Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: Stuart Jessup’s doppelganger

This week, face to face with a terrifying double ...

I've changed a few names in the following strange account for legal reasons.

Stuart Jessup was a vain 30-year-old who was once caught red-handed by a policeman with a marker in his hand, scrawling on a wall at Rock Ferry station, 'I love Stu Jessup' in block letters.

In June 1974, Stuart was dating a beautiful 27-year-old woman named Anna Forsyth, a wallpaper design artist who was starting to make a name for herself, and moved into a house with her on Hoylake's Ferndale Road.

Stuart was not in work at the time despite Anna showing him all of the vacancies in the local newspaper's situations vacant column, and for some reason, got it into his head that he could make a living as a male model.

On this bright sunny June afternoon, Stuart stood in the middle of Anna’s studio in the attic (where she created her wallpaper designs) and posed in front of a full-length mirror. ‘I look striking,’ he said to his reflection, and just as Anna told him: 'Self-praise is no recommendation,' there was a tremendous bang in the heavens over Hoylake.

The skies darkened, so much that Anna had to switch her desk lamp on. A bolt of lightning came through the window and hit the full-length mirror, and the deafening blast blew the elongated-looking glass and Stuart across the attic into a wall.

Anna sat there in shock at her drawing board.

She saw Stuart get up and stagger to her in a dazed condition, his mouth moving, but Anna couldn’t tell what he was saying because the thunder blast had temporarily deafened her.

That afternoon, lightning from the out-of-season thunderstorms killed two horses in Cheshire, and after that day, strange things began to happen to Stuart Jessup.

At first, he thought his friends were pulling his leg; some had told him that he had a double knocking about who was walking about in a long white nightshirt, whereas others accused Stuart of being the so-called double, and branded him as a weird attention-seeker.

One of Stuart’s ex-girlfriends said she had seen the double walking along Ferndale Road one evening that summer, and he had worn a long white robe that went down to his bare feet.

The girl had let on to the creepy man, thinking it was Stuart at first, but when she saw his beady staring eyes and pallid skin close up, she realised it was not her ex, but someone pretending to be him, and she hurried away.

'If you’re trying to scare me,' Stuart told the girl, ‘you’ll have to come up with a better ghost story than that, love.’

The strangely-attired double of Stuart Jessup was then seen by multiple witnesses on an August evening that year at a party on Trinity Road.

The lookalike came into the party dressed in his long white nightshirt and asked several of the guests: 'Where does Stuart Jessup live?' and one of the men present told what he saw as an 'unbalanced impersonator' the address of Anna Forsyth’s house on Ferndale Road.

That night, there was a heavy knocking at Anna’s front door and she stooped in the hallway of her home, looked through the letterbox and asked who was calling at such a late hour – and then she saw that the caller looked just like Stuart, and yet she knew Stuart was upstairs soaking himself in his Radox bath with a mud mask on.

She told the carbon copy of Stuart to leave or she’d call the police but he never reacted; he remained rooted to the spot with bulging eyes and an expressionless face.

She heard the sinister caller outside say, ‘I want to swap places with Stuart – he will lay in my grave and I will lead his life.’

Anna slid the bolt on and ran up the stairs to the bathroom.

She barged in on Stuart and told him about the demented man on the doorstep, and Stuart got out of the bath and wound a bath towel around himself as he went onto the landing.

He looked out the bedroom window and saw the man gazing up at him in the moonlight, and when he saw the face was an exact copy of his own, Stuart felt a shudder go down his spine.

He watched the double walk away down Ferndale Road, then got dressed.

On the following day, Burt Wynne, an old friend of Stuart turned up at the house and said he had seen Stuart’s double walking along Marmion Road at 2am, and when he had crossed over the road to talk to him, the figure had vanished. ‘Oh, it’s a ghost now, is it?’ said Stuart, sarcastically, but Anna could tell he was just putting a brave face on; he was genuinely scared of the spooky stalker.

Burt insisted the figure had vanished when he had gone to chat with it, and then he asked, ‘Why would I even make that up?’

‘It doesn’t make sense,’ said Stuart, ‘why would my double be haunting me? It told Anna it wants to swap places with me so I’d be in a cemetery and it’d live my life.’

‘I think they’re called doppelgangers Stu,’ said Burt; ‘honest mate, I read about them somewhere – they’re like a ghostly twin, and if you start seeing them its curtains.’

Stuart turned to Anna with a lopsided grin and asked, ‘Have you ever heard of these doppelgangers?’ And Anna nodded, wiping the smirk off Stuart’s face.

The thing knocked again that night, and shouted through the letterbox, ‘You should be dead and I should be alive!’

Stuart had had enough, and he left Anna and asked Burt Wynne if he could stay in his house – a secluded semi on Frankby Road.

Burt said he had relatives staying over and that the only room Stuart could stay in was a tiny box room, but Stuart said that was fine, and he slept in an old child’s bed in the room with the Bible and a crucifix under his pillow.

Then one morning around 2am, the door of the box room burst open, and there in the doorway stood Stuart Jessup’s terrifying double; the nightshirt looked more like a burial shroud, and there was an awful smell coming from the figure.

Somehow Stuart barged past the apparition, screaming, waking the entire household up. Stuart ran out of the house and hid in a neighbour’s front garden, and he watched as his replica wandered off. Burt Wynne followed the ghost, and saw it walk into Frankby Cemetery and vanish.

It was never seen again after that night.

Anna believed that when the lightning struck the mirror Stuart had been looking in that June afternoon, his reflected image had somehow passed into this world, but that is pure conjecture, and the case of Stuart’s doppelganger remains a mystery to this day.

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