Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: They bought a ghost

GHOSTS can attach themselves to all sorts of objects, and this week I'm looking at just two cases of people who unwittingly came into possession of a supernatural entity which was haunting an old item they purchased.

In 2002, Betty, a pensioner from Wallasey, telephoned me at Radio Merseyside with a strange and unsettling tale.

Betty explained that in October 1999, she was rummaging through a car boot sale in Birkenhead when she came across a, leather-bound photograph album which contained very old, sepia-toned pictures of people in Victorian clothes.

Half of the yellowed pages in the album were blank, but most of the photographs it contained featured two women and a sickly-looking little girl of about six or seven years of age.

The two older women looked like a mother and daughter. The mother's stance and expression always gave the impression of stern severity. To Betty she looked wicked.

Betty was intrigued by the old pictures and purchased the album for 50 pence. That's when strange things started to happen.

One morning, Betty came into her living room and found the Victorian album lying open on the table, which was odd, because she distinctly remembered putting it away in a cupboard the night before.

The following night Betty fell asleep, and had a terrifying dream. In the dream she was wearing iron leg calipers and was trying to get up a flight of stairs away from a wicked-looking old woman who was dressed in a high-collared blouse.

The harsh-looking woman wore her hair in a tight bun on the top of her head, and even in her dream. Betty recognised her; she was the woman featured in the dusty old photograph album. Betty was tormented in her dream as she somehow sensed that the woman was trying to kill her.

She was chasing her up the stairs. Betty struggled to escape, but she was having great difficulty climbing the stairs, hampered by the heavy calipers on her leg.

The dream grew even more disturbing when the old woman seized Betty by the throat and started to throttle her.

The pensioner woke up in a sweat and found herself totally paralysed with fear. She listened to the fast, pounding beats of her heart in the darkness of her bedroom.

After some time, Betty exerted sufficient willpower to cause her big toe to flex, then slowly regained movement in the rest of her body.

She was so bothered by the disturbing dream that she went downstairs to take another look at the old woman in the album - and got the shock of her life.

The album was lying open inside the cupboard, and the page showed a photograph of the sinister old woman.

She was smiling up from that faded page. Betty could not for the life of her remember seeing such a picture of the long-dead woman like that in the album before. She slammed the book shut and put it away in a large ornamental biscuit tin.

For the next three nights, Betty had a terrible recurring nightmare in which she was lying on a bed, unable to move. In every instance she felt as if she was the young girl in the photo album.

For some reason, each time in the harrowing nightmare, Betty saw the shadow of the woman with the bun in her hair sliding across the wall, then her evil grinning face would appear over her.

The woman then pushed a pillow over Betty's face, and she could feel the powerful pressure pushing down on her mouth and nose and eyes. Betty would fight for breath at this point, and would end up feeling as though she was suffocating. What made it more unbearable was the paralysis, the inability to move, and the haunting sound of her heart pounding away in her ears. Betty would wake up every time gasping for air, and unable to move a muscle for a while.

Enough was enough. Betty was determined to find out who the people in the photo album were and what the haunting episodes were relating to. She scrutinised the book, and discovered the faint words 'Mary Meer' written on the first page.

Betty contacted a friend who was interested in genealogy and tracing family trees, and over a six month period, he pieced together the story of the Meer family, who had lived in the area in the 1890s. What he told Betty shocked and upset her.

Mary Meer had a daughter named Philomena Meer, and a granddaughter named Francesca Meer, who had been a paraplegic. This girl had ended up as “a bedridden cripple” (as they were then called), and a rumour persisted in the Meer family for years that Mary had killed young Francesca in her bed.

The motive for the alleged murder is unknown.

Perhaps it was a so-called mercy killing because Francesca was paralysed, and maybe wasn't expected to live much longer. Betty believes the photo album is somehow haunted by the dead Victorian girl's spirit, so she has now given the book of photographs away; I wonder if the ghost still haunts that book?

In 1970, a 20-year-old Bromborough woman named Claire visited a school jumble sale and for a few shillings she bought a cute-looking vintage doll with curly golden hair and blue glass eyes.

Claire’s Uncle Richard was a retired antiques dealer, and he looked at the doll and opined from its "bisque" head that it was a Simon and Halbig creation, dating from around 1900.

Days after purchasing the doll, Claire returned from her workplace – Tesco on Bromborough’s Allport Lane – at 6pm, and her mother and younger sister said the ghost of what looked like a Victorian woman in black funereal clothes had been looking through the ground floor windows of the house – and her eyes had been fixed on the antique doll, which had been put in a display cabinet in the parlour.

Claire thought her mum and sister were pulling her leg at first, but then she too saw the eerie woman in black near Bromborough Cross as she went to work on the following day.

Not everyone could see the woman in black, and the shade even went into Tesco and gazed at a terrified Claire with a look of hatred.

When Claire walked home, she was followed all the way from the supermarket by the creepy ghost, and so the girl gave the doll to the headmaster of the school where she had purchased it in the jumble sale.

He seemed to know of the old toy’s reputation and said he didn’t want it.

Claire left the doll outside her house near the front gate, and the woman in black was seen to pick it up before vanishing. Perhaps it had belonged to a daughter of the ghostly woman.

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