It was October 3, 1963, and Colleen, at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska, had no plans to walk out of time, that much is pretty well taken for granted. She was on her way to pick up some papers from the dean at Wesleyan, where she worked as a secretary, with her mind on the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, when she walked through the doors of the administration building. It was exceptionally busy today, she remembered thinking, as students and professors hurried on their respective missions. She waved to a couple of professors that she knew, then walked into a room off to the right of the hallway and disappeared through space and time ~ Immediately after she closed the door behind her, Colleen knew something was wrong. She was struck by an odor, a strong smell of mildewed books and rotting grass. And the sound, the sound of .. . nothing. The silence was just as disturbing as the smell, it was if she had just walked into a soundless Universe. “As I entered the room,” she later wrote, “everything was quite normal. About four steps into the room was where the strong odor hit me. When I say odor, I mean the kind that simply stops you in your tracks and almost chokes you.” “Everything was deathly quiet,” she said. “I looked up and something drew my eyes to the cabinet along the wall into the next room. I looked up again and there she was. She had her back to me, reaching up into one of the shelves of a cabinet with her right hand, and standing perfectly still.” Colleen felt the panic rise up in her throat ~ The strange woman standing before her didn’t seem to be moving at all. It was as if she was frozen in time, a phantom that appeared all too real. What was just as disturbing was the fact that the phantom didn’t appear to be aware of Colleen’s sudden appearance in this “Twilight Zone” of reality. “While I was watching her she never once moved. She was not transparent, and yet I knew she wasn’t real. While I was looking at her, she just faded away-not parts of her body one at a time, but her whole body all at once.” Frightened and shocked by the apparition, Colleen stumbled backward, trying to find her way out this dimensional shift and flee the room. “I’m not sure whether I ran or walked over to the window. When I looked out that window, there wasn’t one modern thing out there. The street (Madison Street) which is less than half a block away from the building wasn’t even there and neither was the new Willard House.” That’s not saying there were no people.. . there were. Just not anyone.. . solid. And definitely not anyone she knew. There were horse drawn carriages and old fashioned cars, however. “These people were not in my time,” Colleen said. “I was back in their time.” Colleen stumbled back to the door trying desperately not to think about the implications of what was happening to her or about the ghosts and sights outside the window. She just wanted, NEEDED to get out and back to her own time. She threw herself at the door, pulled it open and ran into the hallway, fully expecting this surrealistic nightmare to continue with the phantoms in hoop skirts and other relics from the past. But it was over. When she went out into the hall she saw students, professors, some of them very familiar faces. The hallway, the students, the sights and the smells were all thankfully back to normal. Somehow she had slipped through the cracks of time and she was scared-more than she had ever been in her entire life. Word of Colleen Baterbaugh’s time-walk spread like wildfire around campus. Eventually someone on the staff told her that she perfectly described a former music teacher at the school. The only glitch in that was that the teacher had been dead since 1936. Apparently the music teacher had died in the very room where Colleen slipped reality. (Blue Moon News)