6 - Supernatural Scenes

Fata Morgana

Travellers and explorers love to report curious sights, but some of the things they describe are decidedly stranger than others. Consider these weird tales.

On 24 June 1906 Robert E. Peary, who later claimed to have been the first man to reach the North Pole, spotted through his field glasses, far away on the Arctic horizon, 'the faint white summits of a distant land'. Four days later, according to his diary, from Cape Thomas Hubbard (on the edge of the polar ice) Peary saw the mysterious mountains again, more clearly, to the north-west. 'My heart leaped the intervening miles of ice as I looked longingly at this land, and in fancy trod its shores, and climbed its summits, even though I knew that that pleasure could be only for another in another season.'

Pausing only to name his discovery 'Crocker Land', after his expedition's sponsor, Peary pushed on towards the Pole, convinced that he had found an unknown island or even an uncharted continent. 'Crocker Land' duly appeared on US Hydrographic Office maps; but in 1914 an expedition sent to explore it found not a single trace of Peary's 'discovery'. After a gruelling journey over 150 miles of treacherous Arctic ice, the baffled explorers concluded that 'Crocker Land' simply did not exist.

On the other side of the world, in January 1915, Frank Worsley, captain of Sir Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated ship Endurance, noted as he sailed along the Antarctic coast: 'Inshore appears a beautiful dazzling city of cathedral spires, domes and minarets.' And yet, as Worsley well knew, there were no such buildings anywhere in the vast ice deserts surrounding the South Pole.

One August day in the seventeenth century an Italian priest, Father Angelucci, was looking out to sea across the Strait of Messina, which divides the southern tip of Italy from Sicily. Suddenly a shimmering city rose up before him from the midst of the waters. Its pillars, arches and aqueducts were dominated by glittering castles; but within minutes, as Father Angelucci watched in wonder, the magnificent metropolis had vanished.

Almost 300 years later, in the summer of 1929, villagers from Niemiskylia, central Finland, picking berries in the nearby Osmankisuo swamp, watched in amazement as 'an obscure dark mass' on the north-eastern horizon turned rapidly into 'a most wonderful city with its buildings, squares and streets'. In it, they told a reporter from the Iisalmen Sanomat newspaper, they could see people 'on their Sunday morning stroll'. One well-travelled berry-picker identified the city as far-off Berlin, complete with the Unter den Linden and its famous zoo.

In 1852 a Mr M'Farland, in a report to the British Association, described this charming scene; it unfolded as he stood with a party of friends upon a rock at Portbalintrea, Ireland.

They perceived a small roundish island as if in the act of emerging from the deep, at a distance of a mile from the shore; at first it appeared but as a green field, afterwards it became fringed with red, yellow and blue; whilst the forms of trees, men and cattle rose upon it slowly and successively; and these continued for about a quarter of an hour, distinct in their outlines, shape and colour; the figures, too, seemed to walk across it, or wandered among the trees, the ocean bathed it around, the sun shone upon it from above; and all was fresh, fair, and beautiful, till the sward assumed a shadowy form, and its various objects, mingling into one confused whole, passed away as strangely as they came.

These sights can be explained. The spangled 'cities' of the Antarctic and the Strait of Messina, Mr M'Farland's green and pleasant 'island', Peary's evanescent 'Crocker Land', even the 'Berlin townscape' that so astonished the berry-pickers of the Osmankisuo swamp, were all mirages created by peculiar atmospheric conditions. The travellers were all fooled because these mirages were of a particularly rare and spectacular type, known as the 'Fata Morgana', first accurately described by Father Angelucci and so called because passing Crusaders in the Middle Ages imagined the illusory turrets to be the legendary citadel of Morgan Le Fay, King Arthur's evil sister and a sorceress with a penchant for luring sailors to their doom. Simple mirages are common.

