WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

This week, Tom explores Wallasey's violent ghost mystery.

I HAVE over a thousand stories relating to unidentified ghosts, with a good percentage of them relating to Wirral, and the following unknown ghost is a case in point.

The apparition seems to have been seen as early as the 1930s (and was probably seen a long time before that).

One windy evening in March 1939, the apparition – that of a young woman in a long black ankle-length robe and long black hair covering her face – was seen by the gate of a house on Wallasey's Monk Road, and within hours, a Mr Evans, who lived at the house, passed away aged 77.

He'd been ill for some time, so his death was expected, and yet there were rumours that the woman in black had been a banshee, because her face had been partially covered by her long hair – one of the characteristics of the Celtic harbinger of doom, although the sinister phantom did not wail as the banshee is always said to do before she warns of imminent death.

A night watchman on his way to work had seen the apparition that evening, and so had a neighbour and two young sweethearts lingering in the alleyway off Monk Road.

The lovers had been quite close to the ghost, and claimed it was surrounded by a fiery crimson glow.

In October 1942, we have a wartime sighting of the same ghost, again on Monk Road, just a few doors away from the spot it was seen four years before.

On this occasion it was seen around 11pm by guests at a party thrown by two newly-weds named Thompson.

The party was attended by over sixty people and many spilled out onto the street, and around a dozen guests saw the eldritch figure.

This time she had her head bowed slightly, again with her long black hair covering her face, stirred by the autumnal breeze.

The weird form stood in the middle of the road, and was taken as one of the living at first until it lit up with a red light and started to sing a very mournful song in an unknown language.

One of the guests - a Welsh history teacher - said the woman sounded as if she was singing something in the Brythonic language – one of the ancestral tongues of Wales.

A tipsy guest named Drake, who hailed from Chester, confronted the weirdly-attired singer, and she stopped singing, screamed at him, and scratched his face before vanishing into thin air.

The vanishing act sobered many of the guests, and again, the ghost was regarded as some omen or a banshee, but there were no apparent deaths connected to the chilling visitation.

The scratches on the face of the guest from Chester never healed for almost a month.

In 1966, a plumber returning to his home on Monk Road around 10:30pm after a night at his local saw a silhouetted woman in what seemed to be a long black dress down to the ground, standing by the gate of a house.

He said 'evening' as he passed her and got no reply, but he felt the hairs on the back of his neck go up for some reason.

He told his wife what he had seen, and she asked: "Was she near the Funston’s house?" 

Her husband replied "No, further down." 

"I saw her earlier on when I put the cat out" said the plumber's wife "and I had an awful feeling about her – as if she was something spooky." 

The couple then went to the front parlour bay window and peeped out into the moonlit street.

They saw the figure approach a man the plumber had been drinking with – a man who hailed from Chester named Jim.

The weird-looking woman started to scream as she launched a vicious attack upon Jim.

She clawed at his face and then she grabbed his hair and as he tried to push the mad young woman away, she literally vanished into nothingness.

The plumber and his wife went out and told Jim they had seen the attack by the ghost and brought him in into the house to treat his face wounds as well as give him a whiskey to calm him down.

Jim had no idea why he had been waylaid by the ghost.

In 1971, a family was watching TV one night at their home on Monk Road when the ghost of a lady in a long black robe with long black greasy hair appeared.

She grabbed a large picture hanging over the fireplace and smashed it on the television set.

She screamed as she stomped on the painting - which depicted Chester's Eastgate Street - then vanished.

The ghost obviously had a hatred of people and things connected to Chester and this was the case in the next violent manifestation.

This took place in March 1974 as 29-year-old Chester man Gareth Brown drove 22-year-old girlfriend Julie home to Monk Road at 1:20am.

The black-robed ghost appeared in front of his Austin Maxi – causing him to swerve to avoid her.

Gareth got out the vehicle to give the girl a piece of his mind, and she screeched at him and tried to scratch his face.

He jumped back in the car and his girlfriend screamed as she saw the female attacker light up with a red glow – and she also noticed her hands were soaked with blood.

Gareth drove off, peeling rubber as he went.

Some think the vengeful ghost is the shade of some witch that was perhaps burned at the stake down in Chester many centuries ago, but if so, why haunt a road in Wallasey?

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