The missing photographs made Cynthia Gisby wonder. Had they somehow travelled back into the past? Says Cynthia:
A lot of people have said to me since about time-slips. I said, ‘Well, I’ve never heard about time-slips,’ and they said, ‘Oh, there are such things, and we reckon that’s what you’ve done.’ But whether we did or not, I don’t know. But the photographs worry me, and I think that alone convinces me that there is something not right.
In 1983 the Gisbys and Simpsons returned to France to mount a thorough search. By now, the local tourist board had been alerted and its representative, Philippe Despeysses, had combed the area. He reported that he had found a house roughly corresponding to the description given by the English couples. It was owned by a couple called M. and Mme Judges and, although it was not a proper hotel, they did take in travellers for bed, breakfast and an evening meal. Later, Despeysses drove there with a researcher who had interviewed the Gisbys and the Simp-sons. Afterwards the researcher wrote:
We drove off in the direction they took and found ourselves on the road designated as RN7. Philippe said nothing at first and simply waited to see if I could spot the house without his aid. I drew a blank though, so we reversed and he pulled into a large filling-station and pointed to a building opposite. The road we were in failed to match up to the description given by the Dover people. And if this was the house then where was the lay-by and stone wall that should have been facing it?
These questions were soon answered by the owners of the filling-station. Their building was a newish structure (though they were uncertain exactly when it had been built), while the road had been considerably widened just two years ago.
Our survey showed that the inside layout of the house differs from the descriptions provided by the couples. In the main this arises from a simple misplacement of the stone staircase. They said it was to the right of the ‘bar-room’, but in fact it is centrally placed between the two main downstairs rooms. And the ‘barroom’ itself is simply a dining-room which has a large mahogany sideboard placed against the wall. This is often loaded up with bottles of wine and spirits and glasses, giving a bar-like appearance.
Upstairs the two bedrooms are there, complete with high old-fashioned wooden beds and wooden-shuttered windows. The bathroom has now been refurbished but back in 1979 it was a semi-antique affair, equipped with a metal bar protruding from the wall to hold the soap.
As for the absurdly small bill, Mme Judges said that they just don’t like to be alone and they like helping people out, so they only charge something small – as a token.
So it was with some confidence that Philippe Despeysses took the Gisbys and the Simpsons to the house in 1983. At first they hesitated. ‘It’s very, very similar,’ said Geoff Simpson. But a closer inspection and a chat with M. and Mme Judges convinced them that it was not the place they had stayed in four years before, and the couples returned home with the mystery as frustratingly unresolved as ever.
If the hotel in which the Gisbys and Simpsons spent the night in October 1979 turns out not to exist, then the case will go down as one of the most remarkable of all in the annals of psychical research. For most ‘phantom scenery’ is reported by people who have only seen it from a distance, yet the Gisbys and Simpsons, patently genuine and honest people, actually spent almost twelve hours inside the building and could later describe it in detail.
There are many loose ends still to tie up, however. An even more thorough search of the countryside around the Montelimar Nord autoroute exit may still locate the house. If it does, then the French ‘phantom hotel’ will turn out to be yet another case of what the experts call ‘mislocation’ -seeing a place, then failing to find it again and finally concluding that it existed only as a paranormal phenomenon. ‘Mislocation’ may also explain another intriguing case which has never been satisfactorily cleared up.
In the autumn of 1926 Miss Ruth Wynne, who had recently opened a ‘dame school’ at Rougham Rectory in Suffolk, was exploring the surrounding countryside with a fourteen-year-old pupil named Audrey Allington. They decided to walk across the fields and visit the church in the nearby hamlet of Bradfield St George. On the way, they came upon ‘a high wall of greenish-yellow bricks’. In it was set a magnificent pair of wrought-iron gates.
Behind the wall, [Miss Wynne reported] and towering above it was a cluster of tall trees. From the gates, a drive led away among these trees to what was evidently a large house. We could just see a corner of the roof above a stucco front in which I remember noticing some windows of Georgian design.
Miss Wynne was puzzled. How curious not to have heard of ‘one of the nearest large residences to our own, and it seemed odd that the occupants had not called.’
The following spring, the schoolteacher and her pupil went for the same walk. Said Miss Wynne:
We walked up through the farm-yard as before, and out on to the road, where, suddenly, we both stopped dead of one accord and gasped. ‘Where’s the wall?’ we queried simultaneously. It was not there. The road was flanked by nothing but a ditch, and beyond the ditch lay a wilderness of tumbled earth, weeds, mounds, all overgrown with the trees we had seen on our first visit.
Had the house been demolished since their last walk? Apparently not, for they found ‘a pond and other small pools amongst the mounds where the house had been visible. It was obvious that they had been there a long time.
‘We then returned home,’ Miss Wynne recalled, ‘half amused, half bothered, and yet convinced that we had seen that wall and house on the occasion of our first visit.’
Back in Rougham, the rector and his wife were equally puzzled, and villagers questioned denied all knowledge of the elusive house. Yet Miss Wynne was certain that she had seen it: ‘I am convinced still that the house either once stood there, or else I shall meet it again somewhere else. I have often been past its site since, but I have never seen it again.’
In the past sixty years several psychical researchers have walked across those same Suffolk fields without finding a trace of the ‘phantom house’. Yet the solution to this mystery may lie in Miss Wynne’s original account. The first point to note is that Miss Wynne had only recently moved to Rougham. ‘The district,’ she wrote, ‘was then entirely new to me.’ Did her unfamiliarity with the local landscape cause her to make a mistake on her return visit to the area where she and her pupil had seen the mysterious house, leading them to confuse one location with another?
How thorough was their search? Miss Wynne’s parents, the first people questioned, were also recent arrivals in the area, and her own account mentions that she merely made ‘various tentative inquiries of some villagers who lived near the site of our mystery, but they had never heard of a house existing at that spot, and obviously thought my question a foolish one, so I let the matter drop.’ Finally both women were extremely vague about the building itself.
Miss Wynne remembered seeing ‘a corner of the roof above a stucco front’ and a few ‘windows of Georgian design’, while Miss Ailing-ton says in her account, ‘I can’t remember the details of the house.’ Had they really seen enough to recognize the building again? Though the case was obviously reported in good faith, it must remain very much unproven.
The Trianon Adventure
The most celebrated ‘phantom scenery’ mystery of all unfolded one August afternoon in 1901 when two English spinsters on holiday in France took a stroll through the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, home of the French kings in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and walked, they believed, into the past. Both were utterly respectable, successful in their careers, and not, apparently, given to fantasy. Charlotte ‘Annie’ Moberly was principal of an Oxford college, Eleanor Jourdain the headmistress of a girls’ school near London.
On the afternoon in question, 10 August 1901, the women were trying to reach the Petit Trianon, one of the most attractive of all the buildings dotted throughout the great park of Versailles. The map in their guidebook, however, was not clear, and they picked their way tentatively along the winding pathways and through the trees. According to their account, strange things happened as they walked.
The people they came across seemed to be wearing eighteenth-century clothes. First, there was a woman shaking a white cloth out of the window of a building, then a couple of ‘very dignified officials, dressed in long greyish-green coats with small three-cornered hats’. Next, Miss Jourdain noticed a woman and a girl standing in the doorway of a nearby cottage. They too were both dressed in the style of a bygone era: ‘Both wore white kerchiefs tucked into the bodice, and the girl’s dress, though she looked 13 or 14 only, was down to her ankles.’ On her head she sported ‘a close white cap’.