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 ca
use 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 wheth
er 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.
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