It Happened to Me...

Timeslip in Grimsby

Further to Jenny Randles detailing the Oz-factor

[ FT398: 30-31], I outline a strange experience with multiple witnesses. I had a chance to revisit the site of the event with my children and this sparked off a need to record what happened. In 1977 I was at a secondary school in Grimsby and on an autumn evening a crowd of school friends called and we set off from Old Clee to Grimsby town centre. We followed a familiar route across Old Clee playing fields to Ladysmith Road and cut through a passageway to the end of David Street. We walked almost to the far end of David Street and turned right into a passage that led to Patrick Street with a plan to arrive on Hainton Avenue. As we entered the passageway joining David Street to Patrick Street, we passed garages to our right and were funnelled into the narrow connecting passageway at the back of the houses. On approaching the narrow section of the passageway, we could see bright white lights like a series of spotlights on the passageway wall on the left. The lights then pulsed brighter and dimmer and the wall appeared to change into a privet hedge with the trunks, leaves and shape clear in the surrounding dark night.

We stopped dead, bewildered by the light show and transformation of wall into privet hedge. House windows looking onto the passageway were unlit and no occupants visible. All sound stopped for about 20 seconds. There was no background noise such as traffic or people walking – and then the light show faded out and the wall came back into focus.

When the wall was clearly visible again, the evening sounds returned all at once with a baby crying, a cat meowing, a radio playing, voices and noise of traffic loud and clear. Lights came on in some of the windows.

We looked at each other all perplexed. We all remarked how weird the experience had been, as if time had stopped for those 20 or so seconds. I smelt an unusual aroma that reminded me of dodgem cars, and this lingered for a while. On leaving the passageway and entering Patrick Street, an old black cab juddered past slowly in front of us en route to Hainton Avenue, as if it had rolled off a 1960s film set. The driver was a withered old man wearing a flat cap and oblivious to us emerging onto the pavement in front of him. The cab turned right onto Hainton Avenue in the direction of Welholme Road.

As we approached Hainton Avenue, a solitary old-style blue double-decker bus (like the one in the On the Buses comedy show) slowly passed in the same direction as the cab, displaying an advert for Guy & Smiths department store (above). It was dimly lit on the upper and lower decks and the driver silhouetted, but we couldn’t see any passengers. It slowly drove down an empty Hainton Avenue. We remarked that both cab and bus looked out of place, and the bus displayed an advert for a store that had closed seven years earlier, in 1970.

After about a half a minute we could see traffic flowing and eventually encountered pedestrians. We couldn’t see where the source of the lights originated in the passageway and couldn’t determine how a brick wall appeared to transform into a privet hedge and back again. The switching on and off of sound made a big impact on all of us because it was so distinct. We all felt out of sorts and spent the rest of the evening unsettled as we tried to come up with a rational explanation.

We all perceived this as a real event and spent the following weeks investigating what it might have been. We asked around to enquire if there had been old vehicles exhibited that evening or around that time, but drew a blank. There was of course no Internet in 1977. We never got a definitive answer to whether an advert for ‘Guy & Smiths’ had ever appeared on a Grimsby and Cleethorpes bus. Some of us tried shining torches on the wall to simulate what we had seen, but this was nowhere as bright. On one evening we observed a car driving into the entrance, but the light was dispersed; and anyway we would have seen and heard a car pulling in. We weren’t aware of any stories of odd events in that area at that time.

Some years later when

I was on the London Underground, I thought the ozone smell was like the dodgem car aroma I had perceived. Has anyone encountered anything similar or heard any strange reports associated with this passageway?

Mike (full name on file) Manchester

Grinning widely

Shortly after reading Theo Paijmans’s article on grinning men [ FT397:32-34], my friend Dave Archer, a veteran of a number of Centre for Fortean Zoology expeditions, told me of his own encounter with a smiling ghost. In 2018 he was on holiday in Magaluf, Majorca, with his wife and friends, staying in the Kathmandu Hotel. On their last night, Dave, wanting to retire early as they were leaving next morning, returned to the hotel, leaving his wife and friends at a bar. As he had to work on his return to England, he had not drunk any alcohol. After sleeping for a while, he awoke and noticed a white shape obscuring the widescreen TV situated on the wall at the foot of his bed.

The shape resolved itself into that of a youngish man with a shaven head, naked from the waist up. He was grinning widely and had clenched fists that he moved up and down as if dancing. Indeed Dave said the figure’s movement reminded him of a ‘raver’. The figure was not transparent but seemed to glow like a low wattage light

The bus displayed an ad for a store that had closed seven years ago

bulb. Dave said he was not afraid but fascinated. The entity seemed to notice him and sidled around the side of the bed, still grinning and dancing. It bent over and put its smiling face close to Dave’s. At this point he lost his bottle and dived under the covers while throwing a punch at the bedroom invader. His fist connected with nothing and when he peeked out again the figure had vanished. There has been at least one suicide of a British tourist at the hotel, but whether this had any connection with Dave’s grinning ghost is unknown.

