My name is Samuel Paulinby. I am a teacher of the Deaf in Washington, D.C. I am 46 years

old. I've had a good life and will always count my blessings. But four weeks ago, I experienced

an awful trauma brought on by nothing more than seeing a certain classified ad in the Washington

Post of Thursday, November 5, 2005. Since then, I've been fighting depression and insomnia

as I tried to let go of one single hour nearly 20 years in the past. The classified

ad which drew me back through the years was a call for anyone who had been writing on

the Metro Rail System on the night of April 12, 1988, between 11 p.m. and midnight, and

witnessed anything strange to meet at the Petworth Library on Kansas Avenue in the city

on a Wednesday night. The ad did not mention any specific incident or accident, as was usually

the custom in the post when people posted ads looking for witnesses to testify in court.

More unusual still was that the person who placed the ad was looking for witnesses to remember

a night 17 years in the past. After three days of deliberation, I gathered my resolve and showed

up at the library on the appointed night. I found two people sitting in a small community room.

Even though 17 years had passed since I first saw them and I was only in their company

back then for one hour, I recognized them instantly.

Ellen Winterberg, who lived in Old Town, Alexandria, was now 49 years old. She was the one who

had placed the ad and summoned fellow Metro riders with long memories. She had set up the meeting

only after a year's worth of sudden awful dreams had almost proven to her beyond a doubt

that what she had seen within the Metro system on the night of April 12, 1988 had not been an illusion.

She needed other people to confirm it. She had been able to bury that night in her subconscious

for almost two decades, but then during a brief power failure inside a metro station,

the previous February had it all come back to her. As it turned out, the only two people who had

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