HAUNTED WIRRAL: A timeslip to the seventies

In this latest tale, Alan takes an unexpected trip back in time.

I'VE been receiving quite a volume of emails from readers in response to the timeslip accounts published in my Wirral Globe column.

The stories of people who have somehow walked or driven into the past or future have given many readers the confidence to "come out" and share their own experiences of slippages in time and space.

Here's just one intriguing report from a Rock Ferry reader named Jen.

In the summer of 2018, Jen and her 70-year-old father Alan went to visit a relative in Thornton Hough. Afterwards, Jen and her dad went to have a drink in the beer garden of the Seven Stars pub on the corner of Church Road and Thornton Common Road.

It was a beautiful sunny afternoon and at one point, Jen went to the toilet in the pub and also made a telephone call to her sister, who lives in Wallasey.

When Jen returned to her table, she could not see her dad. She checked inside the Seven Stars pub, but he wasn’t there, so she waited for a while, in case he'd gone the toilet, but he didn't show.

Jen asked a man who came out the toilet if her father was in there, and described him as grey-haired, with a van dyke beard, and wearing a grey shirt and jeans.

The man went back into the toilet, but emerged less than 15 seconds later shaking his head.

"Has he got his mobile on him?" the man asked Jen. She replied that he hadn't – he was one of those rare people who had always shunned mobile phones.

"If you're worried, you'll have to go to the police," the man said, with a sympathetic expression. Now Jen started to panic.

She went back to the beer garden – and still couldn’t find her father.

What Jen didn't know was that something extraordinary had happened to Alan.

When she had left her father in the beer garden to go to the toilet, Alan had been approached by an old friend he'd worked with before he retired; a 65-year-old Upton man named Marty.

Marty had come over to Alan and said: "Alan, can I just show you something over there?" and nodded sideways, indicating the direction of St George's Church across the road from the beer garden.

"I can't, I'm with me daughter;" Alan had replied, "why? What do you want to show me?"

"You'd have to see it to believe it," Marty had replied, cryptically. "Just come over, it’ll take less than a minute."

Alan had reluctantly left his drink at the table before accompanying Marty across the road.

Marty looked around with a furtive expression, then stepped onto the green of the church and walked behind the thick trunk of an old beech tree.

For a moment, Alan thought his friend had lost his marbles with this strange behaviour.

Alan went round the tree and saw Marty feeling the grey smooth trunk of the beech with his palms. Then Marty smiled, turned to a baffled Alan and said: "This is the part you won't believe – just follow me – just walk close behind me, in my footsteps almost."

"Marty, Jen's going to be looking for me;" said Alan, "what’s all this rigmarole about?" 

Then Alan felt his ears pop, and when he followed Marty around the tree, saw something very odd.

There was a gleaming brand new cream and sky-blue Vanguard Sportsman car parked up on Thornton Common Road – a vintage car that Alan had not seen since he was a kid; they had stopped making them in the 1950s.

Then he saw an Austin Morris 1100 pull up at the post office across the road – and that too looked new – but it was another car from yesteryear.

Marty turned to Alan and said: "We've gone back in time; last time I did this it was the eighties – this time it looks like the seventies."

"What do you mean, gone back – " Alan was saying when he saw a boy with long hair and green flared trousers on a Raleigh Chopper bike freewheeling down the road.

Then he saw a couple in their twenties walking past on this gloriously hot summer’s day. The young man looked like a dead-ringer for David Cassidy and the girl he was with wore a bib and brace and sported a haircut identical to Suzi Quatro.

Alan simply accepted that he and Marty had gone back in time to some point in the 1970s, whereas his friend seemed fascinated, yet very nervous.

Marty took out his iPhone and quickly navigated to the camera icon.

He told Alan he had tried this before, but the pictures were always blurred, and obscured by a black diagonal band which reminded him of the band that appeared on old chemical photographs when you tried to take a picture of a television screen.

The two men visited the post office, then went to the Seven Stars pub and mingled with drinkers dressed in flares and shirts with penny collars.

Then Marty drew Alan's attention to the ghostly-looking figures outside the pub – they looked like people from the 21st Century walking about, but they were very faint and see-through, and Alan noticed that one of them was his daughter, Jen.

He shouted at her and she reacted by turning around, but she obviously couldn’t see Alan.

"Marty, let's go back;" said Alan, fearing he'd be stranded in an age he had no business to be in, "how do we get back?"

"Look at this woman," said Marty, ogling a blonde in yellow hotpants, but Alan swore at him and said: "Marty! How do we get back?"

Marty led his friend back to the beech tree, and the two men walked closely around it – but nothing happened – the 1970s were still there.

Marty did another orbit of the tree, and this time the vintage cars and dated people had vanished.

Alan walked across the road and saw Jen, and she ran to him, hugged her father, and asked where he’d been, and he told her.

Marty showed Jen the tree where, he explained, there was some opening to another time which occasionally came into play, but Jen backed away, and she called for a taxi.

All the way home, Alan talked about the strange incident, but Jen made him promise he would never go near that tree ever again, for she was afraid of losing her dad.

Modern quantum physics says there are portals into the past and future, but they are notoriously difficult to find and utilise – but perhaps they are more commonplace than we think...

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