24 – The Mandela Effect – Vortexes and Hanging Rock

This Was No Picnic

Remembering songs that never occurred are one thing. A skeptic will dismiss it as a false memory.

This is not an unreasonable thing to think. Let’s face it, who hasn’t misremembered something they swore they knew happened?  (Or so it would seem…)

With that in mind, I’m going to discuss an incident that is hard to explain away.

Hanging Rock

There’s this rather famous book by Joan Lindsay called Picnic at Hanging Rock. It’s about the disappearance of three girls back in Woodend, Victoria, Australia, back in the early 1900s. During the 1970s, it was made into a movie.

Hanging Rock is indeed a real place. It is near Woodend, and is a tourist destination. It is a large rock, which can be climbed and explored.

I used to go there a lot during the late 1980s and early 1990s.  I’ve had my share of unusual experiences there.

I would usually go at night with my best friend at the time, Paul.  Like me, he had a fascination for unusual places.

Two Main Roads

Hanging Rock had two main roads on each side of it.  Both continued straight from the highway and if you drove up far enough, you would run into dirt roads.

Paul and I would go up there at night, sometimes by ourselves, sometimes with friends.

One night we drove there. The trip itself was uneventful.  It wasn’t until we started to drive up the road leading to Hanging Rock that I began to feel that something wasn’t quite right. Something about the road didn’t seem to be real; and I commented on it.  Paul felt it, as well.

The night was mild, the moon was waning, but it was still shining enough light.

The Dirt Road

There are huge steel gates that allow entry to the park where Hanging Rock is, and you can’t really miss them, but somehow, we did.

We kept on driving, and we soon came across the dirt road. It took me by surprise since I had come a lot further than I thought. I suddenly found myself going straight through a give way sign and onto it.

“Oh, well done,” said Paul, “But, I suppose it’s late.”

“I didn’t think that we’d come this far,” I said. “Did we pass the gates?”

“We have, but I didn’t see them.  Nor did I see the sign saying 100 meters to Hanging Rock. This is the dirt track that I once went up with some other friends. We went up it three times and we still couldn’t find the gates.”

The Gates

We drove on for a bit, but the road didn’t seem to be going anywhere of interest, and Paul felt a bit uneasy about continuing.  We decided to turn back and find the gates.

And find them, we did. We went back down that same road and it wasn’t long before they appeared.

As mentioned, they are huge and very hard to miss.

Not surprisingly, they were closed.

There had been times when they were left open, and we’d go in and climb the rock. (Especially if it was night.)

The Other Road

Paul suggested we check the other side to see if the gates were open there. I agreed, and so we did. When we got to the other road, however, I noted something was wrong.

“This is a dirt track. It should be a sealed road,” I said.

“I know, go on,” replied Paul, rather calmly. “Continue up it.”

I saw the sign that said Hanging Rock Tourist Road, and soon after we came across the gates on the other side. They were also closed.

A Fork In The Road

As I continued down the road that led from the gate, back to Woodend, I saw a car coming towards us in the distance.  It then turned and disappeared. A short time later, I arrived at the spot the car had turned.

Now, I had been up that road many times. It’s a straight road with barely any turn-offs. Paul, who was far more familiar with the layout of the area also knew this, too.

“Left turn, Gary,” he said.

I stared incredulously at the road. “There is no ‘T’ intersection on this road,” I stated.

“I know,” he simply said.

“So, why is there one now? And what road was the car on, that was coming towards us?”

Paul had no answers, but he was unnervingly calm about it, too. Mind you, from his own stories, this was not the first time something like this had happened to him.

A Different Road

I turned to the left; and then soon made a right hand turn and found myself on the proper road again.

This road had appeared out of nowhere. It didn’t look new, and even if it was, it would have had to been put there in a matter of weeks. If you know anything about Victorian roads, it takes months, or even years, for anything to be completed.

Somehow, the layout of the area had changed around us.

What was even more curious was when I later asked friends about that road, who were also familiar with the area, they would describe the T intersection. They didn’t remember the road being straight.

Changing Realities

I have often suspected there is a rift or vortex in that area.

Hanging Rock is a place where groups gather to perform rituals during certain times of the year. It’s certainly not inconceivable that they may have opened something up.

Sometimes when I returned from there, I would have an odd sense of “newness”, as though I felt I had shifted into a new reality.

Paul went up there more often than me, and the weird thing about that was he would have completely different memories to mine. They were forever changing.

It would drive me crazy because we would argue about events where he would remember a completely different version to what I did. 

This would happen frequently. Even his stories on certain events in his life would change.  Sometimes they would alter only to revert back later to the original telling.

In all the years I knew him, I never heard him lie, or tell tall tales.

Even back in those days, I couldn’t help but wonder if a different version of him was coming back from Hanging Rock. Nowadays, with all I’ve experienced, I’m pretty sure it was.

Next: The Mandela Effect – Alternative Memories