Welcome to the Nightwalks…

---

Paranormal enthusiasts will likely have heard of Borley Rectory, one of the most haunted old buildings in Essex, England. However, very little remains of it today. What was its story, and whatever happened to it? Read on to find out.

Described as the most haunted house in England by psychic researcher Harry Price, this Gothic-style Victorian rectory was built back in 1862, on Hall Road, Borley, Essex, for the rector of Borley parish and his family. It was actually the first rector who built it, a Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull.

It was built to replace a previous rectory that had burned down on the site in 1841. The rectory was enlarged by adding a wing to accommodate Reverend Bull’s 14 children.

The house was 35 feet high with four floors and 11 acres of grounds. It had 32 rooms including 11 bedrooms. However, ever since it was constructed, this house had a reputation for being haunted by something.

The nave of Borley church (nearby) was likely built in the 12th century, and there were several farmhouses and the remains of Borley Hall, once the abode of the Waldegrave family.

Legend had it that a Benedictine monastery was erected in the area in 1362, and it was rumoured that a monk from the monastery had had a secret relationship with a nun from a nearby convent. Their relationship was discovered, leading to the monk’s execution and the nun supposedly bricked up alive in a wall of the convent. (However, this legend was debunked in 1938.)

The first paranormal happenings at the rectory were reported in 1863 – a few of the parish locals heard unexplained footsteps in the building.

On July the 28th 1900, four of the Reverend’s daughters saw something that to them looked like the spirit of a nun at dusk, about 37 metres away from the house. They attempted to talk to it, but it vanished when they drew closer.

The local organist Ernest Ambrose later said that the Bull family seemed convinced they had witnessed an apparition on several occasions.

During the next forty years, different people claimed to have experienced a variety of bizarre things, including a phantom coach driven by two headless horsemen!

In 1892, Reverend Bull died and his son Henry (“Harry”) Foyster Bull succeeded him. Reverend Harry Bull died on June the 9th 1927, and the rectory stood deserted for a while.

Reverend Guy Eric Smith then moved in with his wife in October 1928, and soon after, when Mrs Smith was cleaning out a cupboard, she discovered a brown paper package containing the skull of a young woman.

After that, the Smith family reported a few odd incidents: the sound of servants’ bells ringing even though they had all been disconnected, lights appearing in windows, inexplicable footsteps, Mrs Smith seeing a horse-drawn carriage at night.

The Smith family contacted the Daily Mirror newspaper and asked to be put in contact with the Society for Psychical Research. On June the 10th 1929, the newspaper sent a reporter along with Harry Price, the conjuror and paranormal researcher.

The reporter wrote a series of articles concerning the oddness at Borley Rectory.

Reports of haunting in the rectory intensified after Harry Price visited the place, the first visit occurring on June the 12th 1929. Stones, a vase, and other objects were apparently thrown and “spirit messages” were tapped out on the frame of a mirror. As soon as Price vacated the premises, these particular phenomena stopped and later on, Mrs Smith said she thought he might have been falsifying the phenomena. Harry Price wrote two books about his visits to the rectory.

The Smith family left Borley on July the 14th 1929, and the parish had somewhat of a challenge finding a replacement rector.

On 16th October 1930, Reverend Lionel Algernon Foyster finally moved in with his wife Marianne and adopted daughter Adelaide. Reverend Foyster was a cousin of the Bulls, and he wrote an account of the strange goings-on between the time they moved in and October 1935, which he sent to Harry Price. According to this account there was bell-ringing, shattering windows, the throwing of stones and bottles, writing on the walls, and Adelaide’s room managed to lock itself with no key.

Marianne Foyster told her husband about a range of poltergeist activity including something throwing her from her bed, and in one instance Adelaide was attacked by “something horrible.” Reverend Foyster attempted an exorcism twice, but failed. In the middle of the first attempt, he was struck on the shoulder by a fist-sized stone.

The multiple reports in the Daily Mirror atttacted the interest of paranormal researchers, who concluded the events were being caused, deliberately or unconsciously, by Marianne. Marianne later admitted she thought some events were being fabricated by her husband in cahoots with one of the psychic researchers, but other events she thought were genuine supernatural occurrences. She also later confessed that she was having an affair with a lodger named Frank Pearless, and that she used paranormal explanations to hide her meetings with him.

The Foysters left Borley in October 1935 because of Lionel’s ill health. The rectory was left empty again.

