Glitches

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Story 1.

The Crosswayed Interlopers.

In the spring of 2013, what seemed to be a straightforward emergency call-out for two police officers would turn out to be anything but.

Not only would this experience chill them to the core, it would have them questioning their own reality for years afterwards as they tried to solve the riddle that was the crosswayed interlopers.

The pitch of the engine climbed higher as the vehicle picked up speed, racing along dark country roads that would have been as black as pitch if not for the high beams illuminating the trees and hedgerows around them.

James Haviland, who was sat in the front passenger seat, had briefly considered switching on the blues and blaring the sirens, but decided there was little point.

The roads were empty, and there wasn't another vehicle for miles around.

It was 2.21am on the 31st of March 2013

and James and his on-duty partner, Chris Braddock, who was driving, had just received a call from the CCR, or contact and control room, about a possible break-in at a remote facility out in the countryside.

They were in a rural area on the outskirts of Whitehaven, a town situated in the Copeland district of Cumbria, England, about three miles from their intended destination.

They would be on scene within minutes, although neither man could have known at that moment in time that this call would challenge their very understanding of reality and change their lives forever.

The facility they were heading towards was owned by Crossway Enterprises.

and was known locally as something of an oddity.

Its modern architecture stood out like a sore thumb against the otherwise beautiful and unspoiled English countryside that surrounded it.

The amount of technology it boasted was also at odds with its rural setting.

A highly advanced security framework, remote access and lighting control, and the latest building management systems and head-end software suites, all housed within what is otherwise known in the industry as a smart building.

Its quiet and remote location was the last place you would expect to see such a thing.

Nevertheless, the building stood in silence as they arrived, shrouded in an eerie darkness that made it seem all the more out of place.

The facility looked deserted.

No internal lights were switched on, and there was certainly no sign of a break-in.

The call had come through, stating that the alarm had been going off intermittently.

and that some of the PIR, or passive infrared sensors, had picked up on heat signatures signatures within the building itself.

This information had been provided by the facility's manager, who was off-site, but had remote access to the building's security systems.

Even so, the relative calm of the scene in front of them made Chris and James feel hesitant.

They parked across the road and sat in silence for a moment, observant, waiting for any kind of movement or indication of criminal activity.

At one point, James thought he saw a flash of light through one of the ground floor windows, but reasoned that it could have been a sensor or smoke alarm, or indeed, just his imagination.

Over the next few minutes, nothing at all happened.

They could hear the muffled sound of wind blowing around the exterior of the vehicle and the leaves rustling in the breeze, which was somehow both peaceful, and slightly unsettling all at the same time.

But there was no sign of anything untoward.

However, their attention was soon drawn to the lobby when he and Chris both witnessed the light flicker on and illuminate the space inside.

Suddenly, the automatic doors at the front of the building opened and shut on their own, before the alarm started to sound, piercing the air with a high-pitched undulating screech.

Although startled, both men believed that they had the measure of the situation, that the access system was malfunctioning, and that the opening and closing doors was breaking the live circuit and setting off the alarm.

But just as they were about to radio back to the CCR, a figure emerged from the front entrance, then appeared to look over towards their police car, before jogging off to the right, around to the rear of the building.

Just seconds later, Another, much taller figure emerged, but headed round to the left instead.

In normal circumstances, James and Chris would have jumped out of their vehicle and scrambled after the two men, but something had given them pause.

Although the figures had been distant and only silhouettes cast against the light coming from the lobby, there was no mistaking what they were.

They could tell by the shapes of the caps and bulky stab vests that these two figures had, in fact, been police officers.

Chris scanned the scene for another police vehicle, whilst James James radioed back to Dispatch, asking if there was another unit on scene.

The reply came back negative.

Chris and James were apparently the only ones there.

The only other explanation was that the other two men were security guards, but the two police officers had been under the impression that the facility had no on-site security.

After all, It was in the middle of nowhere.

Something was obviously not quite right with this picture, and whilst the situation was becoming confusing, things were about to turn extremely weird.

Just as James finished using the radio, both figures walked back around to the front of the building and stood outside the entrance looking confused.

The taller one of the two appeared to kick a pebble on the ground, which might have seemed like an insignificant action at the time.

but would later prove to be pivotal in realising the truth of the matter.

There was something oddly familiar about these two men, and both Chris and James were sure they must have known them.

There was something in the way they moved and carried themselves that reminded them of someone they knew, but they could not put their finger on exactly who it was.

Suddenly, both figures looked over towards the police car and began to run towards it.

Chris and James stepped out of their vehicle and donned their caps, ready to greet them.

But when they looked up, the security guards or police officers, or whatever they were, had disappeared.

All that stood before Chris and James was the dark Crossway building.

The lights had all turned off again, and the alarm was no longer sounding.

Both police officers looked left and right.

