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T C Lethbridge – A Step in the Dark

My wife and I went out to coffee one morning with some friends. I won't say who they are, as it might alarm them to know what happened, although it was a long time ago. I have been trained by my wife to notice what kind of clothes are worn by women I meet when she is not there. I am fairly good at it now and when she says, 'What kind of clothes had Mrs. So and So got on?' I can reply with a description. 'Oh she had on a hat made of grey curls like the back of an old-fashioned retriever and she had a plum coloured woolly coat and a skirt like a patchwork quilt.'

That sort of thing.

So I noticed our friend, Mrs. X's, outfit when I sat opposite her at coffee. She and my wife sat side by side. Mr. X sat beside me facing them. Well, I observed Mrs. X, even though my wife was there. I don't suppose I had seen her for over a year and never very often.

After coffee we were shown various things about the house.

I was often within a foot or two of Mrs. X and talking to her.

There was no change in her appearance even when they came to their front door to see us into our car. On the way home my wife remarked: 'Poor Mrs. X, how terribly strained she looked. Her hair has gone so white and she looked much older. Of course that white jumper did not help.' 'What?' I said. 'A white jumper?' ‘Yes,'said my wife, 'with a modern silver Celtic brooch in the front of it.' 'That is not how I saw her,' I said. 'She had on a smart, silk I call it, light chocolate-coloured dress. I noticed it particularly and wondered if we ought to have come in old tweeds. In the front of the dress was an openwork, round, gold brooch with some kind of yellow stone in the middle. I wondered if it was a topaz or a cairngorm.

Her face appeared smooth and unlined and her hair was only slightly salted.'

We realized at once that this could not have been a mistake in observation by one of us. It was a definite slip in time of some sort. Either one of us was seeing Mrs. X as she had been; or the other was seeing her as she was going to be. But to each of us she was there talking, drinking coffee, eating cakes, pointing out various things about the house and seeing us to our car.

It is not easy to determine what had happened. If it had been only a phenomenon in the sitting-room, then one might think that this was only a matter of thought-transference and I had been seeing Mr. X's memory picture of what his wife used to look like. But it is most unlikely that he would have gone on carrying this memory picture about all over the  house and outside to our car. This cannot be the correct answer.

What happened with our spiral and the end of that silver spoon? When you had passed the 40 inch mark, you found a new position for the object and in fact the spoon appeared to be in two places at once. something similar it seems took place with Mrs. X. She seemed to have been in two places in time. It was a fourth-dimensional displacement. I rather think that the displacement was mine and I had been seeing a television picture of Mrs. X; although she was alive, well and talking to me for an hour. It was a perfectly natural phenomenon and may happen far more frequently than anyone observes, for, if only one of us had been present and there had not been two to check what we had each seen, no one would ever have noticed anything out of the ordinary.

This is, I think, one of the best cases we have observed.

Unless someone can suggest a better explanation, it seems to be a perfect example of seeing a ghost; but the ghost was alive.

I had seen some part of Mrs. X displaced in time. In fact it looks as if I had seen her fourth-dimensional aspect, younger altogether than her present-day third-dimensional one.