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Time. It's a funny thing, isn't it? Like an obedient soldier, never changing its pace, it seems to endlessly, dutifully keep marching on, never stopping, never pausing for a moment's rest.
For some of us, the older we get or the more we are enjoying ourselves, the faster it seems to slip by, almost unnoticed. In some instances, perhaps when we are engaged in an activity we don't really enjoy, like a soldier marching for miles with a heavy pack, time seems to slow to an unbearable crawl. And yet, for many, a lifespan of 70 to 80 years is merely a drop in the bucket when there remains the undying hope of an eternity soon to follow it.
But what is time? Sure, we measure it with our clocks. We are each well aware of its ravages, the impact it has on our bodies and minds. But do we understand it with all certainty? The smartest men that have ever lived have made determined efforts to crack the mystery of this strange phenomenon called time. To capture it, to control it.
And if we gain control of it, is it possible that we could reverse it? Or could we independently travel through the veil that separates this present moment from the past? So far, outside of science fiction, we have failed in this respect. But no doubt, somewhere, by some hand, this research continues.
But bizarre as it may sound to the practical mind, despite our inability to control it, there do seem to be instances where, without warning, men and women going about their everyday lives have suddenly and most inexplicably been transported to a different time. Among these are three British Royal Navy cadets during a routine training event as they walked through a small village in the Suffolk countryside.
This is the story of the Kersey Timeslip. I'm Luke LaManna and this is Wartime Stories. That'll be the village, won't it? Kersey, he said. Yep. That's the church tower the old farmer mentioned. Suppose we could use that for a dead reckoning. Yeah, yeah, look, that's great, you know. Can we just get a move on and make Marvin over here? Shouldn't have skipped breakfast then. Yeah, yeah, let's go.
It was Sunday, a clear, bright October morning in 1957. Autumn had fully set, the now brilliant red and yellow leaves were beginning to fall. Three young naval cadets, William Lang, Michael Crowley, and Ray Baker, were slowly pacing their way across the open meadows and fields of Suffolk County. Recently joined with the British Royal Navy, the three young men and a number of other cadets had spent the weekend out on a field training assignment.
They'd spent the night in a barn. It's used by the Navy, no doubt sanctioned by a patriotic local farmer. The next morning, the cadets set out on a map-reading exercise. In much the same way that modern land navigation is conducted in the military, they were instructed to walk a plotted route over several kilometers of the nearby countryside.
Along their route, they would be plotting waypoints, stopping to conduct military-type observations of a specific but unknown location, and then returning to their superiors to report their findings to ensure they had reached their assigned grid point. For these three cadets, their assigned location was the small village of Kersey.
Having finally spotted the nearby hamlet, its church tower brimming over the surrounding treetops, and its bells sounding the start of a morning church service, the young men continued towards it. But upon reaching the forested outskirts of Kersey, they suddenly noticed something odd. "Wait, what happened to the bells?" "I don't know. That's strange, isn't it?" The sound of the church's bells had suddenly, almost unnaturally, disappeared.
Not even a final resounding tone that one would typically expect to hear, just an abrupt silence. And once they descended the narrow lane into the village, despite the bells having rung in the morning service, there didn't appear to be a single congregant making their way past them towards the church. In fact, as they turned around to view the lane leading back up the hill behind them, they suddenly realized there was no church. But what about the bell tower they had seen?
That was the only prominent feature of the town that could be seen from a distance. Lang later recalled that the party had not seen the tower after they descended into the village and the strange pall of silence fell. "There was no sign of a church. I would certainly have seen it if I had a field of observation of 360 degrees, but no church." Slightly confused, the cadets continued down the main street of the village, but what they began to see only added to their sense of unease.
The roads of the village were merely narrow, unpaved dirt lanes, not a car in sight. They could have overlooked the dirt roads, but this being 1957, they certainly expected to see at least a few vehicles. Looking to the houses themselves, these were equally strange. Small, shabby, seemingly hand-built timber-framed homes, with either thatched or wood-shingled roofs. Had they walked onto the elaborate set of some medieval film production?