In May 1937, Harry Price took out a year-long rental agreement for the building, and through an advert printed in The Times, he recruited a team of 48 “official observers” (mostly students) who spent lengths of time, (mainly on weekends) in the house, recording any phenomena that might happen. The investigations found nothing more violent than odd sounds, fluctuations in temperature, and the occasional sighting of a figure.

In March 1938, Helen Glanville, a daughter of one of Price’s team, held a seance in Streatham, London. She apparently contacted two spirits, the first being a nun called Marie Lairre. Marie was apparently a French nun who left her order and travelled to England to marry a member of the Waldegrave family. She was said to have been murdered in an older building where Borley Rectory was now situated, her body either buried in a cellar or thrown into a disused well. The writing that appeared on the walls was alleged to be her asking for help – one message read Marianne, please help me get out. Her spirit became the White Lady of Borley.

The second spirit contacted said it was called Sunex Amures, claiming it would set Borley Rectory on fire at 9pm that night (March the 27th, 1938). It also said that the fire would reveal the bones of a murder victim.

On February 27th 1939, the new owner of the rectory – Captain W H Gregson – accidentally knocked over an oil lamp when unpacking boxes in the hallway. Luckily the house was never connected to a gas or electricity supply, and water was taken from a well in the courtyard to combat the fire. However the flames spread fast and the building was very damaged.

The insurance company carried out an investigation and said the fire seemed to have been started on purpose.

A woman named Miss Williams in nearby Borley Lodge said she saw the figure of a spectral nun in an upstairs window during the fire, and demanded a fee of one guinea for her tale, according to Harry Price.

In August 1943, Price conducted a dig in the cellars of the ruined house and found two bones, thought to be from a young woman. The parish of Borley refused to give the bknes a burial ceremony, as locals believed they came from a pig rather than a human, so the bones were given a Christian burial in Liston churchyard instead.

Harry Price died in 1948, and Daily Mail reporter Charles Sutton claimed Price had faked phenomena. While visiting the rectory in 1929 with Price, Sutton got hit on the head by a large pebble and, on seizing Price, he found his coat pockets full of various-sized stones.

Three members of the Society for Psychical Research – two of whom had been Price’s loyal colleagues – conducted a formal study of his claims about Borley Rectory and published The Haunting of Borley Rectory in 1956. They found that Price had indeed been falsifying evidence, manipulating the “ghost photographs” and possibly writing the messages on the walls himself when in the house alone, because the writing showed signs of having been done with pencil or chalk, the handwriting showing signs of being disguised.

The study or “Borley Report” also found that phenomena had been caused by rats and odd acoustics due to the shape of the building.

Marianne Foyster later admitted that she had never seen any apparitions and that the ghostly sounds had been caused by the wind, friends she had invited over, and her own self while playing practical jokes on her husband.

Many of the legends of Borley Rectory had been conjured out of nowhere. Reverend Harry Bull’s children – who were living there before Lionel Foyster – were surprised when told they had been living in England’s most haunted house, and said they had seen nothing.

However, the SPR’s report and a biography of Price haven’t dissuaded the general public from being interested in the house, and there have been quite a few books and TV programmes on its history and ghostliness.

Even the BBC was going to broadcast a documentary on it in 1956, but ended up cancelling it when threatened with legal action by the widow of the last rector to live in the rectory.

In 1975, the BBC aired an episode of The Ghost Hunters that focused on Borley rectory, with a psychic investigation of the church nearby as well.

Recent films include the partly animated Borley Rectory: The Most Haunted House in England in 2017, the film Ghosts of Borley Rectory in 2021, and Borley Rectory: The Awakening in 2025, which is set in 1900 and shows the origins of the ghost story.

The ruins of Borley Rectory were demolished in 1944. The former site is now part of a private garden.

The timber gateposts from the driveway along the North-East of the building (its true front) survived the demolition and stayed there for quite some time before the late Ivan Banks bought them for £20 and took them home with him to Maidenhead, where he applied wood preserver to them and put them in his garden. Shortly after he published his book about Borley Rectory (The Enigma of Borley Rectory) Ivan Banks died. No one knows where those gateposts are now or even  if they still exist.

The rectory had a well in its courtyard, the water from which was pumped into storage tanks in its attic. The pump wheel survived the 1944 demolition, standing there until the rubble was cleared away. The pump machinery was scrapped but it was planned for the pump wheel to be taken to America. The wheel stayed in a garden at Borley for years before someone restored it and it is now owned privately by someone.

