What If Time Is Not Where You Left It

We read a mining-family story about a man who vanishes on the way to his backyard well and returns seven months later without aging a day. Then we compare it to a listener’s “missing time” drive that somehow takes four days, plus other cases that make us ask what time is really doing when we are not looking. 
• mining towns that get bought out and wiped away 
• the Black Ridge, Ohio legend of Thomas Hale disappearing mid-step 
• a lantern that stays lit far longer than it should 
• the “humming” that sounds like voices 
• a modern missing time report after a short dirt-road trip 
• other accounts of time displacement on trains, in flight, and in the woods 
• my own near-death experience and how little time it felt like 
• the idea of a world unseen that we glimpse at dusk 
Check out the website, some things have changed. Send us your paranormal stories. It doesn't have to be about a ghost, it can be about anything that is unexplained, just like the stories you just heard. Give us a like, give us a share, help us keep spreading the word. 

Transcript

Email From A Miner’s Family

SPEAKER_01 0:04

Hey everybody, it's Dr. G Spirit Tales and Magic. It's the 3rd of May. That makes 151, I believe, days to go until Doctober. We're not really sure how Doctober shakes out yet. 72 degrees in SoCal at about 10 minutes till 3 in the afternoon. Today's email comes from a friend of mine named Jeff. And we'll just start with you know reading a couple lines from the email and then we'll go into the story. Hey Doc, I didn't know that you had passed on and came back to life until I heard it on the podcast. I guess it's been a minute since we talked. As you're aware, my family has been in the mining industry as long as I can remember. Father is my grandfather, my great-grandfather, you should trace our family tree back. It's about mining. There's a story that my family has passed down over the generations that I never really took much stock in until last week. I remember you talking about a small town where you grew up that the coal mine purchased the entire town and got rid of it. Please read this story and then let me know if you think I need to come see you to get analyzed instead of telling a story. Sorry, it's been so long. I'll try and do better, Jeff. Thanks, Jeff. So this story is about Thomas Hale. But before we go into that, yes, I used to talk about a place called Big Five that a coal mining company bought, and the town doesn't exist anymore. It's just gone. And I can't remember the name of the other town that about a month later, where I grew up, I spent some time on a volunteer fire department, as did many young men from there. And we would have what they called fire practice. We would go out and you know burn something or do drills to make us more efficient if something happened. I can't remember the name of this town. We burned the entire thing down because the coal company had purchased it, they were going to strip mine it, and they wanted all the buildings gone, so it was quite a fire practice. So they do that. We were in Bisbee, Arizona a while back, and you know, there's a part of Bisbee that's really, really cool that's being threatened to be completely destroyed and actually wiped out of existence by the copper mines. So it happens. Story goes on to say that in the autumn of 1923, in the quiet mining town of Black Ridge, Ohio, a man named Thomas Hale stepped out of his home to fetch water from the well behind his house. Now they say it was just a little bit after dark, and his wife Eleanor watched him from the kitchen window as he crossed the yard, lantern in hand, and coat pulled around him tight because it was cold outside. But he didn't come back. At first, she thought he'd slipped or maybe injured himself. Then she began to think the worst, what if she f what if he fell down the well? Neighbors were called, lanterns lit the yard, the well was checked, nothing was in it. The woods beyond the property were searched clear through the night, and by morning the sheriff had actually organized an entire searching party. There were no footprints beyond the halfway mark to the well. None. It was as if Thomas Hale had simply stopped existing in mid step. Days turned into weeks, the town whispered, some said he had run off. Others insisted something unnatural had taken him. Blackridge, after all, had a reputation for strange occurrences, all tied to the coal mines beneath it, of course. Eleanor never left the house. She kept his boots by the door, his pipe on the mantle, and every evening at dusk, she lit a lantern and placed it in the window. Just in case she said. Then, nearly seven months later, it was a warm spring night. Thomas walked back through the front door. No knock, no warning. He simply opened it and stepped inside. Eleanor collapsed at the sight of him. Neighbors were summoned once more, but this time stunned in disbelief rather than fear. Thomas seemed unchanged, was wearing the same clothes, carrying the same lantern, which was, by the way, still lit. Though the oil should have burned out months ago. Not a speck of dirt on him, not a scratch. And to him, no time had passed. When questioned, he seemed very confused. He said I just walked out to the well. Just as always, I remember lowering the bucket. Then there was a strange distant humming sound like wind moving through a tunnel, then he was standing in the kitchen again, staring at his wife, who looked somehow a bit older. He couldn't understand why everyone was crying, and why the most of the town had gathered on his property. Why was the calendar on the wall months ahead of the day that he remembered? He was examined by doctors, he seemed to be in perfect health. No signs of trauma, no illness, but no explanation. There was one detail. Thomas mentioned this only once and never again. When pressed about the humming sound, he quietly said I don't believe it was the wind, it sounded like voices. Like they were speaking, but not to me. After that he refused to ever talk about the incident again. Thomas Hale lived another eighteen years in Black Ridge. He never again went near that well. In fact, he avoided the backyard entirely. Every so often, just after dusk, neighbors claimed they could see him standing perfectly still, staring toward the place where his footprints had ended, as if waiting or perhaps remembering something that he couldn't quite bring back with him. Doc I decided to tell you this story now, because let me tell you what happened to me. My wife and I were on one of our mini, hey, let's go see where that dirt road goes night trips. We completed the trip, came back to the house to find police cruisers in our yard. And my relatives and hers standing around with many people we didn't know. From a distance, I thought maybe the house had caught fire, but wouldn't it be the fire department then instead of the police? I was confused. My wife and I lived in the house alone. We don't have children, as you know.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