No, this was certainly the town of Kersey by their map coordinates, but what truly sent a chill down the young man's spines was the overwhelming and eerie silence of the place. Like their observation about the missing church, as they passed through this village, they also became increasingly aware
that there wasn't a single person anywhere in sight. And as for animal life, they saw only a few ducks standing both motionless and unnaturally silent by a shallow stream that ran through the village. But there were no sounds of songbirds or other noises one might expect to hear. Those sounds may well have stopped at the same time as the church bells
Pausing at the bridge that crossed over the small stream and taking a few sips of water from it, not sure what to make of the increasing strangeness of the place, they decided to rest for a few minutes and conduct their assigned observations of the town. As they stood there listening and watching, William Lang would later remark just how unnaturally still the surrounding landscape was. The sky was intensely blue, and the trees…were the trees this green when they had entered the village?
This was the middle of autumn after all, the trees outside the village had been shades of red and yellow, their leaves already beginning to fall. But these trees were unmistakably green, like it was the middle of summer or spring. And to cap it off, there wasn't even the slightest breath of wind rustling through their leaves, it was just quiet. William Lang, the Scottish boy who led the group, put it this way: "It was a ghost village, so to speak. It was almost as if we had walked back in time.
I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness and depression in Kersey, but also a feeling of unfriendliness and unseen watchers which sent shivers up one's back. I wondered if we knocked at a door to ask a question who might have answered, but it doesn't bear thinking about. The area nearest the creek was largely devoid of homes on either side of the dirt lane. Up and down the entire length of it were only a few well-spaced houses, the space between them occupied by forest trees.
Directly across the bridge, however, was what appeared to be the only commercial building in the whole town. It was a butcher shop with a green door. Deciding to investigate, they peered inside the shop's small glass-paned windows, the medieval style of the windows themselves being another oddity. Inside the unexpectedly dirty, cobweb-filled room, the only thing notable in the shop were three hanging skinned oxen carcasses.
and these two showed signs of neglect, all three of them being quite green and rotting. It was as if the shop's proprietor had left in a hurry, probably weeks, maybe months beforehand. Glancing through the small window panes of the nearby houses, the cadets noted the similar strangeness of their interiors. No possessions of any kind, no furniture, and no curtains on the windows. The walls were all a flat white, a crude whitewash,
They thought the rooms themselves appeared to be not of modern day quality. Despite the butcher shop being the only notable commercial building, not a single home appeared to have a garden of any kind. Michael Crowley later remarked that what stood out most to him was that if the town had been abandoned for so long, it was remarkably untouched.
The town wasn't exactly isolated from the surrounding villages and towns, but Crowley noted there wasn't a single broken window or any of the usual signs of adolescent vandalism. And again, this being 1957, all three young men couldn't help but notice the complete lack of modern technology. No electric poles or telephone wires in sight, no radio or television aerials or antennas, no street lights.
Having reached the point of unbearable anxiety about the strange place, the boys decided it was time to leave, and quickly. Hurrying down the rest of the lane, the three cadets climbed a small hill some distance outside the town. At the top of the hill, they all stopped dead. As quickly as the sound of the church bells had stopped, they were now sounding again.
The birds were chirping, the wind once again rustling through the trees. Looking back to the church tower in the distance, they realized there was now a church tower to look at, as well as the sight of smoke curling up from several house chimneys. "Suddenly we could hear the bells once more and saw the smoke rising from the chimneys. None of the chimneys was smoking when we were in the village. We ran for a few hundred yards as if to shake off the weird feeling."
It is in a 1997 publication, Adventures in Time: Encounters with the Past, authored by Andrew Carr Mackenzie, that the story of these three young men is first recounted. A soldier himself having fought during the Second World War, rising to the rank of captain, and distinguishing himself in guerrilla warfare, Mackenzie returned home to London and resumed his pre-war profession as a journalist.
McKenzie became interested in paranormal phenomena while researching articles for a popular magazine in 1961. He then joined the Society for Psychical Research and was eventually elected to its governing council, later becoming a vice president. Topics he would research included the Cheltenham haunting and the Edgar Vandy and Palm Sunday mediumship cases.
As with these cases, his chief contributions were books exploring such subjects as ghosts and apparitions, the Belmez Faces and Time Slips, and numerous book reviews in the Society's journal.
He was particularly intrigued by Moberly and Jourdain's experiences at Versailles, two highly educated British women, the principal and vice-principal of St. Hugh's College at Oxford, who reported their own strange experiences while wandering the sprawling grounds of the Palace of Versailles outside Paris. Unable to explain how, these two women were certain they had seen the gardens as they were before the French Revolution a century prior.
