The incident described in this article is about what might have been a timeslip occurrence that happened to me as a youngster. I make no bones about it, having had several no-doubt-about-its, at least to me, paranormal experiences, that took place in my childhood and thirties...and, in a sense, as recently as May of 2015. That last one can be found on the Boone's Cave story on Mists & Moonlight.
A couple more have taken place that are paranormally experienced possibilities, but were probably not. This story belongs in the latter probability category. Folks who have perused it say it's a nice little read, regardless, so the decision was made to include it on the Carolinian's Archives.
In the early nineteen seventies my family would often visit an aunt and uncle who owned and operated a motel-restaurant several miles south of interstate 85 in Jackson County, Georgia.
About ten years or so ago, as I traveled down the interstate towards Atlanta's airport to pick-up someone coming in from Germany, I decided to make a quick detour and ride by the old motel, which was some miles north of the small, now probably, medium-sized town called Commerce.
It turned into a frustrating side-trip as the motel was gone and the extensive wild wheat fields and copses of trees remembered from childhood were now swallowed up by strip malls and fast food establishments. I finally had to stop and ask someone where the place used to be.
The first-person paranormal story is not always easy for someone to talk about. I have found this out for myself, and by what I believe to be largely honest correspondences and face-to face conversations with many fine folks who have experienced mysterious events themselves. It always helps one to have corroboration in these matters -- and in two cases I tell of here on Mists and Moonlight, that corroboration came forth with other witnesses, animal reactions and an international airport radar, and, in a few unrelated cases, some digital photos.
For the longest time the only people I discussed any of this with was relations or friends. When things like ghost-hunting, sasquatch, and UFOs became more accepted in the popular culture, though, I sensed the time had come to write some of them down and share with anyone interested. It was a great pleasure to hear the response from others and their experiences with the unusual and mysterious.
As a little boy in the sixties, one of the great TV shows watched from those years was Irwin Allen's The Time Tunnel. The setting of the series -- which ran for one season on the ABC network -- was a top secret project known as Tic-Toc, located in a deep underground base in Arizona.
It mostly concerned two scientist entering a spiraling constructed time tunnel and then going forward or backward in time. The show may have been prescient, and certainly put many a young mind to pondering on the possibilities back then.
If we go back in time a bit ourselves, we can see such literary classics on the subject like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, or A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and of course, The Time Machine by HG. Wells.
More recent books and movies in the timeslip-time travel genre include the Star Trek and Back to the Future series of films, and Steven King's The Langoliers. The list of scientists and researchers -- past and present -- is also a very lengthy one that are, or were, interested in the subject.
The point being that despite the phenomenon known as timeslips causing much contention between believers and doubters, the subject has been around and fascinated the public and some of the world's greatest thinkers for a very long time.
I'm far from being any kind of expert in the physics of time travel and slips, but a detailed explanation on how they could happen is readily available on shows like The History Channel and in many popular books as well as numerous reliable sites on the internet.
One of the most famous and interesting cases of a possible occurrence concerning the subject is the Moberly-Jourdain incident. These two Edwardian academic women claim to have seen Marie Antoinette and others on a 1901 visit to Versailles. Of course, this has caused controversy over time like all other such like experiences do.
In conclusion to all this, however, it should be stated that there is some very good evidence these phenomena particularly occur on certain intersections of an Earth grid, the Bermuda Triangle being one of the better known and more powerful of these vortex spots. The Devil's Sea near Japan, which is directly opposite the Bermuda Triangle on the other side of the world, may be another such area. There are many more across the world.
Before we start with what most probably was not a timeslip, let's look at one intriguing fact and then a sister's reluctantly told story of her own one time admitted mysterious encounter.
I've read and seen information that seems to suggest people with Celtic or Native American blood are more likely to pick up on extraordinary phenomenon. Whether this has to do with DNA and/or something else, no one seems to know for sure. However, the ability to experience the metaphysical does appear to be able to be passed down in blood relations.
I am of English, German, and, particularly, Scot-Irish heritage; the latter of which should include some Celtic stock. A great-grandmother supposedly had a bit of Native American blood in her as well. So, if the Celtic and First Nation blood-lines do indeed have a higher perceptiveness to what is usually unseen, then a combination of the two lineages, in varying degrees, would obviously be the most receptive of all to the paranormal, supernatural, or whatever one wants to call it.