I didn't know what to make of all of it.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

Here comes the strange part. Police are interviewing us, asking us, you know, where we'd been and what we had done. I told them we just went down this road and we went down for a long time, maybe six, seven miles, finally found a spot where we could turn around at somebody's old barn and came back. That's the extent of it. And I wondered why that anyone had bothered to call them. A policeman that I had gone to high school with said, what about the other four days? What did you do?

SPEAKER_00 9:16

I don't want to go any further with it, but apparently our 35-minute drive took four days. I don't know what to make of that.

Other Missing Time Reports

Death, Revival, And The Unseen

Send Your Stories And Closing

SPEAKER_01 9:32

But I know you've been around this long enough to maybe have heard something like that. What do you think? Well, there are many, many cases of things like that to report. And that will be a much longer podcast at a different time, but I can tell you the ones that I remember right off the top of my head without having to put research into. I believe it was 1977 when a man got on a subway car that's in New York, but he didn't get off. The train completed its route, doors opened, passengers left. He was not amongst them. Now, how do we know that? Well, we know that because in 2023, surveillance footage captured a man stepping out of a train car that hadn't been in service for decades, wearing the exact same clothes. Same guy. They said, Who is this guy on the train? They're very fussy about some of the train cars in New York. Um, and maybe someday we'll do a podcast about a bus that was allegedly called Blood Money, and the night a train car full of people disappeared in the subway. It came back almost right away, but people did get a little testy about it. I believe it was 1962. A pilot reported flying through what he called a silent storm. He said all of his instruments stopped working. He landed safely, and he claimed only minutes had passed, but flight records later showed his plane had been missing for 18 hours with no fuel loss. When we lived in Oregon, they used to tell us one, I believe it was in 1988, a boy wandered into the woods behind his house, became missing, search teams found nothing. In 2021, he walked into a ranger station, completely unchanged, confused, and asking why everyone looked so much older than they did when he left. Some of those paranormal events we work very hard to try and explain, but we cannot. So, what's your paranormal story? I'd be very curious to know if anyone listening has had an event like that. Did you ever get displaced or feel displaced in time? Those of you who are frequent flyers to the podcast know that three years ago in Oregon, I walked into one of our favorite restaurants that we'd been in many times. Everybody knows us there. We'd go in and do impromptu magic, and Cassandra and I do that all the time. We just show up in a place and hey, come here, I want to show you something. Walked in there, fell over dead. Now, in my mind, number one, I never knew I was dead. I was talking and people were not answering me. The entire incident to me, from the time that happened until the time I woke up, still in the emergency room with Cassandra standing next to me crying, seemed like about four minutes to me. To me, time never passed. So there are many things out there that keep us wondering. And you know, we always say there is indeed a world unseen. It's a world that exists all around us all the time. And every now and then, for whatever the reason, we catch a glimpse of it, and the dead get in. Check out the website, some things have changed. Send us your paranormal stories. It doesn't have to be about a ghost, it can be about anything that is unexplained, just like the stories you just heard. Give us a like, give us a share, help us keep spreading the word. And we always also say thanks to everyone who is a loyal listener. And I believe as of today, 75 countries and 456 cities. And again, thank you to all of you who keep us going. October's got some cool things coming up that hasn't been finalized yet. And of course, we'll be here many, many times between now and then. So take care of each other, be safe in your travels, and hey, tell a paranormal story. It's good for you. Good afternoon from SoCal, my friends.