At the end of a talk on An Adventure which I gave … to the Academic de Versailles, [wrote T.G.S. Combe in 1965] a member of my audience informed me that when she was a child there lived in her district at Versailles a lady who, in the summer, used to dress up as Marie-Antoinette and go and sit in the garden of the Petit Trianon. That Miss Moberly saw this lady seems at least more likely than that she could have seen Marie-Antoinette herself.
Did the two women perhaps share a sort of waking dream? A close reading of An Adventure suggests they did, for they repeatedly refer to an eerie, unreal atmosphere that seemed to pervade the park: ‘Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry [their italics]. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.’ They claimed to have known little about Versailles before their visit, yet what they actually saw demanded no more than the ability to distinguish outmoded clothes from the fashions of 1901. Moreover, Miss Jourdain had taught French history and they had a guidebook with them.
Assuming that they did see people on their walk, could they simply have embroidered the facts, vested them with historical significance, dreamt a little? Were there other sources for their ‘scenario’? For example, a bestselling novel about time travel called Lumen, in which the hero sees the French Revolution happening seventy years after the actual events, had been published in England as recently as 1897, and a story about Marie-Antoinette from Pearson’s Magazine (published in 1893) has many phrases curiously similar to those used by the two ladies to describe their experience.
Was An Adventure a fantasy shared by two avowed believers in psychical phenomena which finally got out of hand, or did Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain really take a stroll into the past on that August afternoon in 1901? Both are now long dead and we shall never know the answer. The trail, frustratingly, has now gone cold.
Yet cases of phantom scenery continue to surface.
Scene Changes
One evening in April 1955 Mrs Susannah Stone, who lives near Tain in Ross and Cromarty in the north of Scotland, was driving a friend home after dinner. It was about 9.30, and although the sun had set it was still light. Just outside the town of Alness, Mrs Stone says that she and her companion spotted a house on fire:
It was a perfectly ordinary house, with a long narrow door in the middle and long windows – quite big, like a farmhouse. It was blazing. Flames were curling out of the windows. I said, ‘My God, what a fire! Poor things!’
We were about a quarter of a mile away and my friend said, ‘Let’s go down and have a closer look.’ It never occurred to me that I’d never seen a house there before.
We went nearer and it wasn’t there.
Mystified, Mrs Stone drove on, but after dropping her friend she returned to the site of the ‘fire’. By now, it was much later: a punctured tyre had delayed her. This time, she walked up the road. She found nothing. ‘No fire, no glow, no ashes, no people, nothing,’ she says. And the next day, when she checked, she discovered that the fire brigade had been called out – but to a blaze in a couple of haystacks thirty miles from Mrs Stone’s mysterious sighting, and in the opposite direction. As far as she can discover, no house of any kind has ever stood on the spot. The experience remains unexplained. It was, says Susannah Stone, ‘very creepy’.
In the late 1940s the Reverend Alfred Byles was Vicar of Yealmpton, South Devon. One Saturday afternoon, while his wife was arranging the altar flowers, he noticed something strange in the churchyard. He wrote later:
In the middle of the path I saw a hole, of irregular shape, about a yard in width. I thought it was subsidence, and went into the church and told my wife about it. Coming out shortly afterwards, I found that the hole was very much larger, and asked my wife to come out and see it. We both looked into it, and I suggested lowering myself into it. However, it was of uncertain depth, and when I threw in a stone it bumped against stonework, which we could see and which looked like part of a wall.
My main concern was to prevent an accident to anyone using the path. I therefore went away to get some planks to cover the hole, which measured about three yards across. In the village street I met Mr Knight, the local builder and undertaker, and asked him to come and see the hole. On arrival there was no sign of the hole. The path and the grass verges were exactly as before, with no sign of disturbance. Mr Knight seemed rather less puzzled than I expected, and said, That’s all right, sir,’ or words to that effect. He never mentioned the incident again.
Mr Byles, on the other hand, was far less phlegmatic. He was mystified, and remained so more than thirty years later. ‘We both of us saw the original hole,’ he said, ‘and we’ve never found an adequate explanation.’
Explanations for ‘phantom scenery’ are indeed hard to establish: optical illusion, hallucination and ‘mislocation’ are some of the weapons in the sceptics’ armoury, while other investigators have tried to explain the phenomenon in terms of ‘retrocognition’, arguing that, for reasons not yet understood, a few rare individuals may briefly be allowed to unlatch a door to the past and peer inside. There are few ideas more beguiling. Lucille Iremonger, author of the definitive work on the ‘Trianon adventure’, expressed its appeal perfectly:
It is the question that has always haunted man – the question that informs the myths and legends of the ancient world, in which Orpheus visits the underworld and the Sibyl foretells the future; the question whether a human mind can experience happenings outside the narrow groove in which it normally runs … whether, in fact, you or I could at any moment step back into the past, or -and this follows – out into the future.
That question has not yet been answered with a decisive yes or no.
Arthur C. Clarke comments:
Since 1966 the Science Fiction Writers of America have issued an annual Nebula Award for the year’s best fiction in all categories. The short story prize for that year went to Richard McKenna’s ‘The Secret Place’.
Unfortunately, McKenna had died two years before at the age of fifty-one having published only six short stories in his lifetime. Like Alex (‘Roots’) Haley, he was a self-made writer who had risen from the ranks in the US Navy by sheer determination. They both deserved success, and they both achieved it – for McKenna’s first and only novel, The Sand Pebbles (1962), was a bestseller and later an excellent film, starring Steve McQueen and featuring a promising young actor named Dickie Attenborough.
‘The Secret Place’ is one of those very few stories which quite literally make the hair stand up on the back of my neck (even thinking about it is doing so right now). It concerns a young girl in the Oregon desert who has visions of a time when the landscape was very different:
‘That’s where all the dogs are,’ she said.
‘Dogs?’
I looked around at the scrubby sagebush and thin soil and ugly black rock and back at Helen. Something was wrong.
‘Big, stupid dogs that go in herds and eat grass,’ she said. She kept turning and gazing. ‘Big cats chase the dogs and eat them. The dogs scream and scream. Can’t you hear them?’
Well, some of the visions described in this chapter also appear to go back in time – though not quite as far as the Early Miocene, approximately twenty-five million years ago. Even if, like McKenna’s story, they are pure fiction, they certainly demonstrate the power of the human imagination.
And there may be more to it than that. Do we yet know all the ways in which records of the past have been preserved? Let me quote from the most famous science fiction writer of all:
A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and fear of those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago. (H.G. Wells, The Grisly Folk)
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7 – Fairies, Phantoms, Fantastic Photographs
The Cottingley Fairies
On 17 July 1972 a most mysterious lot went under the hammer at Sotheby’s salerooms in Bond Street, London. At first glance, there was nothing particularly impressive about its contents. There were a couple of old cameras, five old photographs, and a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, to a girl from a country village in the north of England.