Hi Eardrum.
A couple of things here that might help. Jonny S' description can be taken a step further. Do google search for "Einstein Rings". These are arcs of light that appear around galaxies (and sometimes stars). They are the effects of mass warping space time and turning the space around the galaxy into a sort of lense. What we are seeing in the arcs is a galaxy that is directly behind the foreground galaxy. Now we shouldn't be able to see the rear galaxy but we do in the form of these arcs. The intervening galaxy has acted like a lens and this lens is formed of space/time being warped into a shape like a lens by gravity which is a caracteristic of mass.
As for you ideas on the black hole. If an observer were to watch someone fall towards a black hole they would appear to get slower and slower and slower and never quite seem to get to the event horizon. But to the person falling towards the black hole they would experience no slowing down at all. They would continue to be drawn in by gravity at an increasing rate. Just like us jumping off a building only there would be no terminal velocity until you hit the speed of light and the singularity. After that.....Who knows. Theoretically if the black hole is rotating rapidly or has an electrical charge (don't ask me how that would be possible I'm just relaying what I read
) then theoretically you could possibly get to another universe/space-time/place/event??? Unfortunately you would have to survive the extreme tidal forces of the black hole first>