Detailed research suggested that one of the figures they encountered roaming the grounds might have been Marie Antoinette herself. Mackenzie explored these kinds of documented experiences as well as alleged folkloric stories of the paranormal in Romania, a country he visited frequently. Suffice it to say, as far as credibility in the conduct of paranormal and psychical research goes, Andrew Mackenzie was experienced and proficient in his work.
He was noted by his critics to be unbiased in his approach to the cases he studied, searching for the unknown truth rather than seeking to prove an established thesis. His unpublished work, comprising 30 files of articles and correspondence, have been catalogued and is housed at the Cambridge University Library.
Back in 1957, the three young cadets, William Laing, Michael Crowley, and Ray Baker, had completed their map reading assignment and submitted their report to their petty officers. Laing recalled their superiors were somewhat skeptical that they'd even completed the task. The small hamlet of Kersey had been chosen specifically for this training assignment. Laing, who came from Perthshire in the Highlands of Scotland, was a stranger to this part of the east of England. So were his friends Michael Crowley from Worcestershire.
and Ray Baker, a Cockney. And that was the point. All three were 15 years old and had only recently signed up to join the Royal Navy, and they were unfamiliar with this area.
That made it easy for the petty officers in charge of their training to confirm that they had carried out the assignment and reached the village they were supposed to by checking their observation notes. They had chosen Kersey specifically, already aware of the town's proper description, but the description that the boys had given them of the town, although similar in some respects, was highly bizarre. In the end, they just laughed it off and agreed that we had seen Kersey alright.
They were dismissed, and for the next 30 years, their story remained untold. Hello? Mikey, it's William. Blimey, Will. Hello, Will. How you been keeping up? Yeah, I'm doing alright. Hey, but listen, do you remember back when we started in the Navy? Yeah. You know, that creepy village we walked through down in Suffolk? Yeah, I think it was, isn't it? Yeah, what about it?
It was William Lang, having emigrated to Australia in 1968 and established a business there with his wife, who wrote his first letter to paranormal author and researcher Andrew McKenzie in 1988. Having read his 1982 book, Hauntings and Apparitions, in which McKenzie, the author, had appealed to his readers for case materials, Lang was again reminded of his own bizarre experience in the small village of Kersey.
He phoned up his old friend Michael Crowley, who coincidentally had also emigrated to Australia in the mid-80s. Lang reminded him about the incident, of which Crowley said he couldn't recall as much as Lang, but he did remember enough to know it was a strange experience. He recalled the lack of aerials and streetlights, the bizarre butcher shop, the complete silence. Since the experience had always troubled him, Lang decided to then contact Mackenzie by mail and share the story.
McKenzie was intrigued by Bill Lang's letter and recognized that it might describe a case of retrocognition, the SPR term for what we would call a time slip case.
Looking at the details, he thought it was possible that the three cadets had seen Kersey, not as it was in 1957, but as it had been centuries earlier. The two men exchanged letters for two years. This long correspondence, plus a foray into local libraries with the help of a historian from Kersey, helped McKenzie to confirm that view.
With the town's origin dating back a thousand years, at least to AD 990, a time shortly before the military engagement called the Norman Conquest, McKenzie devoted a long survey on documents, maps, historical records, libraries, interviews of town residents, and so on.
McKenzie also tracked down the third witness, Ray Baker, who was still residing in London. Of the three men, 30 years on, Ray Baker could recall very little about the event, save for the details of the night before their excursion, the sleeping overnight in the barn with the other cadets, and smaller details of the town, like the small glass window panes and lack of furniture inside the houses.
In 1990, William Lang flew to England and the two men returned to walk through the village, reliving the experience. Strange enough to say, several factors would ultimately lead McKenzie to conclude that the cadet's experience had been genuine. There was the obvious sincerity of Lang and his friend Crowley, the detail of their recollections, and a few persuasive discoveries.
Among these, the most striking and really stupefying discovery of their 1990 visit to Kersey was the building that the three young cadets had observed as a derelict butcher shop. Now known as Bridge House, it had been a private residence in 1957 and remained so in 1990.
Today, it is now a vacation rental, available to any of us wishing to book a weekend away in a seemingly different time, or perhaps tempt to wander into the supernatural and relive the experiences described in this story. At the time of their visit in 1990, however, the building was still occupied by two tenants, Miss Gillian Finch and Miss Gladys King, and they discovered it had in fact, formerly, been a butcher shop.