Drivers are used to seeing what looks like a pool of water ahead of them on a hot, dry road. The pool, of course, does not exist. What they are really seeing is the sky, 'reflected' in the layer of air heated by the ground. This is called an 'inferior mirage'. A 'superior mirage' is caused by a 'reflection' in a layer of warm air high above the ground. The 'Fata Morgana' is a much weirder and far more complicated type of mirage which occurs when unusual variations in atmospheric temperature create blurred and uneven 'reflections' of the sea.

Phantom Houses

Explanations for other 'phantom scenes' are more difficult to find. Often, after failing to find answers in the natural world, investigators have turned instead to the supernatural, sometimes with unexpected results.

In 1961, in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Rosalind Heywood, a prominent investigator of the paranormal, published a curious story told to her by a Mr and Mrs Fraser.

Six years earlier, on a Friday evening in November, the Frasers had been driving to Herstmonceux, Sussex, for a weekend in the country. About an hour and a half outside London they spotted a 'lovely old country house' hotel.

It was covered with lichen, [said Peggy Fraser] and its windows were lighted with a diffused light that speaks of comfort and welcome. There was a gravel drive leading to the porticoed entrance and on the left was built a low sloping-roofed addition with the words 'American Bar' in neon lighting. I can see as if it was only a moment ago the small red-shaded lamps and the bar and bottles and small inviting tables.

To the couple's regret, it was not the hotel where they had booked to stay; but they decided to come back later to sample the ambience and drink a nightcap after dinner. But that evening, although the Frasers tried repeatedly to find it again, the quaint hotel seemed to have vanished into thin air. Said Mrs Fraser:

We talked of nothing else that weekend and my husband was annoyed, for he felt such a thing should not have happened to him of all people. Since that time we have made many journeys along that road to visit my parents in Hastings and each time we have looked for the hotel but we have never seen it again.

The Frasers' was not the first 'phantom hotel' to have attracted the attention of psychical researchers. In 1933 a Mr and Mrs Clifford Pye were travelling round Cornwall by train and bus. Just outside Boscastle, as the bus paused for a moment to let off a passenger, the couple noticed what they took to be a splendid guest-house surrounded by a beautiful garden full of scarlet geraniums. Chairs and tables were set out on the lawn beneath black and orange umbrellas. Mrs Pye announced that it would be an ideal stopping-place for the night, but at that moment the bus moved on and took them into Boscastle. Later, when they tried to find the guest-house, they could see no trace of it, and further searches in the surrounding area proved fruitless.

The Pyes' story caused some excitement among psychical researchers, for they hailed it as an example of a rare phenomenon, a 'collective hallucination'. These are greatly prized, for the theory goes that while an apparition reported by an individual may exist only in the mind of the beholder, one seen by more than one person may have an objective reality. But the excitement was misplaced, for the Pyes' guest-house and the Erasers' country hotel turned out to exist after all.

Denys Parsons, a member of the Society for Psychical Research, was impressed by the detail of the Erasers' story. He was sure that they must have seen a real building, and confirmed his suspicions by the simple expedient of writing a letter to the East Sussex police. The 'phantom hotel', they replied, was a fifteenth-century tea-house called Waldernheath. It stood on the road the Erasers had taken and matched their description almost exactly, except in one inexplicable detail: Waldernheath had no bar and therefore no neon sign.

After a visit to the area and 'an excellent meal in the "non-existent building",' Parsons concluded that the Erasers' powers of observation were clearly first-class - their description of the 'hotel', which they had only seen from a moving car and during a torrential downpour, was accurate in almost every respect. What surprised him was 'their failure to identify a building which turns out to be not only where they thought it was but which tallies with eighteen out of twenty-one of the mental images they associated with it'.

As a result of Denys Parsons' revelations, the file on the Boscastle 'guest-house' was reopened, and an investigation by another member of the Society for Psychical Research, Miss A.M. Scott-Eliott quickly cleared up this case too. After a visit to Boscastle, she reported that the building which the Pyes had glimpsed from the bus did indeed exist. It was called Melbourne House and stood halfway down a steep hill into the village. Miss Scott-Eliott even established that red geraniums had been growing in the garden at the time of the Pyes' visit.