The great Borley bell (which hung on the opposite side of the courtyard to the water pump) survived because Harry Price took it as a souvenir when Captain Gregson bought the building in 1938. Price hung the bell outside his workshop in West Sussex, and after he died it was given to Peter Underwood (a ghost-hunter and prolific author) in 1973 by the executor of his estate (the University of London). Underwood hung the bell outside his house in Bentley, Hampshire, before moving to London some years later.

The rectory boundary stone also survived. It was originally positioned on the edge of the upper lawn, which is a slightly odd position for a boundary stone. The poet James Turner (who was living in the former Rectory Cottage in the 1940s) gave the boundary stone to Peter Underwood.

---

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borley_Rectory

http://www.harrypricewebsite.co.uk/Borley/ModernBorley/relics-borley.htm

https://hauntedhosts.com/library/famous-hauntings/borley-rectory-most-haunted-house/

The original rhyme for what number of magpies you see and what “results” from that was published in 1780. The rhyme has its roots in ornithomancy, or bird divination (which was used by the ancient Greeks and Romans).

---

---

Most of you are probably familiar with this poem:

One for sorrow,

Two for joy, 

Three for a girl,

Four for a boy, 

Five for silver, 

Six for gold,

Seven for a secret never to be told

…which is the modern version. However, there are more lines after that going up to thirteen:

Eight for a wish,

Nine for a kiss,

Ten a surprise you should be careful not to miss,

Eleven for health,

Twelve for wealth,

Thirteen – beware, it’s the devil himself!

Magpies, like owls, were seen as a bird of either good or bad omen in some cultures and in Britain since at least the 16th century. Other superstitions about magpies included:

• Scottish people believed magpies were evil and had a drop of the Devil’s blood hidden under their tongues
• It was also believed in Scotland that if a magpie’s tongue was scratched with the sharp edge of an unmilled silver sixpence, followed by a drop of human blood being put into the scratch, the magpie would become able to talk in human language!
• The French believed that evil priests reincarnated as magpies or crows. 
• Early Christians saw the magpie as vain for not having fully black feathers to mourn Jesus’s death. The magpie was said to be the one bird who didn’t sing or offer any comfort during the crucifixion.
• In Sheffield, the magpie is said to be the only bird that refused to enter Noah’s Ark, choosing to sit on the roof chattering about the flood instead!
• In the times of cockfights, fowls’ eggs were sometimes placed in a magpie’s nest so that the chicks would absorb the magpies’ aggression
• Dried and powdered magpie flesh was an old remedy for epilepsy and other bits of the magpie were used variously to cure vertigo, bad eyesight, and melancholy.
• People used to believe that eating the leg of a magpie would help you recover from being bewitched.
• Their chattering calls were thought to signify the arrival of guests in the near future, or if they chattered on the roof, the arrival of “evil tidings.”
• One belief was that the magpie was the offspring of a raven and a dove, and as a result hadn’t been baptised during the flood in the Old Testament.
• A Swedish belief states that the magpie is a witch’s bird, and that witches can take the shape of magpies on Walpurgisnacht, when they travel.
• In Germany, the magpie is a “bird of the underworld.”
• In ancient Rome, magpies were associated with fortune-telling and magic.
• In ancient Greece, magpies were sacred to the god of wine, Dionysus
• In China, the magpie was seen as a “bird of joy” in the Manchu dynasty and was seen as representing the yin and yang, fertility and domestic happiness.
• There is a long-held supposition that magpies love to steal shiny objects. In fact, they are more likely to avoid them according to research done by Harrabin in 2014.

These beliefs may come from the aggressive and territorial behaviour magpies can have when nesting. They have been known to swoop at pedestrians and peck or scratch at people’s heads!

The omens of the rhyme are likely to come from medieval times, but the first version of the rhyme to be published was in a 1780 supplement to the 1778 edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare by Samuel Johnson and George Steevens:

One for sorrow,

Two for mirth,

Three for a wedding,

Four for death.

This was in an appendix, contained in a note scribbled by Reverend Henley: “The magpie is called in the west to this hour, a magatipie, and the import of the augury is determined by the number of these birds that are seen together: ‘One for sorrow: Two for mirth: Three for a wedding: Four for death.'”

Another early version appeared in the 1842 edition of John Brand’s Observations On Popular Antiquities. John Brand was a clergyman of the Church of England and spent his time researching and documenting English folklore.

