Throughout history, time slips and involuntary time travel have been reported. Still, no one knows how they’re caused or if they are actual time travel incidents (or hallucinations, lies, hoaxes). Some of the most famous cases of time slips include the “Ghosts of Versailles” case of 1901, where two visitors spotted the long-dead Queen Marie Antoinette wandering through the gardens at the Palace of Versailles. However, moments later, they were back in the modern day.
Another famous case of time-traveling is the case of an old couple from Loch Ness (a place inexplicably famous for the Loch Ness Monster) who disappeared in the mid-18th century and turned up a hundred years later at a local almshouse before disappearing again. Then we have urban legends like the tale of Rudolph Fentz, where a man turned up in the middle of Times Square, dressed in clothes from the 19th century, and was almost instantaneously hit by a car. The weird part? He was the description of a man who disappeared 74 years earlier. But are there any other cases of time traveling in recent times? As it turns out, there are.
A Hotel from the Past
In 1979, two couples were driving through the old French countryside, transiting to Spain. As it grew increasingly dark, they realized they wouldn’t make it in one stretch and decided to find a place near Montelimar. All the hotels in the vicinity of the city were booked, so they decided to venture a bit off the main roads and into the deep country. They happened upon a winding, cobbled road with old buildings on either side with hand-drawn advertisements for a circus. The couple remembers it quite well because it was the first time they had seen something like it.
Soon, they found a hotel that looked more like an inn and decided to check in. However, they soon realized that the hotel seemed to be a blast from the past. It had no modern comforts, no lifts or telephones. The rooms had wooden fastenings on the doors than the normal locks. Furthermore, instead of pillows on beds, there were bolsters with ancient wooden cisterns and plumbing, and the sheets on the bedspread were of calico – a cheap fabric used for linen that wasn’t used for decades. The windows were even more outmoded; they didn’t have any glass, only shutters.
Despite the strangeness of the hotel, the couple stayed the night because they were too tired and worn out to look for accommodation elsewhere. However, their strange ordeal was far from over. The next morning, when they went down for breakfast, they saw three otherworldly having breakfast in the restaurant: a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress with button boots and carrying a large, jeweled purse, looking like she had just exited a ball, and two French officers wearing pre-World War 01 uniforms. Though these were surprising enough, they had an even bigger shock when they decided to check out– The price was less than a tenth of what they expected the bill would be.
Though the hotel certainly struck out as strange, they had enjoyed their stay and decided to check back in on the way from Spain. The only trouble was that they couldn’t find it anymore. The cobbled road and the old-fashioned circus signs were still there, but the hotel was gone. Vanished off the face of the Earth.
Even bizarrely, when they developed their holiday photos, the ones they took inside the hotel were missing. Though the photographs should’ve been there in the middle of the roll, they were completely skipped over – there weren’t any blanks in the negative either. It was as though the photos were never taken, and the hotel had some paranormal abilities to mess the camera up. The husband even underwent hypnosis in 1985 to see if he could regain any memories and to prove that he wasn’t lying. His memory was clear, just like his conscience.
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A Bizarre Explanation
Even decades after this bizarre incident, this case continues to attract thousands of armchair sleuths on a yearly basis. Did a hotel actually time travel? Are the couple telling the truth? So far, there hasn’t been any rational explanation for this strange incident since cases like these aren’t meant to occur in the first place. But there are people who argue that time slips are a rare but natural phenomenon.
So, did the hotel actually slip through time and go back? Or was it an elaborate prank to attract some attention and fame? Though time slips have been documented, cases are heavily debated. This means that unless the physicists come up with a groundbreaking discovery, this will remain unsolved for a long time.
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