After speculating that some people are born with this "receptiveness factor", there is also the possibility that people may gain it through a strong electrical shock. When I was about six or seven years old, one afternoon I was fooling around alone in my father's basement office. At one point, I stuck a finger in a bad wall outlet.
The shock was severe enough to knock me, still hunched over, at least ten feet across the room, to wind-up sitting, stunned, against the opposite wall. Could this serious jolt have caused the "dials" in my energy field to be more receptive? That is a question I've wondered about but have no definitive answer to. At least it was a hard lesson learned about being careful with electrical wall outlets and the potential power of electricity.
Ava is a pragmatic and down-to-earth woman, not given to aerie-faerie flights of fancy or telling falsehoods. She was rather hesitant to relate the following story as the subject of one of my extraordinary events came up around a warming fire in her home one winter's day.
It all began when a previous, but at the time current, husband's grandfather passed away. A day or so before the funeral, Ava casually walked into her den one afternoon only to be met by the stunning sight of a middle-aged looking woman stretched out on her sofa, staring up at her with dark, sunken eyes.
This wasn't any ordinary lady, but one with stringy, unwashed looking long black hair. Startled, Ava stood there in amazement for some time as the figure slowly vanished right in front of her. This wasn't to be the only appearance of this specter. For the next three or four nights running, the eerie apparition came to Ava's side of the bed, hung on to the bed post, and just stared at her.
She said after a while the apparition would float away towards the bedroom door or wall and pass on through. After the three or four nights the wraith stopped appearing and Ava initially thought it had something to do with her then husband's deceased grandfather, but soon changed her feelings on that. Her spouse, whom she told of the visits at the time, had no clue about the specter's identity, either. He felt the same as Ava now did about why the entity was appearing -- and that was that they really had no idea.
Somewhat amazingly, a Scottish writer and investigator friend of mine made the insightful comment that the woman and family situation have all the earmarks of what is known as an Irish Banshee encounter! But if so, why did she appear after a death, as they're thought to foretell them? One can only wonder if this was such an entity or something else entirely.
As mentioned previously in the article, I would often visit the aunt and uncle's place as a young teenager. Other than watching programs like The Flip Wilson Show in the lobby, or swimming in the tiny outdoor pool, there really wasn't much to keep a young boy occupied at the motel.
I'd recently been given a 20 gauge shotgun, which was a common thing for a boy to receive around the age of twelve or thirteen back then. In front of the motel and across the highway were grass and wild wheat fields, interspersed with patches of trees that went back for many miles. I often walked those fields trying to stir up rabbits to hunt or just think on things as young boys are wont to do.
One day, while returning from a fruitless hunt, I suddenly felt all tensed up and a bit light-headed. It was a sunny day and it should be noted that as far as I knew back then there weren't any buildings, roads, or homes anywhere in those expansive Georgia meadows.
Within a few seconds of the tense feeling there suddenly appeared to my right a strange looking abode. There were also several small, nearly naked African American children squealing and chasing each other out in front of the antiquated looking place, an old cabin in appearance, really.
But what caught my eye more than anything else was an attractive young woman sitting on a log who was closest to me as I passed by. I took her as the little ones' mother. She turned and smiled at me very warmly, and what struck me then, and even more so later on, was what she was wearing.
The young woman had on a turban-style head wrap and a distinctly old-timey looking dress that went to her feet and came down to her wrists. And this was summer as that was the time of season we visited. There was nothing "modern" that I could see anywhere and the whole scene and feel was completely out of place with any kind of familiarity. Returning the smile and quickly moving on by, the tenseness and odd feeling soon went away.
At some point, maybe the next day, maybe several days later when I was back in those fields, although not specifically looking for the cabin, it was no where in sight which puzzled me a little. The hunting forays at the motel soon ended after this time, so there was no chance of coming on the place again in the future. I'll be the first to admit the people and cabin were near certainly from the early '70s, but still, the experience seemed very strange and obviously was never forgotten.