Norfolk

At some time in 1973 the exact time he could not recall numismatist (coin collector) Mr Squirrel went to Great Yarmouth to buy envelopes in which to keep the individual coins of his collection. He was going to a general stationer’s that he had not previously been to but which had been recommended to him. He believes that it was an old and established shop.

Outside the shop was a cobbled area, the shop front was newly and brightly painted, whilst inside the till was very old-fashioned and the floor covered with what he described as ‘oil cloth’. The shop assistant appeared. She looked to be in her early thirties and was wearing a long black skirt and a blouse with a cameo brooch at the neck. Her hair was piled in a bun. Although seemingly old-fashioned, such an outfit would not have been out of place in the early 1970s, when there was a great flux in the styles and fashions people were wearing. Mr Squirrel did not regard the scene as abnormal.

When he asked for the envelopes for his coins the assistant was able to supply him with these, explaining that they were sold to fishermen for keeping fish hooks in. He purchased 36 of the envelopes and returned home. The one other fact which struck him, and which he particularly mentioned to a friend later, was that there was an extraordinary silence while he was in the shop traffic noise was completely absent.

The following week he returned to the shop to purchase some more envelopes but was extremely surprised to find it looking completely different. The cobbles had disappeared and had been replaced by paving stones, the building itself looked rather dark and worn and many features of the inside of the shop were missing. The shop assistant was over fifty and quite obviously not the person who had previously served him, though she told him that she was the only assistant on the premises, that she had been there for many years and that there had never been a young lady working there.

Nor did the shop sell the envelopes for his coins, and, as far as the assistant knew, it never had done. Joan Forman, in The Mask of Time, suggests that the case has sufficient detail to indicate a possible time dislocation but points out, importantly, that there was the added and special fact of the handing over of the envelopes which would, if time dislocation was the explanation, mean that they had been handed from one time to another. Since Mr Squirrel had retained some of the plastic envelopes, these were able to be dated by the manufacturers. Certainly they did not date from the early 1900s, which was the era suggested by the description of the stationer’s shop. The manufacturers believed them to be just ten or fifteen years old when they examined them, which would place them in the late fifties, early sixties. They pointed out that cellulose film was used in the 1920s, although techniques of production were established even prior to 1914.

Basically it did not seem that they were evidence of the time slip and indeed, as Joan Forman points out, ‘seemed to eliminate such an explanation’ One other theory put forward is ‘family memory’; that the appearance of the shop was as it appeared to Mr Squirrel’s coin-collecting grandfather and somehow ‘came down’ to the grandson. There must be at least some room for the possibility that, despite the obvious sincerity of the witness, on his first visit he may have, erroneously, entered quite different premises which may have been rather old-fashioned but perhaps not so old as Mr Squirrel believed. The absence of sound while Mr Squirrel was in the shop is interesting. A similar detail occurs in the case which took place in Cockeymore .

Generally speaking, a stillness or quietness during sightings of ghosts and apparitions is fairly common. A very similar phenomenon is associated with UFO encounters, where a ‘cone of silence’ seems to envelop witnesses, particularly during close encounters. Precisely what this may mean is uncertain; in the case of these alleged time slips it is tempting to ascribe it to the fact that the past was simply quieter, with less traffic and so on, but that would probably be a simplistic answer.

The cone of silence may be related to the apparition and its method of appearance, or it may, we would think more likely, relate to the witness and be a factor of the ‘altered state of consciousness’ which either creates the illusion in the witness’s mind or enables the witness’s mind to perceive realities that it otherwise would not perceive.

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