So why had they been unable to find it when they retraced their journey? For one thing, Melbourne House was almost totally hidden behind a hedge and a high wall. It would have been difficult for anyone on foot to see it, especially if they had been going up the hill and not down, as the Pyes had done in the bus. Secondly, there had never been any tables with black and orange umbrellas in the garden: these had been outside a cafe further down the hill and had somehow been 'transported' in the minds of the visitors to the lawn of Melbourne House.

Finally, the place was not a guest-house at all, but a private home. Perhaps the Pyes' eagerness to find somewhere pleasant for the night had caused them to assume that it did take guests. Since their first impressions of the place had been so inaccurate, it was hardly surprising that, even if the couple did catch a glimpse of Melbourne House during their search, they failed to associate it with the 'guest-house' that had seemed so welcoming from the bus.

In retrospect, the psychical researchers to whom the stories were first told may have been too uncritical in publishing them as evidence of collective hallucinations, and simple checks like a letter to the local police or a thorough search of the area by an independent investigator would have cleared up the mysteries long before they were enshrined in print. Denys Parsons pointed up the lesson:

We should indeed accord almost zero value to the type of statement with which accounts of such 'hallucination' cases always conclude: 'Although we searched everywhere and made all sorts of enquiries, the building had vanished without trace.' The layman knows neither how to search nor how to make enquiries ... Let us resolve to be more fussy about alleged hallucinations.

Today's researchers have taken the hint, and a remarkable story told by two married couples from Dover is being rigorously investigated. This, arguably the strangest of all tales of 'phantom scenery', began in October 1979 while Geoff and Pauline Simpson and Len and Cynthia Gisby were driving through France en route to a holiday in Spain. Late in the evening they turned off the autoroute near Montelimar and tried to find rooms at a nearby motel, the Ibis, but it was fully booked. Instead they were told to 'try down the road'. A short drive brought them to a long two-storeyed stone building fronting directly on to the highway. The travellers parked their car in the lay-by opposite and Len Gisby went in. He found himself in a large room that housed a bar. Then the patron appeared and indicated that there were rooms available (he spoke no English and the travellers knew very little French).

The place struck the couples as quaintly - almost comically - old-fashioned. The bedroom windows were unglazed but fitted with double shutters. The sheets were of heavy calico and there were bolsters instead of pillows. In the bathroom the travellers were amused to see that the soap was impaled on an iron rod. But the place was comfortable and clean and, after a dinner of steak, eggs, pommes frites and beer, they went to bed, relieved to have found somewhere for the night.

Next morning, while the Gisbys and the Simpsons were having breakfast, three people came into the hotel: a woman with a little dog and, shortly afterwards, two gendarmes. They also seemed oddly antiquated. The woman wore a long dress and button-boots and the gendarmes were kitted out in gaiters, capes and high hats. Len Gisby remembers thinking that their uniforms were quite unlike those worn by the police they had passed on their way through France.

The bill for the night came as a shock, but not for the usual reason. It was ridiculously low: a mere 19 francs (less than £2) for dinner, beer, bed and breakfast for all four. But the patron was insistent, and the Gisbys and Simpsons, hardly able to believe their luck, continued their journey to Spain.

A hotel offering so much for so little is a rare find indeed, and the couples naturally made for it on their way home. Once again they turned off the autoroute at the sign pointing to Montelimar Nord and followed the road past the Motel Ibis: exactly, they say, as they had done a fortnight before. The only difference was that this time the building seemed to have disappeared without trace.

They drove round the area three times before giving up in bewilderment. There was no sign of the house nor of the lay-by where they had parked on their way down. They had to make do with a hotel near Lyon which charged them 247 francs for their stay - realistic for 1979 but thirteen times as much as they had had to pay at the other quainter - and now mysterious - hostelry.

