About This Archive
Inspired by modern ideas about time as something more than a simple straight line, this project looks at the hidden echoes of history and experience that seem to exist just beyond ordinary perception.
Through investigations, local folklore, eyewitness accounts, and reflections on unexplained phenomena - especially those connected with the Isle of Wight - Otherside of Time invites you to step sideways out of the present moment and consider what might still be echoing.
Not everything stays where it happened.
Some things remain just on the otherside of time.
The Isle of Wight
This island offers a magnificent mix of history and folklore packed into a relatively small and spectacular landscape, which is why its paranormal traditions feel so vivid.
Roman villas, Saxon battle sites, Tudor forts, ruined abbeys, Victorian hospitals, royal residences, smuggling coves, and isolated downland all overlap here, and each period leaves behind its own ghost stories and emotional atmosphere.
There is also a fascinating interaction between genuine oral tradition and later Victorian or 20th-century ghost writing. Some stories almost certainly evolved over centuries through local retelling, while others were romanticised by newspapers, guidebooks, paranormal investigators, and modern tourism.
Yet even embellished legends usually grow from something emotionally or historically real about the location.
The Island’s folklore often feels melancholic and atmospheric rather than overtly terrifying. Many of its hauntings are tied more to memories of grief and isolation, and of course the sea.
Not so many echoes of terrifying horror like those to be found in the Tower of London, or Windsor Castle, which are included in the British Hauntings sections of this site.
Archivist Nick Hammond
Arrived in 1961 into a cor-blimey family who lived in Bomb Alley, the east end of London. Scared early by a TV ghost story show called “The Stone Tapes”.
Nick spent a childhood year in a ferociously haunted Scottish farmhouse plagued, so most people suspected by the ghosts of tragic crimes of passion.
Never felt, heard or saw a thing.
He moved to the Isle of Wight in 1992 and worked as an assistant to the Island's famous ghost-hunter Margo Williams, until she passed in 2009.
A giant Thank you to all those who journeyed with Margo through weather fair and foul, braving hostile ruins and bluebell woods; to all Margo's army of ghost rescuers who helped so many find their way.