Funny How Time Slips Away At Wotton

Wotton's Church of St. John, via Colin Smith/Wikipedia

I have never been one of those people who lament that they can't live in some past era. For all the modern world's great and grievous flaws, it has one thing going for it that can't be beat. It can be summed up in two words: indoor plumbing.

However, my greatest dream is to be able to hop in a time machine and briefly visit any historical scene I choose; for even just an hour or so, to be given the chance to make a personal assessment of Richard III or Mary Queen of Scots, or look into the face of Jack the Ripper. For that reason, my favorite Fortean stories are those accounts of what are usually called "time-slips," and it is the only example of Forteana I'd want to personally experience. Spontaneous Human Combustion is messy, not to mention fatal. Poltergeists are rude. And just try to explain blood oozing from the walls to your insurance company. Time-slips, on the other hand, are generally just good clean anomalous fun.  Among the most interesting of these alleged "visits to the past" was experienced by an English bookseller and his wife during a seemingly ordinary excursion.

In the summer of 1954, Eric Barton and his wife Irina felt the need for a brief holiday. Both were feeling generally tired and stressed by life, and thought a bus trip to the country would revive them. They missed their intended stop, and wound up riding to the small village of Wotton Hatch, most famous for being the birthplace of famed diarist and gossip John Evelyn. Since they were there, the Bartons decided to examine the Evelyn family church, named after St. John the Evangelist.

When the couple left the churchyard, they turned to the right, where they found themselves on a badly overgrown path flanked by high, unkempt bushes. The Bartons followed this path uphill to a clearing with a wooden bench. They sat down there to eat their lunch and enjoy the view of the valley below. In the distance, they heard the sounds of someone chopping wood, birds singing, and a dog barking. Otherwise, all was quiet. It all should have been an idyllically peaceful and soothing atmosphere, but for some reason they couldn't identify, the Bartons were ill-at-ease. They had a strange sense of something being "off."

And then suddenly, these bucolic sounds ceased, and a peculiar hush fell over the scene. An icy terror crept over Mrs. Barton. She knew that things were very wrong indeed, but she still could not say how. Then three men wearing what looked like clerical garb entered the clearing behind her. Although she had her back to them, she somehow just "knew" they were there. One looked friendly, but the other two, in Irina's words, seemed to "radiate hatred and hostility." She wanted to get away, but stayed frozen in place, unable to move. Then the feeling of fear abruptly passed. The men vanished. Eric noticed that Irina's arm felt icy cold, like that of a corpse.

The pair quickly left what felt like an accursed spot, but they found themselves suffering from weakness and mental confusion. After staggering off, the Bartons collapsed on the grass, unconscious. After a period of time they found themselves in Dorking, without being able to remember how they got there. They thankfully took the train back home to Battersea.

Irina remained haunted by her experience. Two years later, she returned to Wotton Hatch, curious if she could recreate the inexplicable events of that day. She tried following the same path she and Eric had taken from the churchyard...only to find that the landscape had completely changed. There was no overgrown path, no hill, no clearing, no wooden seat. According to a local woodman, there had been none of these features on the estate in living memory. Eric revisited the area himself, and confirmed that it was completely different from what they had seen.

At this point, the Bartons realized that things were getting seriously weird. They contacted the Society of Psychical Research, but due to some bureaucratic confusion, their report was overlooked. In 1973, they repeated their story to solicitor and SPR member Mary Rose Barrington, who delivered a paper about the Bartons to the Society in the following years. Barrington researched the area around the Wotton church, and was able to verify that the hill and bench described by the Bartons did not exist, and, as far as anyone knew, never had been there. However, Barrington found an intriguing entry in John Evelyn's diary for March 15, 1696. He wrote of the recent execution of "three wretches," one of whom had been a priest, for the crime of attempting to assassinate King William. The men were hanged at a location matching that of the now-vanished landscape observed by Eric and Irina Barton.

Were these the three sinister men observed by Irina Barton? And did the Bartons indeed visit the area around Wotton Hatch churchyard...but only as it had existed in the late 17th century?