A few weeks later, when the couples' holiday snapshots came back from the processors, their puzzlement grew. Both Geoff and Len recalled taking photographs of their wives leaning out of the hotel bedroom windows just before breakfast, yet the negatives showed no trace of them. A careful examination revealed no blanks in the film and the serial numbers of the frames were consecutive.

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'.

On they wandered to their most sinister encounter. On the steps of a kind of round summerhouse sat a man wearing 'a cloak and a large shady hat'. He 'slowly turned his face, which was marked by smallpox: his complexion was very dark. The expression was very evil and yet unseeing ...' Suddenly, they heard the sound of someone running, and a young man appeared as if from nowhere, shouting that they were going in the wrong direction. He wore a dark cloak 'wrapped across him like a scarf and quaint buckle shoes.

At last they reached the Petit Trianon, where Miss Moberly, but curiously not Miss Jourdain, noticed a woman apparently sketching. Again, she seemed to be dressed in eighteenth-century style. Finally the women met a young man who directed them to the entrance. They both recalled that he had come out of a nearby building, slamming the door behind him.

Had the two English tourists glimpsed scenes from the past? When they compared notes, no other answer seemed possible; for what other explanation could there be for their encounters with people dressed in eighteenth-century clothes?

'Do you think that the Petit Trianon is haunted?' asked Miss Moberly.

'Yes I do,' replied Miss Jourdain.

Ten years later, their story was published, written pseudonymously and bolstered with research carried out at Versailles and in French archives. Despite its bland title, An Adventure was a sensation, for the women had concluded that during their walk in 1901 they had 'dropped in' on Versailles as it was in the 1780s, just before the French Revolution - the time of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.

Do their claims bear scrutiny? Three-quarters of a century of controversy and analysis of An Adventure have thrown up arguments both for and against.

Supporters of Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain point first to the findings of the research undertaken by the two women. These include their claim that the 'very dignified officials' they met early in their walk were wearing eighteenth-century royal livery, quite different to what was being worn at Versailles in 1901.

The woman whom Miss Moberly had seen sitting near the Petit Trianon was identified as Marie-Antoinette herself from a contemporary portrait, and the journal of the queen's dressmaker provided the information that Marie-Antoinette had owned a dress exactly like the one the figure had been wearing in 1901. Much was made of the apparent correspondence of the landscape seen by Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain, altered since the Revolution, to the Versailles of the eighteenth century.

Miss Jourdain provided another telling argument in favour of the time-slip claim. A few months after the first experience she returned to Versailles and again met people who seemed to belong more to the eighteenth than the twentieth century, including two curiously dressed men loading sticks into a cart.

After consulting the Versailles wages book, Miss Jourdain concluded she had seen the 'cart with two horses (almost certainly requiring two men)' which had been hired for picking up wood in 1789. She also reported hearing strange music floating from afar which she later identified as 'the chief motifs of the light opera of the eighteenth century' - operas which, in many cases, had not been available since they were first played.

Further back-up came later from other people who claimed that they, too, had seen figures from.the past at Versailles. Mr and Mrs Crooke and their son Stephen, who lived near the park in 1907 and 1908, said they saw several figures, including a 'sketching lady' like the one Miss Moberly had seen outside the Trianon, and a man in a three-cornered hat.

In 1928 Ann Lambert, a seventeen-year-old English schoolgirl, and her former teacher, Miss Clare M. Burrow, came upon a strangely dressed gardener at Versailles. They had gone through a little gate and there he was, wearing a dingy brown corduroy jacket, knee breeches, black hose, buckle shoes and a hat turned up at the sides.

He spoke in a curious way. To Miss Burrow, an accomplished linguist, it sounded perplexingly like an old, out-dated form of French, current 150 years before. An even stranger sight greeted them when they reached the Petit Trianon. A group of people - six or eight, Miss Lambert thought - stood on the lawn outside. Some were playing musical instruments; an elegant man and a beautiful woman were engaged in intimate conversation.

