Haunted Wirral: The mysterious mummies under Bidston Hill

THERE are mysteries in the earth beneath our feet – treasures, wonders and horrors that are probably best left unexcavated.

There are tunnels criss-crossing Wirral, and some of them were excavated during World War Two to access subterranean munitions dumps and air-raid shelters, and of course there are railway tunnels and there are also secret passages that run from the coast which were used by smugglers in the Mother Redcap era.

But deeper still in the earth, there are enigmatic objects feared by mainstream archaeologists called Ooparts, an acronym-like word for Out-of-place-artifacts – things that have been found in places where they shouldn’t be, according to orthodox dating methods.

We date fossils and other objects in the earth by the strata of rock they are found in, but sometimes we find things – like the coin bearing the date 1397, embedded in coal, meaning that the coin had been minted in the Carboniferous Period, which lasted from 359.2 to 299 million years ago.

Another unearthed object that makes a mockery of scientific chronology is the Baghdad Battery – an earthenware jar containing an iron rod, a copper cylinder and traces of some acidic substance. It was deemed to be a 'primitive' 1.5 volt battery used by silversmiths around the time of Christ to electroplate jewellery – and yet our history books tell us that the first battery was made by Alessandro Volta in 1800.

We also have a problem explaining away the Greek computer known as the Antikythera mechanism, found in the silt of an ancient shipwreck found off the Greek island of Antikythera in 1902.

The complex analogue computer is a mass of high-precision cog wheels which would have allowed Greek scientists over a century before the birth of Christ to have computed the movement of planets and allowed them to predict eclipses. So, just before the fall of their great civilization, it would seem that the Greeks came very close to the achievements of our modern age.

Further back, the Egyptians used lightning conductors on the mysterious pyramids, and they also knew the principles of aviation, according to some archaeologists who have examined the “Saqqara Bird” - a toy glider, made of sycamore, which has a fuselage, curved wings and a vertical stabilizer fin at its tail.

It might have been a toy for the child of a Pharaoh – but larger gliders might have been built, thousands of years before the Wright Brothers took to the air.

I could spend all day talking about lost achievements, but let us look at just one local example of an archaeologist’s nightmare.

In January 1974, two former Marines in their early forties named Mike and Terry, went for a brisk walk on Bidston Hill on the day after an earthquake had struck North Wales and parts of Wirral.

Terry's younger brother, Brian, a keen birdwatcher, had claimed he had seen a mini avalanche on Bidston Hill during the tremor, and Terry, knowing Brian was something of an exaggerator, went to have a look for himself with his friend Mike.

The two men found an opening in the hill about five feet in height and seven feet across which had not been there before. It looked as if Brian had been telling the truth after all, as there were chunks of sandstone and around the opening, which had tumbled down after the tremor.

The former Marines had a look inside the opening – and saw what seemed to be rough steps carved out of a passage that went down an almost vertical wall of rock.

The two men later came on The Billy Butler Show and told me what they found when they descended those steps. First Mike went to his car and found a flashlight, and then he and Terry made the perilous descent into a huge cave, about a hundred feet or more below.

The men looked up, and as their eyes adjusted to the dark, and saw what they took to be Celtic carvings of triskelions and bas relief images of faces with pointed chins – and the winter sun, emerging from grey clouds, suddenly shone through the opening high above on Bidston Hill, sending a golden shaft of its light down onto a very eerie scene.

Leaning against one wall were two figures that looked as if they were mummies – but on closer inspection, Mike saw that the bodies did not look human at all; there was something insect-like about the limbs, and the heads, with skulls bearing huge eye sockets, gave the appearance of bug-eyes.

The duo looked desiccated – bone dry and shrivelled up – and their bones reminded Mike of the exoskeleton of an insect more than a human.

After a cursory search of the cave, Terry was of the opinion that they were in some ancient sunken cathedral.

He formed this opinion from the arched opening and carvings of Celtic crosses on the walls, and a huge block of stone that seemed to be an altar. Above this block there was a huge spiral carved into the stone and it seemed to be inlaid with gold.

"I don't like the look of these things," Terry said to Mike, nodding to the dried-up alien-looking husks of the two bodies, and then the cave shook.

Rocks fell down from the entrance high above.

The ex-Marines kept their cool and started to climb the rudimentary steps back to the sunlit world above. At one point Terry let the torch slip and it crashed to the ground as he was nearing the opening.

That opening was now much smaller since the tremor, but the men just managed to get through it when they felt Bidston Hill shake.

The hole vanished with the subsidence, and the men visited a geologist at Liverpool University who confidently told them that Bidston Hill did not have any huge caverns – and this expert was not even aware of the well-documented tunnels under Bidston Hill.

Mike and Terry wanted to excavate the site on the hill but were warned off by the authorities.

When they told their strange tale on the radio, many listeners called in to talk of strange subterranean goings on at Bidston Hill. Perhaps ground-penetrating radar could clear this mystery up ...

• Tom Slemen’s books and audiobook are on Amazon.