Time and again there have been questions raised if there indeed exists another dimension in which mortals cannot travel to at will. People have been known to have weird experiences where they seemingly enter another world all of a sudden, especially while traveling somewhere, and things happen which make them sure that they are not in the "real world".

It all began innocently enough in October 1979, when two couples in Dover, England, set off on a vacation together intending to travel through France and Spain. It ended in a journey that took them to another world.

Geoff and Pauline Simpson and their friends, Len and Cynthia Gisby, boarded a boat that took them across the English Channel to the coast of France. There they rented a car and proceeded to drive north. Around 9:30 that first evening, October 3, they began to tire and looked for a place to stay. They pulled off the autoroute when they saw a plush-looking motel.

Len went inside and in the lobby encountered a man dressed in an odd plum uniform. The man said that there was no room in the motel but there was a small motel south along the road. Len thanked him and he and his companions went on

Along the way they were struck by the oldness of the cobbled, narrow road and the buildings they passed. They also saw posters advertising a circus, which was very old-fashioned.

Finally the travellers saw a long, low building with a row of brightly lit windows. Some men were standing in front of it and when Cynthia spoke with them, they told her that the place was an inn, not a hotel. They drove further down the road until they saw two buildings, one a police station, the other an old-fashioned two-storey building bearing a sign marked "Hotel". Inside, everything was made of heavy wood. There were no tablecloths on the tables, nor was there any evidence of such modern conveniences as telephones or elevators.

The rooms were no less strange. The beds had heavy sheets and no pillows. There were no locks on the doors, only wooden catches. The bathroom the couple had to share had old-fashioned plumbing.

After they ate, they returned to their rooms and fell asleep. They were awakened when sunlight filtered through the windows, which only consisted of wooden shutters, no glass. As they were sitting eating their breakfast, a woman wearing a silk evening gown and carrying a dog under her arm sat opposite them.

At that point two gendarmes entered the room. "They were nothing like the gendarmes we saw anywhere else in France, their uniforms seemed to be very old" said Geoff. Their hats were large and peaked.

Despite the oddities, the couples enjoyed themselves and, when they returned to their rooms, the two husbands separately took pictures of their wives standing next to the wooden shutters.

On their way out Len and Geoff talked with the gendarmes about the best way to take the autoroute to Avignon and the Spanish border. The officers did not seem to understand the word "autoroute", and the travellers assumed that they did not know how to pronounce the French word properly. The directions they were given were quite poor, they took the friends to an old road some miles out of the way. They decided to use the map instead and take a more direct route along the highway.

After the car was packed, Len went to pay his bill, and was astonished when the manager only asked for nineteen francs. Len explained that there were four of them and that they had eaten a meal. The manager only nodded.

On their way back, the two couples decided to stop at the hotel again. They saw the old circus signs, but there was no hotel alongside it. Thinking that they had somehow missed it, they went back to the motel where the man in the plum suit had given them directions. That motel was there, but there was no an in the unusual suit, and the clerk denied such an individual worked there.

The couples drove three times up and down the road looking for something that, they were now beginning to realise, was no longer there. It had vanished without a trace.

Upon their return to Dover, they had their rolls of film processed. In each case the pictures of the hotel were in the middle of the roll. But when they got the pictures back, the ones taken inside the hotel were missing. There were no spoiled negatives. Each film had its full quota of pictures. It was as if the pictures had never been taken, except that there was evidence that the camera had tried to wind on in the middle of the film. Sprocket holes on the negatives showed damage.

A psychiatrist hypnotised Geoff to see if he could recall anymore of the peculiar event. He added nothing more to what he subconsciously remembered.

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The strange story began routinely enough on June 3, 1968.

Dr. and Mrs. Grardo Vidal of Maipu, Argentina, had gone to Chascomus to attend a family reunion. Another couple from Maipu, also relatives of the family, went as well.

The neighbours travelled in separate cars and later that evening, both couples set out toward home. When the Vidals did not arrive, however, their neighbours got back into their car and retraced the route, fearing an accident had happened. They drove eighty miles back to Chascomus but so no sign of the Vidals or their car. Back in Maipu, they began calling hospitals and still no information emerged.

Forty-eight hours later, Senor Rapallini, at whose home the reunion had been held, got a long-distance call from Mexico City. The caller was Dr. Vidal, who said he and his wife were well and would be flying back to Buenos Aires. He asked his relative to pick them up at the airport.

Friends and relatives were waiting when the couple got off the plane, wearing the same clothes they had on when they left the party. Mrs. Vidal, who appeared greatly shaken, was immediately taken to a private hospital, suffering from what a press account called a "violent nervous crisis."

Dr. Vidal told and incredible story about what had happened to him and his wife in the previous two days. He said that on their drive home they had entered a bank of fog. The fog was so intense that everything went black. And then, suddenly, it was daylight.

They were on an unfamiliar road. And when the doctor got out of his car, he discovered that all of the paint had been scorched off his automobile’s surface.

When he flagged down a motorist to ask where they were, the man told him that they were outside Mexico City. Later, when the couple went to the Argentine consulate, they learnt that two days had passed since they had entered the fog.

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Annie Moberly and Eleanor Jourdain, two British teachers, visited the royal palace at Versailles during a trip to France in 1901. Having explored the main palace, they walked through the world-famous gardens on their way to Petit Trianon, Marie Antoinette’s small palace. Since they did not know the ground plan, they requested the assistance of two men dressed in 18^th century garb who they thought were caretakers. The men waved them straight ahead, and as the women moved on, they saw a woman and a young girl also wearing old-fashioned costumes standing in a cottage doorway.

The schoolteachers continued walking until they came to a wooded area. There they encountered a dark man with a malevolent expression sitting in front of a temple of love, a pavilion with a round roof supported by columns. a young man emerged from behind some rocks along a weeded path. He spoke a French dialect unfamiliar to the women, but with the assistance of gestures, directed them toward Petit Trianon, across a wooded bridge over a small gulley. On the other side was the front lawn of the palace.

As they looked ahead at Petit Trianon, Moberly noticed an attractive and obviously aristocratic lady sketching the bordering woods. She was wearing a large hat, a long-waisted green bodice, and a short white skirt. Noticing the teachers, the noblewoman stared at them, as if startled.

Suddenly, the eerie stillness seemed to lift and the surroundings returned to normal. A modern guide appeared and escorted the ladies on a tour of Petit Trianon. The aristocratic artist was no longer anywhere to be seen.

The teachers did not speak to anybody about what they had seen until they had thoroughly research it and concluded that they had walked through a summer day in 1789.

The gardeners, they declared, were Swiss guards. The dark, menacing man was most likely the Count de Vaudereuil, who was visiting Trianon at the time. The woman and the young girl in the cottage doorway, according to old palace records, could have been peasants living on the palace grounds. The memoirs of Marie Antoinette’s dressmaker mentioned making several green bodices and white skirts for what turned out to be the queen’s last summer.

There was no mention, however, of a wooden bridge in any available records. That missing piece in the puzzle caused the teacher’s account to be generally ridiculed – until the royal architect’s original plans, which included the gully and the bridge, were eventually found in the chimney of an old building in a nearby town. The plans had been hidden there long before, perhaps for safekeeping.

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