But this was well before 1957, with the last known use of the building as a butcher shop being dated to more than half a century earlier. Little by way of public records existed, but McKenzie traced the history of the building through the assistance of two other families, Cocaine and Vince, who had formerly owned the building. Through these families accounts, he discovered that Bridge House was known to be associated with a butchery business, at least from year 1790 to 1905.
When it closed as a butcher shop, it was then reappropriated as a general store and sweet shop until 1970.
And although the Cockayne family was unable to supply evidentiary documents for this, if such documents would ever have existed, Mackenzie remarked that Bridge House was very likely used as a butcher shop merely by the nature of its construction, and probably even earlier than 1790. The home had an outbuilding slaughterhouse, the style of which dated back to the 16th century, and it was further ascertained that the construction of the main building could date back to 1350.
and its close proximity to the running stream in the village would be ideal for sanitation, carrying away the runoff of animal blood and other fluids from the butchering process. In McKenzie's view, this date of 1350 was corroborated by the issue of the vanishing church of St. Mary's. The construction of the church dates to the 14th century, and it is the principal landmark in the district, readily visible to anybody passing along the main street.
Mackenzie, basing his case on the history of St. Mary's, interpreted this anomaly as evidence to help pinpoint the likely date on which Lange and his companions visited the village. In his research, he noted that the construction of the tower was halted by the ravages of the Black Death , which killed half the population of Kersey, which likely had a minute population of perhaps 100 or so residents at that time.
McKenzie concluded that the cadets might have seen the village as it had been in the aftermath of the plague, when the shell of the half-constructed church would have been hidden by the trees. And it's easy enough to find that many villages like Kersey were completely abandoned during the Black Death, which could explain the absence of human life in the town. Survivors quickly fled the confines of their villages in sheer terror, hoping to avoid the disease spreading amongst them.
Many would of course later return to their homes and livelihoods once the disease had run its course. Of course, if this estimation of time were accurate, it is worth pointing out that paranormal events and strange happenings are often associated with locations that, at some point, have experienced grotesque amounts of death and suffering. A place where, perhaps, such supernatural energies are most potent, if we can bring ourselves to believe in such a thing.
But what else can we say if we were the ones who witnessed what those three young men did? We have every reason to be skeptical. Such a story baffles the mind. But no one has offered a valid explanation for what those three boys experienced and their apparent ability to describe the town as it was well before their current time.
However, the structure of the town and its buildings even presently continues to resemble its medieval origins, and it has become a favorite location for filmmakers being famed as one of the oldest and most picturesque medieval villages of England. Some have suggested that perhaps the cadets, specifically Lange and Crowley, who hailed from different parts of the UK, were simply mistaken, considering the town's true appearance to be strange by their own contemporary perception.
But since Baker was from the area, the medieval appearance of the town, even if it was witnessed several hundred years prior, was not considered as remarkable by him. This does not account for the unpaved dirt lanes, houses being empty, the lack of modern technology, and the town seemingly abandoned and unnaturally silent. And how did they recall the details about the butcher shop? The building was a private residence in 1957.
McKenzie found that the street was first surfaced using pea shingle and tar soon after the Second World War. He later found that most roads in the West Suffolk area were surfaced for the first time in the late 1940s. And more recent photos of the village, taken sometime in the 1930s or 40s, depict a much different look compared to the depictions offered by the cadets. The stream they stopped at is visible between the trees up the lane.
It is more easily seen in an earlier photo dating back further to the 1890s when the butcher shop was still in operation, with cattle passing through the water splash in the road, with the wooden brick bridge crossing over the stream on the left-hand side. When Lang was shown the older three photos, he immediately denied that it could depict the landscape around the stream as he saw it in 1957, some 20 or more years after the most recent photos were taken.
meaning what he described had to have happened before those photos were taken.
The background houses and church weren't there, he noted, and there were too many houses in view and not enough trees, with the houses he saw near the stream being few and far between, with the right side of the lane leading up to the church being mostly forested. Now, in the 1950s, documents show that officials with the Suffolk Preservation Society were making every effort to preserve the picturesque medieval appearance of the town,
trying to keep its skyline free from unsightly aerials and wires. But yet another photo dated before 1957 shows at least one telephone pole in the town, along with many more houses standing right alongside the stream where the three boys would have been.
