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

I was recently talking to a doctor who has a practice in Wirral and was telling me that cases of tinnitus seem to be on the increase, adding that many patients are also reporting an auditory phenomenon that apparently waxes and wanes in certain areas of Wirral.

That is the dreaded Hum – a very invasive low-frequency sound that has been likened to the soft droning hum of a refrigerator, a noise similar to an idling diesel engine in the distance, and sometimes it has also been compared to the sound produced by a tuning fork.

Not everyone can hear the Hum, but some people are very perceptive regarding this nuisance noise, which causes those who hear it to become irritable and depressed, and at night the baffling sound causes chronic insomnia.

It swept the country in the 1970s and made headlines around the world, because apparently the Hum was heard abroad as well, in places ranging from the Gobi Desert to New York and the Australian outback.

Now it would seem that the Hum is back, and is being heard in every corner of the Wirral peninsula, parts of Merseyside, North Wales and Cheshire.

There are hotspots in Wirral where the Hum seems to be particularly intense - they are Bebington, Heswall, Wallasey and West Kirby.

In September 2023, a Bebington lady in her thirties named Lauren walked her dog from her home on Kirket Lane to the cemetery of St Andrew’s Church and upon reaching the junction at Highcroft Avenue and Church Road, started to see shimmering zigzag lines and a kaleidoscope of colours – the onset of a migraine of the type she had not had for years.

She thought about turning back but decided to walk on for her dog’s sake, and at this point she heard a loud, low humming sound. Lauren thought the sound might be somehow connected to her migraine, but then she met her sister-in-law Kate, who remarked upon the low-pitched sound before Lauren could even mention it.

Kate walked on and Lauren strolled around the cemetery at St Andrew’s when she felt a strange pressure on her eardrums as the low sound turned into a painful throbbing sensation.

The dog started to whimper as it looked at something behind its owner, and Lauren turned to see what it was.

It was a silvery lens-shaped craft hovering near the tower of the church.

It stayed there in mid-air for about a minute or less, then ascended steadily upwards, and as it did, Lauren’s ‘migraine’ faded away rapidly and so did that humming sound. Lauren hurried home with the dog, and she later heard that the same UFO had been seen over Bromborough Road.

Could UFOs have something to do with the Hum? Could their occupants (whoever or whatever they are) be trying to manipulate our minds using audio frequencies for some arcane reason?

It has been noted that these unexplained sounds sometimes seem to travel in an almost laser-like straight line, and this has led some researchers to wonder if they might be the remnants of the fabled ley-lines that allegedly criss-cross Wirral, connecting ancient sites like Bidston Hill and various mounds in this region.

The ley-lines are said to have existed in profusion all over this land in the past, and the greatest example are the standing stones of Stonehenge and Avebury, and numerous dowsers and some scientists have said some type of energy which borders in frequency on the audio range is being transmitted between these stones – but for what purpose is unknown.

An example of the directional “beam of sound” effect is the humming noise a woman kept hearing at her home on Salacre Lane, Upton, in 2012.

The lady and several friends only heard the sound in the kitchen and garden and a relative who lives on nearby Ford Road also heard the same low-pitched sound, but only when he was in the back garden.

This sound seemed to tie in with recent reports of a hum being heard by motorists passing through a certain stretch of the M53 and also with a baffling noise that was heard by staff and patients at a local care home.

When traced on a map, the locations joined a straight line that indicated that the axis of the audio beam was in a Nort-East South-West arrangement – and it was suggested that the line, when extended in both directions, joined Bidston Hill and the Thor’s Stone in Thursaston just over four miles away.

For centuries, the spectacular sandstone Tor of Thor’s Stone has been regarded as a scared place and a nexus in some long-forgotten ley-line network, but of course, all this is just supposition, although in recent years, investigators of the paranormal have collected a lot of Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings at the ancient stone, some of which seem to be in Old English and even Old Norse.

In Heswall, at the junction of Telegraph Road and Rocky Lane, there is a pay and display car park that lies adjacent to a block of six luxury flats where the old Grange Villa used to stand.

In September 2022, a man got into his car at this car park and was about to leave when he and his wife and two other passengers all heard a loud thrumming sound which was painful to their eardrums. The driver then noticed that when the car reversed a few feet, the loud noise stopped dead, but when he went forward again it deafened everyone in the vehicle again.

The driver gradually established, through driving the car around, that the highly directional low-pitched sound was passing across the road, through a busy junction box, towards the Post Office on Downham Road South.

The driver then discovered that the sound stopped dead at the corner of nearby Pye Road, and he and his wife and the passengers got out and got some funny looks from passersby who saw them angling their heads to determine the origin of the sound.

It seemed to come from a point on a sandstone garden wall where, perhaps by coincidence, someone had sprayed a yellow heart symbol; there was no other graffiti on that wall.

The mystery then deepened when an old man came from the direction of Milner Road and asked the driver, 'Have you heard it too?’

He then mentioned the sleepless nights he had endured because of the persistent humming sound. His doctor had told him it was due to hardening of the arteries but the elderly man said his 25-year-old nephew had also heard the sound whenever he stayed over.

The source of the beam of noise remains a mystery.

• All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are on Amazon.