When Past Met Present on a Country Road

Dr. Edward Gibson Moon, a country physician in England, considered himself a hardheaded man of science, but an experience he had in the early 1930's shook his faith in orthodok notions atthe time. One of Moon's patients was Lord Edward Carson, who lived on the Isle of Thanet. The front steps of his house, Cleve Court, led to a semicircular driveway that opened at either end to a country lane. A tall hedge screened the house from the road.

Lord Carson was very ill, and Moon saw him daily. After one morning's visit, the physician stood at the head of the steps, deep in thought about the patient. As he told the story later, he was not much mindful of his surroundings when he happened to glance up toward the hedge.

But there was not hedge. Nor did a road lie beyond where the hedge should have been. Try as he might, Moon could not see a single familer landmark. There was only a muddy track streching across empty fields. Odder still was the man walking up the track toward the house. He carried a flintlock and was wearing breeches, riding boots, a caped overcoat, and a top hat with narrow crown - haberdashery long out of fashion - and he apperaed to belong in another century, perhaps the late eighteenth or early ninteenth.

To Moon it seemed the stranger saw him as well. The vistor stopped midstride, and for a moment the two men gaped at each other. Trying to oreint himself, Moon turned to see whether Cleve Court was still behind him. It was, and when he turned around again he found the landscape had righted itself. The hedge and road were in their accustomed places, and the stranger had vanished.

Some parapsychologists interpret the doctors vision as an instance of simultaneous retrocognition and precognition. Through a tear in the fabric of time, Moon was peering into the past - retrocognition. The stranger, if indeed he saw the doctor, experienced precognition, seeing the future.