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Date: Fri, 07 Aug 1998 12:33:48 -0400
From: Jeremy Simmons (gregor@one.net)
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Subject: true inexplicable experience!
The Phantom street
In 1991 I was living in England, with friends, in the country just southeast of London, in a small town called Oxted, in the county of Surrey. One night, some two weeks after I had arrived there, I decided to take a long walk about the town to learn its streets a little better, and as no one wished to join me, I set out alone.
It was a lovely night, humid but breezy, with just enough chill to make a sweater comfortable. The moon was half full and glowing dully in the moist air, and only a few stars were visible. I had been walking for over half an hour and was considering turning back ( where there was warmth and good english beer awaiting me ) when I decided to take one last detour. I walked up a short hill on a street called EastHill. Strangely enough, the street running perpendicular to EastHill, into which EastHill terminated, was called WestHill. There is no explaining the decisions of our English cousins sometimes. In any case, I walked up EastHill and turned right on WestHill. After walking about a quarter mile down WestHill, having seen no other roads, only driveways, leading off of this street, I decided to call it a night, the air was getting chill and rather uncomfortable. I turned and headed back for the intersection with EastHill, to get back home. Instead I came to an intersection that I did not entirely recognise, but as this was a colliqiual little town with its own oddities, I thought I must have, somehow, missed it when I had strolled past earlier. I walked down what turned out to be a dead-end street. I saw no sign for its name. Turning around, I headed back out onto WestHill and finally found EastHill, took it through the way I had come and was home not twenty minutes later. But here is the part that made this night one I could never forget :
I remember that when I stepped foot on the dead-end street, and with every step I took further down into it, I got the most apalling sensation of fear and of being out of place, as out of place as I ever could be, though the feeling seemed to have no base in anything I could see, the street looked the same as many of the others on which I had traveled that night. But I soon left it, and the terror left me, and in great confusion and no small amount of apprehension, I went home.
The next day I had a friend drive me up EastHill, and turn right onto Westhill, making up some story about losing my sunglasses ( worthless article in that country anyway ) and I looked for that street. It was not there. I am not kidding. Later I went back and combed WestHill for a hidden entrance to the phantom street and had no luck. I know I could not have been mistaken about turning right onto WestHill, because the way to the left leads down a steep hill, along a waterway and under a railroad underpass, I certainly would have remembered that, it was not such a dark night. In any case there were no streets leading off of it either, not for two miles or more, anyway.
I have never found a satisfactory explanation for walking on a street that never existed, but I can tell you that I remember nothing about it except that in appearance it was not notable, at the time.
Believe me or disbelieve me, but this happened.
-Jeremy Simmons
gregor@one.net