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://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/i-travelled-time-walking-down-36345785
Liverpool’s 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
Nightwalks 