They were in a wide open car park.

There was nowhere else these two other men could have gone.

They had simply vanished into thin air.

They looked at each other in stunned silence, neither man willing to speak first about what they had just witnessed.

Time seemed to stand still.

The wind was no longer blowing, the leaves no longer rustling.

The air had become thick and heavy, as if muffled and weighted down by an inevitability that neither man was aware of at that moment in time.

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After their initial shock had subsided, James was the first to say something and suggested that they go over and take a look at the building.

Chris agreed, but there was no denying that both men felt a stab of apprehension as they made their way over the road.

They noticed as they approached the front entrance that it was completely locked down.

They had to relay a request to the facilities manager in order to gain access.

As they entered the lobby, Chris went up the flight of stairs to the first floor, whilst James remained on the ground floor and began checking through the dark offices, as the lighting system had still not activated.

He found nothing out of the ordinary.

but couldn't help feeling a little spooked about what had happened only moments before.

As he was walking back towards the lobby, he noticed the light flicker on.

Then he heard the hiss of the automatic doors as they opened and closed, before the silence was suddenly shattered once again by the sound of the alarm.

He picked up the pace and noticed Chris coming down the stairs as he exited the building, fully believing that an intruder had just slipped past them.

He looked over towards their vehicle and quickly scanned the car park for anyone running away, but there was no one there.

His instincts told him to run around to the left of the building as it was the quickest way for someone to get out of sight.

However, as he made his way around to the rear, he was confronted with a refuse area, which was surrounded by high brick walls.

He checked the bins inside and out, and even tried to scale the wall itself, but it was just too high.

There was no chance someone could have escaped this way.

Returning to the front of the building, he noticed Chris walking back from the other side, and they met up in front of the entrance.

Not for the first time that night, they were completely baffled by what had just happened, and contemplated radioing back to the CCR to tell them that the access and alarm systems were malfunctioning and would need to be checked over.

They were reluctant to put it all down to a false alarm, as they knew they had witnessed two other people on the scene.

although they would have had trouble in explaining in their reports exactly who who those people were or indeed where they had gone.

It was only when Chris, James's well-built 6'6 tall partner, casually kicked a pebble on the ground in front of the building whilst discussing their options that the reality of the situation came crashing down.

But it couldn't be, surely.

They looked back towards their vehicle, and sure enough, they saw two faces staring out at them from behind the windscreen.

The dashlights were reflecting off their skin and they knew in that instant that those two faces

were their own.

They ran back towards their car and saw the doors open

but no one stepped out.

The two men inside

had vanished.

James has spent the last four years pondering on exactly what happened in the early hours of that morning.

Before this, he had never experienced anything he would describe as paranormal or supernatural.

He was an ardent sceptic, and in most cases still is.

But he has no rational explanation for what occurred.

He has researched online and has spoken to many so-called experts, but usually finds that they have more questions than they do answers.

Neither he nor Chris are certain what they experienced, whether they saw their own doppelgangers or whether it was a glitch in reality, where the universe slipped time and allowed them a brief glimpse into their own futures.

Or maybe that they even both temporarily lost their minds.

They are well aware of how unbelievable this sounds.

And for this reason, they did not write it up in any of their reports.

Names and details have had to be changed in order for us to share this story with you.

There is no such company as Crossway Enterprises, but somewhere out in the wilds of Cumbria, there is a building which stands alone and in stark contrast to its surroundings.

A building which sends a very real chill up the spines of at least two police officers whenever they think back on the events of that early morning, all those years ago.

Story two:

The Belfast Crossover

In October of 2016, a nurse working a day shift at a busy hospital in Northern Ireland was involved in an unsettling turn of events which left him questioning everything he thought he knew about the world we inhabit.

What happened during the Belfast Crossover?

There has been a public hospital of some shape or form in Belfast since the late 1790s, and today the city's inhabitants are served by the Royal Victoria, which is also known locally as the RVH.

The cavernous red brick buildings that first housed the original facility are still situated on Grosvenor Road, a short walk from the city centre, but the site has steadily expanded over the years to the point where it now sprawls across 70 acres of land.

In addition to the localised support and care it provides to the residents of Belfast itself, the RVH also provides specialist services for the rest of Northern Ireland.

As well as the main facility itself, there are also three other specialist hospitals located on the site.

These provide maternity, pediatric and dental care for up to two-thirds of the country's general population.

Over the course of the year, the RVH nursing teams will treat over half a million different patients, from illnesses as mild as the common cold, up to complex and critical heart surgery.

In particular, the hospital's accident and emergency unit is perceived to be one of the most stressful but hard-working departments to be found anywhere in the NHS, with staff there having had to endure the most brutal and savage injuries that the country's historic religious and political rivalries have produced.

The latter half of 2016 found Ryan Kirkpatrick working at the Royal Victoria as an auxiliary nurse, which involved providing logistics and support for the more qualified nursing practitioners.