Richard Freeman

Exeter, Devon

Sky mirage

I was interested in the photos of ships appearing to float in the sky [ FT405:11], because I think I have witnessed something similar inland [although see “Sky ships” FT407: 67].

To be precise, in Bickley town near Malpas, Cheshire, when I was about four or five years old. My family were at the junction of the road between the A49-No Man’s Heath and Bickley Town Road. The grown-ups were gossiping and I looked away, to the west, towards No Man’s Heath and Malpas, up to the sky, where I saw three railway wagons floating in the air. In later years I have often wondered whether I had had a vivid dream or hallucination. However, the sight was probably a mirage of wagons on the Chester-TattenhallWhitchurch branch line. Raymond Vickers

Birkby, Huddersfield

Henry Hall calling

About 20 years ago – I think it was the summer of 2000 – my husband and I visited a friend who collects old teddy bears. He’d recently bought an antique HMV horn gramophone, which came with an old 78rpm record, which he duly played for us. It was a 1932 recording of “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” by the then popular bandleader, Henry Hall (pictured above).

The next morning was a workday, and as usual we were awoken by our radio alarm clock at around 6am. Always set to Radio 4’s Today programme, presented at that time by John Humphrys. Henry Hall was mentioned in passing.

At that time, we both worked in Birmingham and used to catch the bus together to the city centre. As with most commuters, we picked up a couple of copies of the free Metro newspaper on the bus and I began browsing the letters page. Next to one of the letters was a small, oldfashioned sepia photograph of a bespectacled man in evening dress, with the caption: “The band leader, Henry Hall”. The topic of the letter had no connection to the conversation on the Today programme that morning.

During my lunch break, I was sitting at the table in the office rest room, where someone had left a newspaper open on the sports page, showing the horseracing fixtures for the day. Eating my sandwiches and with nothing in particular to read, I glanced down the list. I know absolutely nothing about horseracing or placing a bet, but I noticed a horse called Henry Hall with what seemed to be quite good odds.

Purely because this run of coincidences now seemed to be significant, I felt that I should somehow try to place a bet on this horse. I knew a colleague in the next office to be a betting man, so I dashed in and told him the story. All I had on me in cash that day was a five pound note, but he was so impressed that he placed more on that horse than me – £10, if memory serves. Henry Hall duly came in first and I won £50.

Carolyn Taylor

Halesowen, West Midlands

Only connect

I like the idea of a “lattice of coincidence that lies on top of everything” (as quoted by Anne Henderson [“Plates of shrimp’, FT399: 71]. I find this happens all the time. I learn a new word and suddenly I see it everywhere; I think of somebody I haven’t seen for ages and they reappear in my life; I decide to ring someone and they ring me; I give a book to a friend at the same time as they give the same book to me and so on ad infinitum. I am sure many FT readers relate to this. Here are a few things that have happened to me over the past week [in November 2020]. I was discussing various films with a friend and she remarked that she liked Charlotte Rampling and wondered if she was still around as she hadn’t seen her in a film for ages. The next day Rampling starred in two films shown on BBC4 and Channel 4 ( DNA and Sparrow). A friend gave me a book by an author I hadn’t heard about; I switched on the radio and the said author was talking on Woman’s Hour.

One of my sons and I were discussing buying a new television, so we looked on the Internet to see what we could find. The next day, as I was about to order the TV, I had an email from another son, Luke, telling me that he thought I needed a new television and that he had ordered one as a surprise. Of course, it was the same model as I had intended to buy. Luke had had no idea of my intentions; the idea had come to him “out of the blue”.

One of the best ‘ plates of shrimp’ occurred in the 1970s when I was living in Bath. At the time I was interested in Arthur Guirdham and his theories about the Cathars. When we moved to Bath, I knew nothing about the Cathars – where Guirdham lived or where he worked or whether he was the person he said he was (a psychiatrist in a big hospital) – but his story intrigued me. I got a job at a doctor’s surgery and found that Guirdham was a patient there. I was reading

We Are One Another at the time and discovered (quite by accident?) that Clare, the main character, was also a patient at the surgery. When she came in, she was immediately recognisable, both by her appearance, including her ‘English Rose’ complexion, and by her manner. It gave me a sort of déjà vu feeling as I felt I already knew her. I discovered her real name and it was gratifying to find out that she actually existed, and it gave me a real thrill when I thought about her “secret Cathar past” which, at the time, I really believed. It was as if a whole chain of coincidences had been set in motion solely for my benefit.

Anna David

Wellington, Somerset