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

This week, another timeslip tale ...

IN the summer of 1984, Roy and Barry, two Birkenhead men in their thirties, decided to photocopy around 500 leaflets to publicise their latest attempt at bringing in a few bob.

The two odd-job men had invented a business with the bizarre name of Kilimanjaro Plastering.

They posted the leaflets through letterboxes across Birkenhead and hoped the outlandish business name would get them noticed.

They waited for over a week for the phone to ring, and just after Roy quipped: "I think zeppelin pilots are more likely to get a job than us," the telephone rang.

It was an elderly woman named Mrs Morris.

She wanted Kilimanjaro Plastering to do the walls of her daughter’s renovated house on Serpentine Road, Wallasey.

Mrs Morris accepted the rates of pay quoted by Roy and the two men turned up at the property on the following Monday morning.

Roy had more plastering experience than Barry and listened to Penny, the daughter of Mrs Morris, as she told him what she wanted done.

Penny wanted the walls of the front parlour and hallway Artexed. Just before the plasterers started work, Roy said he'd get a couple of masks because he thought there was blue asbestos around the wall where the central heating cupboard was and from that moment, Barry didn’t want to continue with the job.

"That stuff kills, Roy," Barry told his friend, but Roy said they’d be alright if they kept their masks on.

On the second day at the job, an electrician named John turned up at the house, and he was there to rewire the renovated house, and Barry told him about the blue asbestos and asked him if he thought he’d be alright with the mask.

John said: "I don't know mate; I think they have special respirators for asbestos, like. I'm keeping well away from the hallway."

John then went into the kitchen to make himself a cuppa. Barry started telling Roy about his fears of getting asbestosis – and Roy snapped.

He turned and roared at Barry: "Look, you big jessie – you’ll be alright as long as you keep your mask on! There's a tiny little bit of the stuff in the wall and we’re going to plaster over it!"

John the electrician came into the hall to get a toolbox he’d left there and said to Roy: "Alright mouth almighty, simmer down!"

"I don’t want to be here,’ said Barry, and something very strange took place.

In an instant, Barry, Roy and John suddenly found themselves two miles away in some shopping centre.

John recalled that he had seen a bright blue light around himself and the two plasterers before they had all somehow been transported to what turned out to be the Grange Precinct in Birkenhead, two miles away from the house on Serpentine Road.

Several people in Grange Precinct witnessed the sudden appearance of the two plasters and looked at them in awe, as if they were apparitions.

John the electrician stood there in shock for a moment, then went around asking bemused people where he was, for he was naturally confused at the sudden change of scenery. Seconds ago he’d been in the hallway of a house in Wallasey.

Roy and Barry were looking about with confused expressions, unable to take in what had just happened.

Roy had to finish the plastering job on his own, as Barry refused to return to the house; not just because he was scared of the asbestos, he also now believed the house was haunted after the unearthly teleportation.

He fell out with Roy, but weeks later they patched up their differences, and Kilimanjaro Plastering was "wound up".

Roy and Barry later contacted me on the Billy Butler Show to tell me of the strange incident and John the electrician also backed up their story.

He had told many people of the apparent teleportation but no one believed him. Teleportation – the transference of people or objects from one place to another in an instant – has long been used as a way of moving a story along in science fiction (as in the use of the matter transporter to beam Captain Kirk to and from a planet’s surface in Star Trek), but it would seem teleportation, like many of the concepts that were once classed as science fiction, could be possible if one was to use what is known as a "wormhole" – a special tunnel-like structure through spacetime which is actually based on the special solution to the Einstein field equations.

In other words, wormholes are entirely consistent with the General Theory of Relativity, but at the present level of our technology, it is exceedingly difficult to construct a wormhole, as tremendous amounts of energy are required and lot of exotic materials – but – there may be occasions when a wormhole through the spacetime continuum occurs naturally, and anyone entering such a tunnel in time could find themselves either in the past or future, or in their own time, but miles away from the wormhole’s point of entry.

Is it possible that Barry, when he said: "I don't want to be here," somehow caused that wormhole to open up, perhaps through some psychic force?

It's probably pointless to speculate, but something seems to have triggered the teleportation.

A Wirral Globe reader from Heswall named Kirsty told me how, one rainy night in November 2009, she was driving along Barnston Road, on her way to a relative’s house.

As she had turned right onto Storeton Lane (not far from the Fox & Hounds pub), she found herself on the Lever Causeway – well over two miles away.

Kirsty had somehow travelled those two miles in seconds, but was naturally baffled as to how this had happened.

It might have been teleportation, and I have many similar cases on file where car journeys have been inexplicably shortened in such a way.

As slow but sure advancements are made in quantum physics, we may one day find the answer to these strange mysteries of time and space.

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