The Kersey time-slip: three naval cadets walk into a silent medieval village (1957)

Kersey sits in south Suffolk, near Hadleigh and about 12 miles west of Ipswich. In October 1957 three Royal Navy cadets from HMS Ganges at Shotley were out on a map-reading exercise. William (Bill) Laing was from Perthshire. Michael Crowley came from Worcestershire. Ray Baker was a Cockney. All three were 15.

It was an October morning. From a distance the boys saw smoke rising from the chimneys and heard church bells. They went down into the village. The bells stopped. Birdsong faded. The wind dropped. No leaves stirred, and the trees cast no shadows. Ducks stood motionless and silent. No chimney smoked. The trees were "that magnificent green colour one finds in spring or early summer", Laing said. It was October.

There were no people. No cars, no phone wires, no TV aerials, no streetlights. The timber-framed houses looked "almost medieval in appearance". And the church? "There was no sign of a church," Laing said. "I would certainly have seen it as I had a field of observation of 360 degrees." Crowley recalled "no church or pub."

Laing saw a butcher's shop. "There were no tables or counters, just two or three whole oxen carcasses which had been skinned and in places were quite green with age." Then there was the feeling. "It was a ghost village, so to speak. It was almost as if we had walked back in time… I experienced an overwhelming feeling of sadness and depression in Kersey, but also a feeling of unfriendliness and unseen watchers which sent shivers up one's back."

Then they walked out. "Suddenly we could hear the bells once more and saw the smoke rising from chimneys." Their superiors laughed it off.

Three decades passed. In the late 1980s Laing and Crowley, both living in Australia, talked it over by phone. Laing contacted Andrew MacKenzie, a New Zealand-born journalist active in the Society for Psychical Research, after reading one of his books. They exchanged letters for two years. In 1990 the two men walked through Kersey together. Ray Baker, traced too, turned out to remember nothing of the experience.

MacKenzie learned that the house Laing called the butcher's was a private home in 1957. But the building dates to about 1350 and was a butcher's shop by at least 1790. Work on the tower of St Mary's Church stopped after the Black Death of 1348-49 killed about half of Kersey's people. A half-built tower could have been hidden by trees. MacKenzie called it retrocognition and dated the scene to about 1420. The case opened his 1997 book Adventures in Time.

Writer Mike Dash saw problems. Glass windows were rare and expensive. Villages rarely had butcher's shops, and two or three carcasses in stock would be implausible. Citing Hilary Evans, Dash raised derealisation, a state in which the real world feels unreal. He also weighed thirty years of memory, smoothed by retelling.

Kersey offers ordinary answers too. Mains electricity arrived only in the early 1950s, with cables laid underground and overhead lines run behind the houses to keep the skyline clear. A reader noted that on a Sunday morning, locals would be in bed or in church.

The case is often set beside Versailles, where Moberly and Jourdain had their own strange experience in 1901. Reviewing MacKenzie's book, Anthony Campbell wrote that "joint hallucinations of this kind are rare and difficult to explain on any normal theory of brain function." Dash could not accept real time travel without better evidence. No one has alleged a hoax.