Historically speaking, there are inconsistencies with attempts to date these boys' time travel to a more precise timeframe. The church, the lack of houses, the lack of furniture in the homes, the type of glass window panes the boys described. Then again, we can only base our conclusions about these certain features on the reliability of what is known about the village of Kersey throughout the centuries.
But much more bizarrely, there is the issue of the absolute surrealness of the town and the surrounding area described by the men. The lack of noises, of wind, birds, and save for a few ducks, a complete absence of animal life. None of these strange things can amount to what could be considered even a momentary slip back through time. Because certainly, the 14th century still had things like wind and songbirds.
That alone makes the case much easier for skeptics to write it off as a complete fabrication. Something at least two of these men conspired together on, regardless of any reports of sincerity in their testimony or the trustworthiness and scrupulous research of a paranormal scholar like Andrew McKenzie.
I myself am subject to inherent skepticism, and I cannot deny the motivations of being a laborer in a creative field who wishes to draw an audience that wants to hear about these strange, unbelievable, but purportedly true stories. But regardless of such individual motivations, specifically those of the three men and Andrew McKenzie, I suppose, as with all things, it boils down to what we know.
And there is always a massive void of things we do not know, some of which are theories and ideas that possibly lie beyond our comprehension in the realm of science fiction, missing people and episodes of lost time, the crossing of parallel dimensions, the folding of space that connects two points not by measurable distance but by time, alternate realities and parallel universes,
Well, whatever the case, whether cross-dimensional interlopers or unwary time travelers, it cannot be ignored that the experiences described by these three cadets are not entirely unique. There are other notable cases of similar occurrences, most of which are not military related, but are no less intriguing. Places like the Palace of Versailles or on Bold Street in the city of Liverpool.
These sort of time slip incidents may be the least reported among unexplained phenomena, but the beautiful rolling countryside of Suffolk where the village of Kersey is located is not at all unfamiliar with bizarre happenings. Historical tragedies like the Black Plague in the 14th century or the entire area of West Suffolk being bombarded by Germans during World War II, no doubt because of its routes to seaports and proximity to London,
Bizarre encounters with strange animals or even such bizarre stories as the appearance of two unusual children in the village of Woolpit in the 12th century. Children with green colored skin who spoke an unknown language and claimed to have come from somewhere else. Supernatural sightings of specters and poltergeists reported in homes, churches, graveyards and forests are rife in the surrounding area.
And then there's the UFO activity. In December 1980, the Rendlesham Forest incident, a UFO sighting met with a military response and investigation that would become a prominent case study among ufologists. Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt and other witnesses described a UFO landing in the forest, clearly under intelligent control, spotted near RAF Woodbridge, an American Air Force installation in Suffolk.
Lieutenant Colonel Halt's service history, his tours during World War II, Vietnam, and Korea, and his rank lent a lot of credibility towards his claims that what he saw was a real alien craft. Radar operators at the nearby Waddesham Airfield likewise picked up what they called the "bogie," which they lost radar contact with near the forest. And this is only one of many reported UFO sightings over Suffolk in the following decades.
All of these strange things occurring years apart and with no seeming connection other than their close physical proximity and their high strangeness. What can we deduce from it all? Perhaps nothing. Perhaps something. And perhaps some of you who reside in and around Suffolk can offer us more accounts of strange happenings. And we would of course be eager to hear them. But until such a time in the future as we might come to understand them, if ever,
Then we can at least while away the hours pondering the many peculiar mysteries that these stories have left behind.
Wartime Stories is created and hosted by me, Luke LaManna. Executive produced by Mr. Ballin, Nick Witters, and Zach Levitt. Written by Jake Howard and myself. Audio editing and sound design by me, Cole Lacascio, and Whit Lacascio. Additional editing by Davin Intag and Jordan Stidham. Research by me, Jake Howard, Evan Beamer, and Camille Callahan.
Mixed and mastered by Brendan Cain. Production supervision by Jeremy Bone. Production coordination by Avery Siegel. Additional production support by Brooklyn Gooden. Artwork by Jessica Clarkson-Kiner, Robin Vane, and Picotta. If you'd like to get in touch or share your own story, you can email me at info at wartimestories.com. Thank you so much for listening to Wartime Stories.
