The Haunted Palace Blog

Bizarre, Ghosts & Hauntings, Supernatural

Time Slips: Suffolk Tales

Timeslip stories from Rougham and Kersey recount eerie experiences where people see houses suddenly appear and step into empty villages from another era. These haunting encounters blur time, creating a chilling sense of stepping into the past, leaving witnesses unsettled by the mysterious and ghostly nature of these visions.

Miss_Jessel

May 10, 2026

6–9 minutes

ghost houses, hoaxes, Kersey, mysterious britain, phantom houses, Rougham, Suffolk timeslip, Time travel, Timeslips

Imagine walking through a deserted film set or an American ghost town. In the abandoned houses and buildings, you can see echoes of the people who once lived there. It’s as if the people have just left or will soon return. This sense of unease is the feeling I get whenever I think about the timeslip stories of Rougham and Kersey. Timeslips are strange supernatural events where people seemingly slip through into the past. However, in most timeslip stories, those who slip through, see and hear figures from the past. In Rougham and Kersey, that’s not the case. Here just as in the ghost towns or abandoned film sets there is no one – or if there are – they are hiding, just out of view.

Rougham Village sign by Geographer, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons (edited by Lenora).

The Vanishing Houses of Rougham

For about 150 years, the small Suffolk village of Rougham has been something of a mystery. In the village and the surrounding area, people have reported houses suddenly appearing out of thin air, and just as suddenly disappearing again.

One of the most well-known accounts involved Ruth, the daughter of Rev. Arthur Eckersall Wynne, who in 1926 was appointed as the new rector of the village. Later that year, in October, Ruth, along with her pupil, Evelyn Allington, decided to take an afternoon stroll to see the church of Bradfield St. George. Evelyn, as was Ruth, was new to Rougham and the walks were a way to get to know the area. Taking a path from the churchyard, they followed the road. As they walked, they noticed a high wall made of greenish-yellow bricks running alongside the road. The wall eventually led to tall wrought iron gates. From the gates, they could see a drive and the windows of a large Georgian house. The rest of the house was hidden by the tall trees¹. Being unfamiliar with the area and there being nothing to arouse their suspicions, Ruth and Evelyn continued on their way. The next spring, Ruth and Evelyn decided to take the same walking route. However, this time, they were mystified to find that the wall had disappeared and a ditch in its place. The Georgian house they had spied on their first walk was also gone, along with the iron gates. Miss Wynne sent her account of the mystery house to Sir Ernest Bennett, a BBC radio host of a programme on the supernatural. He managed to contact Evelyn Allington, who confirmed Ruth’s story². However, neither witness was able to explain exactly where they had seen the house and despite regularly searching the area for it, they never saw it again.

Why they couldn’t find the house again doesn’t really make much sense. Neither the villages of Rougham nor Bradfield St. George are large and the distance between them isn’t exactly enormous. This odd confusion on the part of the women also puzzled Carl Grove, who in his paper The Rougham Mystery³ writes that the distance was only about 1.5 miles and at the time, you could see the church from Rougham. He goes on to say that there was no chance of them having got lost and forgotten where the house was.⁴ Did they purposefully refuse to say where the house was, and if so, why? Could they have been making it up, or was there another reason?

However, Ruth’s account is just one of many. In 1975, the gardening magazine Amateur Gardening published a short article by James Cobbold (possibly a pseudonym), a local resident who, along with members of his family, had allegedly seen the house. Cobbold said that when he was about 12 (in around 1911), he had heard the story of the disappearing house from a young girl. He hadn’t believed her but when he told his grandmother, he found that her own father, ‘Robert Palfrey’, had also seen the house. Palfrey’s sighting had taken place one June evening in 1860 while he was haymaking. Glancing up from his work, he suddenly saw a red brick house appear on the other side of the land. As well as the house, he could make out 2 wrought iron gates and a garden full of flowers but not a living soul. His father had said the air was chilled despite the weather being warm. When Palfrey returned to the spot later that evening with members of his family, the house had gone⁵.

Cobbold went on to say that he himself had seen the house while accompanying George Waylett, the local pork butcher, on his Saturday rounds. While driving in the butcher’s pony and trap south down Kingshall Street, suddenly out of the mist a house suddenly appeared causing the pony to rear up in terror and throw Waylett from the trap. Just as suddenly, the house was shrouded in mist and disappeared from sight. Cobbold described the red brick house as having 3 stories with blooming flowers in the front garden as well as rose trees. Cobbold remarked that Wyatt shouted, ‘That house! That’s about the third time I’ve seen that happen!’⁶

Another report was made in the 1940s by Edward Bentley, who was distributing catalogues for a Bury men’s outfitters. As he was making the rounds along Kingshall Street, he noticed a house off to the right that he had somehow missed. By the time he had reversed back to the house, the house was gone.

From these and other accounts gathered about the strange Rougham phenomenon, it’s clear that people were seeing different houses.

The village of Kersey in Suffolk from the Church by Allan Lee, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons (Image edited by Lenora).

Kersey: A Village Out of Time

The other timeslip account involves the village of Kersey, which coincidentally is also found in Suffolk. In October 1957, three 15-year-old, Royal Navy cadets, William Laing, Michael Crawley and Ray Baker were on a weekend survival exercise⁷. As part of the route they had to follow, they needed to go through Kersey. As they got closer, they could hear the sound of church bells. However, once they climbed over a fence just outside the village, everything changed. The bells fell silent and an eerie stillness descended. As they walked through the village, they observed that the place seemed strangely deserted (with the exception of a few ducks)⁸. Putting it down to everyone being at church, they continued on their way. However, there were some other odd signs. The season seemed to have changed from spring/summer to autumn, the village buildings seemed somehow older, dirty and run-down, and the lanes had a brown, earthen, dusty surface. Stranger still, peering into a building that they identified as a butcher’s from the rotting oxen carcasses in the window, they saw there were no curtains on the windows or even furniture in the building. Instead, it was full of cobwebs and looked abandoned – indeed, the whole village looked deserted. There was also no evidence of modern technology, such as telephone wires or electricity. After about 20 to 30 minutes and feeling increasingly uneasy, they decided to leave. Once they had left the village, they again heard the sound of church bells⁹.

Victorian butcher shop. Public Domain [?]

Many people have said the boys made up the story but one thing can’t be explained. They described the butcher’s perfectly, including the location. Although in the 1950s a building known as Bridge House existed on the same spot, it was a private house; it had not been a butcher’s for about 50 years and indeed only a couple of older residents of the village remembered it as such¹⁰ [24]. There is no way the boys could have known. An investigation into the area based on the boys’ accounts found that in the seventeenth century, the village had been in a state of decline due to emigration to America [25]. Their description of the houses and lanes places the village exactly in that time frame.

Concluding Thoughts

What did people see in Rougham and Kersey? Are the reports a hoax, hallucinations or glimpses into the past? It makes you wonder what would happen if you stepped inside one of those buildings. Would you disappear along with it and if you did, would you ever find your way back?