This article is about a form of residual haunting that takes on the feel of an "echo" from the past. It doesn't involve spirits in the general sense rather than the sounds of a horrible moment in history. Strong battles like the following often create impressions in time which can be felt years later. In this case, so far as I have ever seen, the echo only happened once. There may have been more not recorded or witnessed but the following is rather interesting nonetheless.
   On August 19, 1942 during World War II, over 6000 Allied soldiers (5000 of them Canadian) attempted a raid on the port of Dieppe in Normandy which was being held by Nazi Germany. The mission ended up as an unplanned failure resulting in bloodbath with serious casualties for the Allied troops.
   Nine years later, on August 4, 1951, two English women on vacation in Puys, one of the villages near Dieppe that had been one of the landing points of the battle, awoke to the sound of gunfire. For the next 3 hours, the 2 ladies sat in wonderment as they listened to sounds of the battle which came from nowhere.
   Nobody else in the area heard anything besides the two women, but their descriptions were so close to the official records of the event that the British Society for Psychical Research investigated the incident. After the investigation, they declared that "the experience must be rated as a genuine psychic experience." The description of the battle noises given by the women are compared with the official record of events below.

Description by Ladies	Offical Records
4:00am - The women hear men's cries "as if above a storm," with distinct sounds of gunfire and dive-bombing steadily becoming louder.	3:47am - Allied assault vessels exchanged fire with German ships. Troops manning beach defenses were probably shouting to each other.
4:50 - Abrupt silence.	4:50 - Zero hour for troop landings at Puys, but the operation was running 17 minutes behind schedule and firing may have stopped at this point.
5:07 - Waves of loud noise - mainly dive-bombers - but some faint cries in the background.	5:07 - Landing craft beached at Puys under heavy fire; then destroyers bombarded Dieppe with shells while aircraft attacked seafront buildings.
5:40 - Silence again.	5:40 - Naval bombardment stopped.
5:50 - Sound of aircraft in large numbers, with fainter background noises.	5:50 - Allied air reinforcements arrived and encountered German aircraft.
6:00 - All noise died away. 6:25 - More cries, gradually becoming fainter. 6:55 - Uninterrupted silence.	8:30 - Attack repulsed with appalling Canadian casualties. Survivors surrendered.

Reader's Digest - Strange Stories, Amazing Facts - 1976

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