An early version of the poem was extended in Proverbs and Popular Sayings (1846, by Michael Aislabie Denham) with the words “hell” and “Devil” censored out:

One for sorrow,

Two for luck;

Three for a wedding,

Four for death;

Five for silver,

Six for gold;

Seven for a secret never to be told,

Eight for heaven,

Nine for ––––,

And ten for the d–––l’s own sell!

Sometimes “luck” would be changed to “mirth” and “death” would be changed to “birth,” although those last two words are total opposites (or opposing sides of the same coin…)

Another version was in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable:

One’s sorrow,
Two’s mirth,
Three’s a wedding,
Four’s a birth,
Five’s a christening,
Six a dearth,
Seven’s heaven,
Eight is hell,
And nine’s the devil his old self.

A tradition in England is that if you see a solitary magpie, the way to ward off the “sorrow” or bad luck is to say Good morning, Mr Magpie, how are Mrs Magpie and all the other little magpies? or to salute the magpie and turn around three times.

One 19th century custom in Shropshire was to say Devil, Devil, I defy thee! Magpie, Magpie, I go by thee! then spit on the ground three times.

Another custom in Westmorland and North Lancashire is to draw a cross on the ground when you see a lone magpie, or say this rhyme instead:

Magpie, magpie, chatter and flee,
Turn up thy tail and good luck fall me.

Other variations include taking off your hat to it, bowing, and wishing the bird a good day, or spitting over your left shoulder, turning around three times, crossing your fingers and saying:

I cross the magpie,
The magpie crosses me;
Bad luck to the magpie,
And good luck to me.

Sometimes, birds within the Corvidae family (crows, jackdaws) are involved with this traditional rhyme in places where magpies aren’t often seen, e.g. in America, or in India, where they apply the rhyme to the myna bird.

The “one for sorrow” idea may stem from the knowledge that magpies mate for life, so a widowed magpie is, naturally, a melancholy bird.

Other Strange Iterations

“1 for sorrow, 2 for mirth,
3 for a wedding, 4 for a birth,
5 for silver, 6 for gold,
7 for a secret never to be told,
8 for the tale that the stars have spun,
9 for a gate that can’t be undone,
10 for a river of forgotten lore,
11 for a key to the spectral door,
12 for a mirror reflecting the night,
13 for a beast that lives in spite,
14 for a heaven that none can reach,
15 for a lesson that none can teach,
16 for dreams trapped in stones,
17 for the gods’ hollow moans,
18 for the abyss that gazes back,
19 for the knowledge that which we lack,
20 for a magpies’ final verse, in a realm where shadows converse.”

“1 for sorrow
2 for joy
3 for a girl
4 for a boy
5 for silver
6 for gold
7 for a secret that’s never been told
8 for love,
9 for marriage,
10 for a baby in a golden carriage.”

“I saw eight magpies in a tree,

Two for you and six for me.

One for sorrow, two for mirth,

Three for a wedding, four for a birth.

Five for England, six for France,

Seven for a fiddler, eight for a dance.”

“Ravens perched on a single branch
What do your numbers foretell of chance?
One for sorrow
Two for mirth
Three for a wedding
And for four a birth
Five for rags
Six for gold
Seven for a secret
Never told
Eight for love
Nine for hate
Ten for a new friend at the gate
Eleven for a house
Twelve for sails
Lucky thirteen for secret spells.”

“…Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a time of joyous bliss”

“Eight for a wish,
Nine for a kiss,
Ten for a letter,
Eleven for worse
And twelve for better”

“…Eight bring wishing
Nine bring kissing
Ten, the love my own heart’s missing!

(from Warwickshire, England)

“…Eight you live
Nine you die
Ten you eat a bogey pie!”

(from Yorkshire)

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for rich,
Six for poor,
Seven for a bitch,
Eight for a whore,
Nine for a funeral,
Ten for a dance,
Eleven for England,
Twelve for France”

“One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for rich,
Six for poor,
Seven for a witch.”

“One is sorrow, two mirth,
Three a wedding, four a birth,
Five a sickening, six a christening,
Seven a dance, eight a lady going to France.”

There is also a version by the comedian John Finnemore, which goes up to 1000. You can hear it on “John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme” series 9, episode 6.