It was a full-time job, meaning he was permanently stationed at the hospital, but the position was transferable between different departments, depending on their changing levels of demand.

This meant that his day-to-day duties could see him working anywhere across the entire site.

It was a challenging role, but one that Ryan enjoyed.

The flexible nature of of his job meant that he was exposed to diverse working practices and challenges he simply would not find if limited to working in just one department.

He also enjoyed having the freedom to travel around the different units, interacting with not only his fellow staff members, but also the more regular inpatients.

On the afternoon of October the 21st, Ryan made his way to work the same way he had done a hundred times before.

He had spent the last week attached to the Acute Medical Unit, which saw admissions come from not only both of the two accident and emergency units that are located at the site, but also cases that local GPs deemed serious in nature.

As he walked into the hospital via the main entrance, fully expecting to spend his shift attending the AMU ward, he had no idea of the bizarre and terrifying circumstances that awaited him.

Ryan hadn't even managed to finish locking his personal effects away before he was advised that he needed to make his way directly over to the main A ⁇ E department.

It transpired that earlier in the afternoon there had been a serious road traffic collision on the M5 motorway near Carrick Fergus.

He was quickly briefed that it had involved four vehicles and there were multiple casualties being transported to the RVH in order to be treated for a mixture of both life-threatening and life-changing injuries.

He arrived to find the A ⁇ E department in a predictable state of chaos and immediately threw himself into the busy task of helping out the regular nursing staff with whatever they needed to assist in stabilizing their patients.

The sights and sounds he experienced throughout that day were truly testing, but the auxiliary nurse steadily took it all in his stride.

This was what he had joined the NHS for, to help people in their most desperate time of need.

By 6.30pm, things had calmed down enough for him to be released back to his allocated duties.

He was thanked for his efforts before he made his way over to the AMU to to finish what remained of his shift.

When Ryan finally arrived and spoke to the sister on the ward, she told him that the last medicine round had not yet been done and asked him if he could pick it up.

After stopping for a brief refreshment break, he collected a medicine trolley and loaded it up at the secure medicine store, then made his way through the winding corridors into the heart of the ward.

Ryan's first customer of the day was an older lady, whom he had never treated before.

As he cordially introduced himself and went over to retrieve the treatment chart from the end of her bed, he was met with a polite but slightly puzzled greeting in return.

The patient would go on to inform him that not only had she already received her second round of medication for the day, but that it had been Ryan himself who had administered it, about an hour beforehand.

Dismissing this as mild confusion on the part of his patient, Ryan explained that he had in fact been working in A ⁇ E all afternoon, and so unfortunately she must have been mistaken.

He confidently showed her the chart, which appeared not to have been checked off for that evening when the occupant of the next bed along shouted for his attention.

She was slightly younger than the patient he had been talking to, and confirmed that not only had Ryan already attended that afternoon to give the older lady her medication, but he had in fact done so for the entire ward.

Becoming slightly unnerved at the unshakable conviction that his patients were displaying, Ryan decided to go and ask at the nearby nurse's station to see if anyone in an official capacity could explain the odd turn of events he was now experiencing.

He found the ward receptionist there, chatting away to one of the other nurses, and both confirmed that they had indeed seen Ryan doing his rounds about the department earlier that afternoon.

Despite their insistence, Ryan was adamant that he'd been nowhere near the ward all day, having only arrived 10 minutes beforehand.

He became immediately immediately concerned that a major misunderstanding and possibly even negligence had taken place, which might have resulted in a very serious outcome.

If medicine had been administered to each of the patients, then why hadn't their respective charts been completed?

He tried to find the sister who had instructed him to carry out the medicine round, but she was nowhere to be seen.

She had apparently finished her shift hours beforehand.

Determined to try and get to the bottom of the matter, he put a cursory phone call into the hospital security office before excusing himself and walking across the site to view the footage captured by the hospital's CCTV cameras.

When he arrived, he was informed that the part of the system that covered A ⁇ E was undergoing maintenance, so there had been no footage captured in that department all day.

When Ryan started playing the footage from the AMU department, he experienced a growing mixture of amazement and horror.

As he watched, he could clearly see an obscure figure pushing the medicine trolley through the corridors of the AMU, timestamped an hour and a half before he'd even arrived.

And he knew in that instant that the figure was himself.

But that was impossible.

The duty security officer became a little frustrated at Ryan's repeated requests to rewind and re-watch the footage, but the young nurse began to realize there was something interesting and yet unsettling about his phantom double.

At no point did it ever show its face on camera.

The footage was always captured from behind or from the side when its head was facing entirely in the opposite direction.

It became clear that his copy, whatever it was, had also left little evidence of its presence.

save for the testimony of the people it had passed by.

