Woolwich Tunnel Time Anomaly

[nivek]

Woolwich Tunnel Time Anomaly

In July of 2017 a very odd report described a peculiar time anomaly that supposedly occurred at the historic Woolwich foot tunnel, which spans under the Thames River and has been in operation since 1912. In 2011 the foot tunnel was closed down in order to carry out renovations and refurbishments.

Inside the Woolwich foot tunnel

When contractors went into the tunnels to begin their work they did so expecting it to be a fairly quick job, and it wasn’t expected to take more than a few months at most. However, the tunnel would supposedly be closed for more than a year and a half, a delay which baffled the residents of the area.

Talking to the workers who had been down there started to paint a very strange picture, as they allegedly began to report having experienced strange time anomalies while walking through the tunnel, such as working in the tunnels for hours only to emerge back into daylight to discover that only a few minutes had actually passed, or of walking through the tunnel to find that the trip had inexplicably taken far less time than it should have.

One worker on the tunnel purportedly told of a strange experience he had in the Woolwich Tunnel thus:

I was one of the first ones to experience it. We were working from both ends, as it were, and had tents on both sides of the river. It was pretty basic, if you wanted something from the other side, you just had to walk it through the tunnel. Anyway the foreman’s on the other side and he radios to ask me across. So I walk through the tunnel – the ‘long walk’, we called it, funnily enough – and it’s slightly spooky because no one else is down there, they’re all working on the lift shafts, and I get up the other side, find the foreman, and his eyes nearly pop out of his head. Says he only radioed like a minute ago and how did I get there so quick? Wouldn’t take my word for it I’d walked. Reckoned I had a buggy down there or something, that it was some kind of prank.

But I stand my ground and he starts to see I’m not lying. Anyway he forgets what he called me there for. He gives me this big red plastic box, tells me to walk back over and hold it up for him when I get to the other side. So I head back down, the lonely walk back, thinking shouldn’t we be getting on with some work. When I get to the top I wave the red box in the air and radio the foreman. ‘You just left me!’ he’s saying, ‘No more than a minute ago’. That’s when I start to feel a bit weird.

Apparently strange time slips and other temporal anomalies became rather commonplace down there in the murky gloom as they worked, and no one had any rational explanation for it all. It became such a reliable given that time slowed down or even stopped in the tunnel that workers allegedly stopped even trying to use their watches to tell time, resorting to using egg timers instead.

One worker explains:

My initial feelings was I was pretty freaked out by it all. But once everyone else had experienced it, it was amazing how quickly it seemed normal. It became like a joke. It was a laugh, you know, a source of giggles. Someone said we’d invented the teleporter and were all going to be rich. The foreman stopped trusting watches and phones when we were down there, and took to using egg-timers.

A few of the young agency lads tried to claim extra on their time sheets. That was the thing, though: time froze when you were down there. If you were down there for the full working day, fixing the tiling, you’d basically finish work, come back up and it would still be morning.

One thing we couldn’t get our head round was how the two, sort of, “time-places” a guy was in seemed to be happening at the same time, as it were. Like I see you emerge across the river in no time at all, but there’s also a ‘you’ who reckons he’s spending four hours in the tunnel.

Some workers apparently tested out their theory that time was actually stopping for them by camping out for a whole 3 days down in the dank tunnel.

When they finally emerged into the outside world it was claimed that the day and time was exactly the same as when they had first descended into the dark to begin their odd experiment.

In another experiment, one worker named Petar tied a rope around his waist as others held onto the other end. The idea was for him to walk through the tunnel with the rope and then signal the others with a red flag when he got to the other side, after which other workers would shout out to the ones holding the rope that he had crossed and then pull on the rope.

It seemed like a pretty standard, even silly bit of experimentation and fooling around, but things would apparently get very weird very fast.

One of the people holding the rope said of what happened:

I’m kneeling down and craning my head down so I can watch Petar walk around the curve, [the tunnel bends in an inverted bow underground – PoL] and he laughs and waves at me for a minute, then gets bored, keeps walking. And he’s just about to round the curve, out of sight – it hasn’t been long, just a minute or so, around the same time it’d took us to walk down the steps – and I feel the rope around me tighten. Then I hear the lads up top. ‘He’s across. Waving a red flag’. The thing is, Petar hears it too.

And he stops. Turns round. And he’s looking at me. His hand slowly reaches into his big jacket pocket, and he pulls out the edge of this large red flag. For a moment I grin. I reckon they’re all having me on. But it’s the look on his face, that’s what still haunts me. Nobody’s that good an actor. His face – and he’s a big man, mind you, fearless.

Our Petar was a big character, always at the centre of things, always with this big smile. Never saw him take anything too serious in all our days til then, but – I don’t know how to describe it, it was – fear. Just plain fear on his face. And he’s looking right at me and I know what he’s thinking. I know what he’s trying to figure out – do I keep going, or do I come back? He takes one step towards me, then stops. I don’t know how long we looked at each other like that, neither of us talking. Then in the end he turns round again, and carries on, out of sight.

Well, I’m up those stairs like a shot and when I get up top there he is, across the river, unmistakeable even from that distance, red flag in one hand, another guy’s arm around his shoulders.
Anyway I didn’t like that. That freaked me out, that did.

The whole bonkers story really took off when it was first released on the site, and generated a lot of discussion and speculation on whether any of it was real or not.

However, while there are those who hold it up as a genuine time anomaly and a real case, others have criticized it as being nothing more than a fictionalized tale passed off as an actual account of the unexplained.

 

[Toroid]

Maybe the water moving above generates the anomaly.
Facts about the River Thames & useful information - Visit Thames

The River Thames may take its name from the Sanskrit Tamas meaning “dark” as its waters are often dark and cloudy; another school of thought is that it is named after the Roman Tam meaning “wide” and Isis meaning water.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=PemE-LZIiK8