---

Sources

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_for_Sorrow_(nursery_rhyme)

https://blog.gardenwildlifedirect.co.uk/magpie-rhyme/

https://www.birdspot.co.uk/culture/one-for-sorrow-magpie-nursery-rhyme

https://www.countrylife.co.uk/country-life/how-to-salute-a-magpie-70304

https://www.hypnogoria.com/folklore_magpies.html

https://www.icysedgwick.com/magpie-rhymes/

---

In the middle of Liverpool in the UK, there is a seemingly normal street of shops known as Bold Street. But over the years, people who walked down it noticed time doing peculiar things.

---

Bold Street has the usual sort of thing you’d expect – a line of independent shops, cafes, bars and restaurants with a bohemian style, and a church (St. Luke’s, which was bombed in the Blitz). However, this road is the centre of what has become known as the Liverpool time slips. These are moments where certain people accidentally stepped from the present day into a different time. This is a similar phenomenon to the Versailles Incident.

One off-duty (or perhaps retired) policeman from Melling (Frank) and his wife (Carol) were shopping in Liverpool in 1996. They split up at Liverpool Central Station for a little while, with Frank going into a record shop on Ranelagh Street and his wife into a bookshop on Bold Street to buy “Trainspotting” by Irvine Welsh. When Frank was walking along the incline near the Lyceum heading into Bold Street to meet up with Carol again, he came across a “dead spot of quietness.”

At that moment, a small, 1950s-style boxvan with the name “Caplan’s” on its side almost drove into him, beeping its horn, although he was on a pedestrianised area (or at least, it was for pedestrians in the 1990s!)

Frank crossed the road and noticed the bookshop (Dillons) had changed into “Cripps,” a women’s clothing shop, and the entire street appeared to have gone back in time by decades. The shoppers were wearing 1950s clothing (the men in trilbies and long coats, the women in scarves, berets, pillbox hats and gloves) and the cars were vintage.

There was one modern detail: a twenty-something year-old woman (Emma) in 1990s clothing (a green sleeveless top and black hipsters) carrying a Miss Selfridge bag. Frank followed this woman into Cripps, and the interior of the shop suddenly snapped back into that of Dillons, the bookshop. Frank grabbed the woman’s arm and asked, “Did you see that?” or words to that extent, and the woman replied that she thought a new clothes shop had just opened where the bookshop used to be, chuckled, and walked out shaking her head.

The experience lasted a few minutes but Frank kept talking about it for years, comvinced he had been through a time slip. His wife said she hadn’t noticed anything odd.

It transpired that there had been a firm called Caplan’s in the 50s and 60s, and that Cripps was in the spot where Dillons was (where Waterstones currently is). Cripps was in fact a women’s shawl shop established there in 1848.

Fast forward to 2006. A 19-year-old named Sean was running away from a security guard after stealing something from a shop near Bold Street, and ducked into a narrow passageway called Brooks Alley, which was a dead end.

As he entered the alley, he felt a tightness in his chest and the surroundings seemed to change around him. He turned around to see the guard had disappeared, and found himself in what appeared to be a past version of that area. Roadworks he knew to be there had suddenly gone, people were dressed strangely, and at a newspaper stand he noticed an edition of the Daily Post bearing the date Thursday May the 18th, 1967. When he tried to use his mobile phone, there was no service.

Panicking, he dashed back towards the street, passing shopfronts and signs that later seemed to be from the late 1960s (according to retellings which claim that details lined up with old shop names).

The guard chasing Sean claimed that when he sped into Brooks Alley, Sean had vanished!

As Sean ran, the houses and shopfronts gradually assumed normalcy, but when he stopped and glanced around, the area he had run from still looked antiquated. He boarded a bus and escaped home.

Sean was later interviewed and repeatedly told the same story. The historically factual names of the shops and their locations added to its credibility. The time slip itself lasted seconds or minutes.

Another occurrence from 2006 concerned Jane, a student who was meeting a friend at Liverpool Central station at 3pm. She was a little late for the meeting, so as she went up Bold Street she phoned the friend to let her know.

In the middle of the call and halfway along the street Jane’s phone cut out and she became aware something about the area had changed.

At first, she assumed she’d walked into a period‑drama film set, because there were people close by in Victorian clothes. Later, she claimed to have seen horses and carriages, mud and straw on the road, and oil lamps.

One version of the story stated that Jane spoke to some shopkeepers and passersby who seemed unbothered by her appearance, but other reports said she didn’t talk to anyone.

Jane allegedly said the whole event lasted a minute, then she found herself back in the same spot on Bold Street. She met her friend in the end, but was disorientated and dizzy.

