Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: The Peggy Gadfly’s Timeslip

This week, another timeslip tale.

I receive a lot of astonishing stories of intriguing paranormal incidents from Wirral Globe readers and, sometimes, categorizing them is difficult.

The following story has been pigeonholed as a timeslip, but technically it could also be classified as a case of teleportation.

Teleportation is a means of transferring energy or matter from point A to point B without physically passing through the space between those two points.

For years it was thought to be impossible, and teleportation was a "gimmick" utilised in the science fiction genre, most famously being used in the original Star Trek TV series by the ship’s engineer Scotty whenever he needed to beam Captain Kirk to a destination via the starship’s matter-transporter.

Real-life teleportation was first achieved on the quantum level in 1997, and this was only the teleportation of information in the form of photons – but now it would seem that matter – solid physical objects – can also be teleported, and this is down to the Breit-Wheeler Process – a way of making matter from energy.

You get two high energy photons (gamma photons) to collide with one another and that collision produces an electron and positron - a pair of particles that are solid, material objects – matter.

The reversal of this process – the turning of material particles into energy is known as the Dirac Process. By using a very sophisticated quantum computer, you could be scanned by a machine that converts your atoms into energy which is either transmitted by a carrier wave or entangled with the photons of a laser beam and your actual body – now converted for a brief instant into energy – could be transmitted to a teleporter receiver that converts you back into matter.

This might be as simple as a laser making a 3D hologram – but admittedly, the electronics used in our teleporter would be very sophisticated. Explaining it would be like trying to make Henry VIII understand the workings of a colour television – but – it will be done at some point in the future – and I believe this strong possibility may throw some light on the following strange story.

In the back garden of a house on New Brighton’s Victoria Parade in August 2022, a 60-year-old man named Jimmy McRandle was helping his 24-year-old daughter Jenny to cut the grass. Jimmy was sweating just guiding the Flymo over the grass, and Jenny reminded him how he used to be in shape when she was a kid and of the number of push-ups he’d do each day. 'I’m pushing sixty now, love,' he said with a smile, 'that’s the only pushing I’m going to do nowadays.'

Jenny offered her dad a bottle of a chilled high-energy drink as he switched off the Flymo, and he asked: 'What’s that noise?'

Father and daughter heard a faint crackling sound and then everything became quiet.

'I can feel static electricity all over me,' said Jenny. Dad Jimmy stroked his forearm and nodded: 'So can I, what is it?' he asked, and there was a loud bang which made Jenny scream.

The two of them saw everything go dark, and then found themselves surrounded by a bright green light. Now it was night.

A moment ago the August sun had been beating down on Jimmy and Jenny, but now it was night-time, and cold, and a full moon was hanging in the sky instead of the sun.

They were no longer in Jenny's back garden, either – they were outside a building that they recognised as the New Brighton Hotel – but when Jenny had visited the place a few days ago it had been called The Bar & Lounge – but now it was called Peggy Gadfly’s.

'How – how did we get here? What just happened?' Jenny asked her dad, and he looked as bewildered as her. He was gazing at the pub.

He slowly said: 'That used to be the name of the pub years ago – Peggy Gadfly's. What the hell is going on?'

The two of them had somehow travelled about 600 feet west of Jenny’s house, and, according to Jimmy, they appeared to have gone back in time.

'Oh my God, Jenny,' said Jimmy, looking at a red-haired man going into the pub, 'that's John Duffin – he died in the 1990s!'

'Let’s go to my place dad, come on,' Jenny suggested, grabbing her father by the arm, but he remained rooted to the spot. 'Let's just go in here and see what the bloody hell is going on.' 

He went into Peggy Gadfly's and there was a DJ named Alan who he hadn’t seen for years and there was Duffin, an old neighbour of Jimmy who had died of a brain haemorrhage around 1998.

Jimmy felt as if he was dreaming. He turned to Jenny, who was looking about nervously, and he said: 'I used to drink in here years back, when it was Lacey’s Bar, about 1995. Sweet Jesus, we’ve gone back in time.'

'Dad, let’s go, this is creeping me out,' said Jenny, but the ‘dead man’ John Duffin came over, looked Jimmy up and down and asked him if he was related to Jimmy McRandle.

'I AM Jimmy McRandle,' came the reply, 'it's me, John.'

John shot a puzzled look at Jimmy, then gazed at his grey hair and smiled: 'Jimbo’s hair’s as black as coal; you his uncle?'

'No, I told you – 'Jimmy replied, but his daughter grabbed his hand and squeezed it and said: 'Dad! Let's go. We’re not supposed to be here.'

Jimmy noticed the tabloid newspaper on a table in the corner. He picked it up and read the date; Friday, 27 September, 1996. On the pub telly, the game show Catchphrase with Roy Walker was just starting.

'Can I get you and your lovely daughter a jar?' John Duffin asked, eyeing Jenny, but Jimmy turned and walked out of the pub, and Jenny hurried after him.

They strolled up Victoria Road, the two of them in a daze, unsure what they were doing, and the night paled before their eyes, and the sun reappeared and then Jenny noticed her neighbour in his Land Rover Discovery 5 - a vehicle that had certainly not been around in 1996. They had returned to 2022.

Jimmy McRandle felt relieved to be back, yet so sad; he had been 34 'back there' – where had all those years gone to?

He told his wife what had happened and she was convinced someone had somehow spiked coffee he and Jenny had drunk earlier that day.

It would seem, through some unknown phenomenon, a man and his daughter were teleported through space and time to a location 26 years into the past and to repeat an earlier analogy, trying to understand how this happened would be like Henry VIII attempting to comprehend the circuitry of a colour TV.

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