?

Wikipedia (about the disappearing French hotel) and a media news website called Digital Spy. And the story about some men coming across a pub that doesn’t exist, apparently they were NOT drunk at all!

[74westy]

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=48116655
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?p=52814867

Time slip

[compositejoe]

I forgot to add as well that personally, I have never experienced a time slip and I don’t know anybody personally who has experienced a time slip either.

[Trinopus]

Well… I had a disappearing camera store. It was there one day, and gone two weeks later. I was sad, as it was a nice store.

Then, months later, I walked by, and it was there again. I went in and mentioned it to the manager, and he said, “No, we’ve always been here. We never closed.”

I’m still not at all sure what happened. Maybe I walked down a very similar street?

[Yumblie]

Not quite the same thing, but once I was with my family at a restaurant, and we ordered cheesecake for dessert. It was so good that when we were there a year later, we went to order it again. We didn’t find it on the menu though, and asked the waiter about it. He said they don’t serve cheesecake. We insisted that we had it there before, and he in turn insisted that he had worked there since the restaurant opened and they had never ever served cheesecake.

Weird.

[Sailboat]

How’s this for mind-blowing – the word “non-existant” doesn’t exist, either! It’s nonexistent.

[CarnalK]

@Trinopus

Well… I had a disappearing camera store. It was there one day, and gone two weeks later. I was sad, as it was a nice store.

Then, months later, I walked by, and it was there again. I went in and mentioned it to the manager, and he said, “No, we’ve always been here. We never closed.”

I’m still not at all sure what happened. Maybe I walked down a very similar street?

I don’t believe in time slips so a ghost store seems the most likely explanation.

[Grrr]

Driving to work one day I was stopped at a red light. The same red light I’ve been stopped at a hundred times before. I looked to my left: :“Holy crap! There’s a CVS (Drug store) there!” (It used to be an office park.)

But I think that has more to do with me being oblivious than a “time slip.”

[Rhythmdvl]

I got stranded a few nights ago on a very foggy night. Fortunately, I got a ride from a trucker; Large Marge. She told me about a terrible accident a year ago, and when she dropped me off at a coffee shop she said to say hello…

[robert_columbia]

Does finding vintage lingerie in your sister’s closet count?

[aruvqan]

Yup, back about 10 years ago my friend Matthew and I were driving from Hartford down to New Haven to meet up with some friends. We were driving down rt 15, which has a very noticeable tunnel near New Haven. We made it all the way to rt 95 without going through the tunnel at all [apparently] and about 20 minutes faster than the trip normally took. We joke that at some point when we are in a hurry the tunnel and that 20 minutes will reappear

[peedin]

With a bit of a mind flip
You’re into the time slip…

[ralph124c]

Sorta off-topic, but there was an old “Outer Limits” episode, where time stopped in an old house. The people inside stayed there, because if they left, they would instantly age and die.
The story about Versailles always interested me. Unfortunately, neither woman had a camera…so…I guess no proof.

[Coup_Fourre]

@Shakes

Driving to work one day I was stopped at a red light. The same red light I’ve been stopped at a hundred times before. I looked to my left: :“Holy crap! There’s a CVS (Drug store) there!” (It used to be an office park.)

But I think that has more to do with me being oblivious than a “time slip.”

Honestly, those things seem to go up in two days. Same thing happened to me.

[Leaffan]

It’s just a jump to the left.

[LawMonkey]

@peedin

With a bit of a mind flip
You’re into the time slip…

Nothing will ever be the same, man.

[Gedd]

Not me.

I recommend some duct tape. If it’s time sliding that you’re having a problem with, first check to see if the table is level.