Around May 2011, a woman named Imogen was shopping for baby clothes on or near Bold Street and accidentally entered a shop which technically should not have been there.

Imogen stepped into a branch of “Mothercare” on the corner of Lord Street and Whitechapel to get presents for her new niece or nephew, and was surprised to find that everything was cheap. On trying to pay using her debit card, she was informed the shop didn’t take cards. Irritated but not frightened, she put things back on the shelves and left the shop.

Imogen told her mother what happened, who was confused and said that the shop her daughter was describing had closed years previously and that a bank (a branch where her mother’s account was held) stood in its place now.

In disbelief, Imogen took her mother back to “Mothercare” to check, and there was a bank on that corner instead of the shop.

As recently as the 2020s, weird stuff has been going on. One Friday, December the 13th two girls walked down to Bold Street to do Christmas shopping. They entered a shop they’d never heard of, called “Ritzy Sports.” After looking around, they noticed the clothes cost far less than expected and everyone in the shop was dressed extremely differently to them.

The girls picked up what they thought was a vintage trainer and suddenly found themselves inside the restaurant “AKA Sushi.” They ran out, still clutching the shoe, and when other people became aware of their tale, they found out the style of trainer they picked up was popular circa 1998. CCTV footage of this event hasn’t been found.

[These anecdotes have been passed around by word of mouth so often, it’s more of an urban legend than anything else. There are no original statements or local reports that mark where the stories began, and the people named in them don’t even have surnames.]

People who worked and lived on Bold Street in the 1960s – a decade that many have claimed they slipped back to – may have noticed something peculiar on their road. Chris Gibson, the founder of a community and construction project called “Future Liverpool”, went into the cellar of one of Bold Street’s shops in 2010 and was disturbed to see some messages scrawled on the walls, e.g.:

“God have mercy on all who enter here.” – 5/2/66

“It’s no joke.” – 12/9/69

Gibson also said he heard “noises coming from within the room,” including “a low buzzing sound mixed with a sort of clattering.”

For more time-slip tales from the area, see this PDF: http://www.parascience.org.uk/PDFs/Time%20Slips.pdf

Theories

Various explanations have been put forward for the time slips, the most logical one being that people look at a shopfront or street, misread what their eyes see, then their brain fills in the gaps later.

If you expect to see something historical, your memory can lean towards that. And if you’re sleep-deprived, stressed, daydreaming, or just not paying much attention to where you are, a location can sometimes feel surreal or unfamiliar temporarily. Afterwards, your mind edits the memory, adding details you might have picked up before from stories about time slips from the media.

Other explanations are that Bold Street has “thin spots” where different times sometimes overlap, leading people to believe there’s a time portal in Liverpool.

A popular theory is that the time slips are linked to the underground railway system nearby, especially the city-centre underground loop on Merseyrail’s network, which runs under central Liverpool but not far from Bold Street. Some folks speculate this loop might create energy fields or “vortices” which distort time.

(An interesting side-note: there are old abandoned tunnels under Bold Street, chanced upon by two restaurant workers when they were restocking a cellar. They found a locked door and kicked it down, finding many chambers and workstations joined together by underground passageways. No one knows where the tunnels came from or what they were for, as before Bold Street existed the area was fields and farmland. An old well was excavated in these old foundations in 2001, with archaeologists finding clay pipes and porcelain fragments. You can visit this “Ye Olde Wishing Well” on the premises of Jeff’s.)

Another speculation holds that people have genuinely stepped into an almost-identical parallel world where Bold Street looks like another decade. There’s even claims that the time slips are a “glitch in the matrix,” or “entities are guarding something,” or “someone’s manipulating reality.”

---

Sources:

https://www.discoveryuk.com/mysteries/a-shopfront-to-the-past-the-mystery-of-bold-street-time-slips/

https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/bizarre-tale-bold-street-timeslips-20350964

https://thetab.com/2025/02/24/erm-apparently-theres-a-time-slip-on-bold-street-and-every-liverpool-student-knows-about-it

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/i-travelled-time-walking-down-36345785

http://www.paranormalscholar.com/liverpools-time-slips-and-mysterious-events-on-bold-street/

https://www.spookyisles.com/time-slips-bold-street-liverpool/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/weird/2141695/i-experienced-time-travel-famous-Uk-street

http://www.parascience.org.uk/PDFs/Time%20Slips.pdf