All were arrayed in the most dazzling eighteenth-century costumes. With all the briskness of her calling, Miss Burrow ushered her fascinated pupil onward into the Trianon. 'It must be a pageant,' she said. Yet months later she confessed that she had made enquiries and had discovered that no pageant had been rehearsed or performed at Versailles that day. Even more puzzling was the revelation that the gate through which they had passed before meeting the gardener had apparently been sealed up for more than 100 years.

At least one Frenchman claims to have seen the ghosts of Versailles. Robert Philippe, an art teacher and cabinetmaker, was walking in the park with his parents one June day in the 1930s, when he found himself obliged by a sudden call of nature to go behind a tree. There, to his embarrassment, he felt a presence. A mysterious woman had appeared by his side, as if from nowhere. Quite unabashed, she engaged him in conversation.

Did she live in Paris? asked the nonplussed M. Philippe. No, at the Trianon. 'But I thought the Trianon was uninhabited.' 'Yes,' came the reply, 'but not for me.' The young man looked away for a moment and relit a cigarette. When he looked up, the woman had gone. His parents, who had been waiting nearby, had seen no one and had imagined that, for some reason, their son had been talking to himself behind the tree.

Nevertheless, the sceptics have marshalled a formidable case against the claims of the two 'adventurers'. They have pointed out that the descriptions of the people encountered are so vague that it is, for example, impossible to decide whether they were wearing authentic eighteenth-century dress or clothes that were merely rustic or somewhat old-fashioned. Why, they ask, did the two women not discuss their experience immediately after the walk, over their tea at the Hotel des Reservoirs - instead of waiting a week to compare notes? Why do their accounts of the 'adventure', written at various times before the book was published, differ markedly? In particular, why do telling details, missing from the earliest versions, suddenly appear in later ones?

Perhaps most crucial of all is the women's reluctance to look for, and accept, a natural explanation for the events of that summer afternoon. They were, after all, in unfamiliar surroundings and had lost their way in a maze of pathways and thickets; the weather was sultry and there was an oppressive, brooding atmosphere - the kind that often precedes a thunderstorm. In such circumstances imagination can work overtime, and even the most respectable of academic ladies may be forgiven for indulging in romantic reverie, especially since, as one critic has put it,

there are few places in the world in which it is easier to imagine ghosts than the vast palace of Versailles. The echoing halls of the great chateau, the labyrinthine walks of the main park with their stone benches and frozen statuary, the haunted gardens of the Petit Trianon - all are alike murmurous with the footfalls of history.

Dame Joan Evans, an Oxford art historian and friend and literary executor of the two authors of An Adventure, was one of those who settled for a down-to-earth explanation. She discovered from a book published in the 1960s that a rakish aristocrat called Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenzac had been obsessed with the fashions of the eighteenth century and often wore clothes of the period. Moreover, he frequented the gardens of Versailles and organized tableaux vivants or pageants in which he and his cronies wore eighteenth-century costume. Dame Joan concluded that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had stumbled upon one of the count's rehearsals and that all the people they had met in the gardens had been acting.

Miss Moberly is known to have mistaken a real person for a ghost on at least one occasion. Two years after An Adventure was published she visited the Louvre in Paris, where she noticed an extraordinary man. He had 'a small golden coronal on his head, and wore a loose toga-like dress of some light colour'.

After much research, she decided that she had seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who had marched in procession down the road over which the Louvre was later built. But this exotic little scenario was demolished in the 1960s when a Sunday newspaper revealed that there had been an artist living in Paris at the time of the 'vision' who had gone about dressed as a Roman, complete with gold crown, in protest at the ugliness of current fashions.

In a letter to The Times it was suggested that Miss Moberly had also jumped to the wrong conclusion in her identification of the 'sketching lady':

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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