History tells us what happened. Folklore remembers how it felt.
Events and Echoes
Through history, folklore, eyewitness accounts, investigations and reflections on unexplained experience, Otherside of Time explores the echoes people believe remain after remarkable events.
Most disappear. Some seem to linger.
Are those echoes psychological, cultural, spiritual or something we do not yet understand? You decide.
The Isle of Wight
This island contains an extraordinary concentration of British history within a relatively small landscape. Roman villas lie beneath farmland. Norman castles dominate ancient hills. Tudor gun forts still face the Channel. Medieval abbeys slowly return to nature and Victorian hospitals continue to cast long shadows across the Island's memory.
Every generation has left its own stories behind. Some became history. Others became folklore.
The Isle of Wight's ghost stories are fascinating because they reveal how folklore develops. Some appear to have been handed down through local tradition for generations. Others were expanded by Victorian writers, investigated by 20th century researchers, or shaped for modern audiences.
However they evolved, most began with a place, an event or a memory that mattered deeply to the people who lived there.
Unlike the darker traditions surrounding places such as the Tower of London, the Isle of Wight's folklore often feels reflective rather than terrifying.
Its ghost stories are filled with loss and loneliness, shipwrecks, and forgotten communities and the enduring presence of the sea.
Archivist
Nick Hammond has lived on the Isle of Wight since 1992 and has spent more than three decades documenting its folklore, local history and paranormal traditions.
Between 1992 and 2009 he worked alongside the Island's well-known clairaudient investigator Margo Williams, accompanying investigations, preserving case material and later helping to compile what became the Margo Williams Archive.
Although fascinated by reports of unexplained experiences from an early age, his approach has always remained exploratory rather than dogmatic.
Otherside of Time preserves stories, historical records and eyewitness testimony, leaving readers free to reach their own conclusions.