STROLLING along her local high street on a Saturday afternoon, Julie French did a double take.
In the place of a bookstore at the bottom of Bold Street in Liverpool, she suddenly noticed the shopfront looked like an old fashioned department store advertising handbags and shoes from the 1940s.
“I thought it must’ve been a promotion or something to do with the war,” Julie, then in her 20s but now in her 50s, tells The Sun.
“But then when I looked down at the floor, the pavement seemed to go darker. I turned around and as I looked up Bold Street, I saw about 12 or 13 people walking by all dressed in 1940s coats and hats.
“And what was even more significant was on the day it happened in June 1996, it was warm and I was wearing a T-shirt and jeans – but the people on the street seemed to be in the cold.”
Julie claims she was then startled by the sound of an old-fashioned car with round side mirrors honking its horn as it hurtled towards her, despite the street being pedestrianised.
She headed inside the shop, where a woman in 1940s-style clothing was manning the till and shaking her head at her.
“It had old-fashioned, mahogany display cabinets, and everything was dark, which is odd because shops are normally bright,” adds Julie.
“Then suddenly I saw a bookcase with Dillons written on it, and a man grabbed my arm, and I was back in 1996.”
Julie believes she experienced a phenomenon known as a ‘time slip’, where people claim they were suddenly transported backwards – and forwards – in time to the same spot.
It sounds like something out of the Netflix show Manifest or Doctor Who, but the internet is awash with so-called time slippers’ experiences.
Danny Robins, who hosts the Uncanny podcast and BBC series of the same name, which explores people’s experiences of paranormal phenomena, says they are not uncommon and highly intriguing.
“I received a great story about somebody who walked out of the Oxford Street branch of HMV in the 1990s and saw the London street as it was in the Victorian period,” he tells The Sun.
“They witnessed horse drawn carriages and cobbled streets and even experienced the smells of Victorian London.
“How do you explain that? Is it a glitch in someone’s mind? Or is it a moment of the past genuinely coming back to life in a strange sensory way?
“The idea of a connection to the past is really intriguing. We’d all love to travel back in time like in Back to the Future.”
Bold Street, where Julie claims she had her first paranormal encounter, is said to be a hotbed of time slip encounters.
She wasn’t alone that day – an off-duty policeman called Frank was heading into the bookshop to meet his wife Carol and also claimed to witness the flashback to the 1940s, with spooky echoes of Julie’s account.
Julie claims she experienced subsequent time slips – the first one being nine months later, again in Liverpool, where she worked for ITV’s This Morning, then filmed at the Albert Docks.
She was heading to the Abbey National bank on North John Street in her lunch break when she found herself entering a shop adjacent, full of baby clothes.
“I remember grabbing a little grey knitted cardigan, but when I looked up there was a sign saying 2d – two pence in old money – and everyone was dressed in 1960s clothes,” she recalls.
She says the experience was much quicker than the Bold Street one and things returned to normal as she headed back up the street.
A few years later she had another brief time slip encounter, this time on a train near Waverley Station in Edinburgh. She felt it slow down and assumed they were arriving at the station, but when she went to the door the carriage suddenly looked different.
“There had been lots of people onboard, but then there were only maybe three people, I could only see the backs of their heads, and the carriage looked older,” she says.
“I peered out the door and was shocked to see a station that was really old and everyone was dressed in early 1900s clothes.”
Unnerved by the experiences, Julie even went to see renowned British psychic Derek Acorah who told her that she might have one foot in this dimension and another in a different one.
He got her to try to do a ‘close off’, where she imagined a purple cloak covering her from top to bottom, with the intention of ‘closing her third eye’. She felt safe for a while after, but has had other little slips since.
Julie thinks there’s a connection between the fact she is always in a hurry when experiencing the time slips, and the train systems.
“There’s a theory online that time shifts are linked with the trains and underground rail system, which shake time,” she says. “Everywhere I’ve had the slips there’s been train lines.”
One of the most well known ‘time slips’ is the Moberly-Jourdain incident in 1911, in which Charlotte Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain claimed to have seen the Versailles Palace gardens as they were in the late 18th century, as well as ghosts, including Marie Antoinette.
Another is the story of Harry Martindale, who in 1953 while working as an apprentice plumber was doing a job in the cellar of the Treasurer’s House in York.
He claimed he was standing on his ladder on a section of an old Roman road when he looked down and witnessed a procession of Roman soldiers on foot and horseback looking weary, miserable and dirty, shuffling along like an undisciplined rabble.
Alan Murdie, chairman of The Ghost Club – the oldest organisation in the world associated with psychical research – tells The Sun: “I met Harry in 1981 and he told me that story.
“Interestingly there was subsequent research by a guy called Ian Wilson who wrote a book called In Search of Ghosts, in which he indicates other people at the Treasurer’s House had also seen these Roman soldiers.”
Murdie believes time slips are visions rather than people actually travelling back in time.
“I don’t believe this is some kind of Tardis experience,” he adds.
“I think they’re having a vision of the past in the way that some people have the ability to look into the future.”
Carl Grove, who has a keen interest in time slips and has written a research paper on unusual incidents in the village of Rougham, Suffolk, tells The Sun about a recent potential time slip he claims he experienced when on holiday in Hemsby, Norfolk.
“About halfway through the small caravan site I saw an old rusting caravan that stood out amongst the new well-kept ones. It looked as if a half-hearted attempt had been made to tidy up the furnishings before its abandonment,” he recalls.
“Then a few yards further on, I saw a 1950s style gents toilet with an entrance facing the caravans and steps leading down to a gloomy interior.
“The next time I went that way a few days later there was no sign of either caravan or toilet!”
People have also spoken online about time slipping into the future. One claimed to witness a hover vehicle with no wheels drive past on the road and a load of people in futuristic clothes inside staring back in surprise.
Robins has been inundated with people’s time slip stories and thinks the accounts seem genuine.
“People believe that they went to these various streets and locations and were transported in time,” he says.
“They could see and feel everything, whether it’s horse and carts or shops from the 1940s. And there are so many of them that it’s hard to just dismiss them off-hand.
“I don’t get scared by headless horsemen or phantom nuns, but I do get frightened by sudden moments of the impossible in our everyday lives, like time slips.”
William Turner is a seasoned U.K. correspondent with a deep understanding of domestic affairs. With a passion for British politics and culture, he provides insightful analysis and comprehensive coverage of events within the United Kingdom.