It had also not signed any documentation or checklists as it issued the medication, despite being required to do so.

Fearing humiliation amongst his colleagues, Ryan chose to keep the incident to himself.

He quietly made his way back over to the AMU and signed off the medication charts for each of the patients before retiring for the evening.

Ryan was so unnerved by the experience that he transferred out of the hospital to go and work in Ulster the following year.

But he has never forgotten that day and the resultant feelings of dread and unbridled confusion that were now scarred upon his soul forevermore.

The events that Ryan describes are extremely unsettling and seem to defy any conventional or rational explanation.

Just what was it that he experienced during this otherwise unexceptional and mundane working day?

As it turns out, There are a number of theories which we can explore.

Stories of time slips and so-called reality glitches are nothing new.

They have apparently occurred for centuries.

Even in the Dark Ages there were accounts of people experiencing a similar phenomenon, finding themselves momentarily transported to another time and place, unable to comprehend the completely different world they were seeing before their eyes.

The real question is whether these time slips actually occur or whether they are simply all in the mind of the witness.

In some cases, there is a rational explanation for the perceived phenomenon.

We know, for instance, that walls can absorb and record sound waves and play them back under the right circumstances.

It has been shown that EVP methods can pick up voices that were spoken in an older building hundreds of years before.

Is it such a stretch to theorise that the very fabric of space and time might also be capable of recording images, which can be played back in a similar fashion, if just the right circumstances are met.

Many ghost sightings are attributed attributed to just this kind of supposed phenomenon.

Apparitions are often witnessed walking through walls, where there perhaps used to be a door, suggesting that the eyewitness is seeing a playback of a time gone by.

And if we can indeed see recordings of people from the past, why not recordings of entire scenes?

Could the impostor Ryan that walked the corridors of the AMU ward have been an ethereal recording of his past exploits in the same area?

Maybe so, but if it was, how is it able to interact with living people and real-world items?

Perhaps the other Ryan might have been a fleeting visitor from a neighbouring reality, who unwittingly crossed over to ours, and perhaps when he later returned to his own space and time, he was being thanked for his help by the ANE staff, only to protest that he had been on the AMU ward all day.

We have seen in previous cases how many eyewitnesses absolutely believe that they have briefly travelled to or travelled from an alternate reality.

Much of the Mandela effect phenomenon, whether real or purely psychological, has been attributed to alleged crossovers between neighbouring universes, and the ever-present possibility that reality perhaps exists just as much in the physical world as it does in the mind.

Maybe Ryan saw his doppelganger.

Over time, The concept of doppelgangers has become somewhat confused with the idea of a long-lost twin or a body double, but it is in fact something far more mysterious than either of those possibilities.

A doppelganger is instead a supernatural copy or identical projection of a person, right down to the smallest detail.

Doppelgangers have been documented throughout history and are largely seen as sinister and malevolent entities, whose arrival is often interpreted as a precursor to tragedy or death.

Their true motives are unknown and their actions irrational, with very little direct interaction taking place between them and the subject they are impersonating.

In this case, however, the fact that the copy was apparently capable of independent conversation and physical interaction with third parties does not fully fit the characteristics of a typical doppelganger event, although its sentient desire to avoid facing any of the cameras was intriguing.

Finally, could Ryan's experience have been the result of a psychotic break, a momentary lapse of memory or concentration, possibly a brief instance of multiple personality disorder?

Although Ryan is not a drug user, has no history of mental illness or specific memory loss, and despite the fact that random and transient psychological issues such as this are virtually unheard of, it is not beyond all possibility.

Even though the accident and emergency staff were able to confirm that Ryan had been assisting them for most of the day, there might have been a brief period where he was able to slip away to the AMU ward and then return without his absence being noticed.

And maybe he was unaware of his actions in this instance, or that his short-term memory just didn't log the information.

Without any video footage from the AE security cameras, which would conclusively prove that Ryan was indeed in two places at once, we unfortunately cannot determine one way or the other what happened on that strange October day back in 2016.

We can only speculate.

speculate.

His experience seems to feature elements of all four possible explanations, whilst not comfortably fitting into any of them.

His double displayed no signs of aggression or danger to anybody, and so it's possible that it was acting with good intentions, regardless of how much confusion and upset its presence would end up causing for Ryan himself.

He is keen to stress that he has never experienced anything like this before in his life, or indeed in the few years since it happened to him.

He continues to search for answers as to what took place.

This was the reason he sent his story into us after watching the Crosswayed Interlopers, in the hope that he could relate to other people who may have had similar experiences and share their stories.

It is unlikely that the answers Ryan seeks will ever be found, and this unnerving experience will forever remain a mystery.

But as people continue to come forward describing similar events, which seem to take place in realities that are slightly skewed in comparison to our own, the idea that our reality is not always quite what it seems is prevalent and compelling.

Bed times for our name.