Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: The Prenton Doll

A long time ago, when Middle English was spoken in these isles after this land was overrun by the Normans, there was a word introduced to our mongrel language – bogge – which meant 'a frightening spectre'.

By the 15th Century, the word "bogeyman" had appeared, derived from bogge. 

In Northumbria and Scotland the word became bogle. 

The Welsh version was bwgan and the concept of the bogeyman as we know him today – a figure of fear to make children behave - was soon attached to these words.

The gender-specific word was not applicable to frightening female entities and the word bogeywoman never quite stuck, although a very young bogeywoman quickly springs to mind when I think of a certain part of Wirral – and that is the eerie living doll of Prenton.

I mentioned her once on The Billy Butler Show and was inundated with stories about her from every corner of Wirral.

The life-size female doll would be seen at the illuminated window of a type of "Wendy House" in a certain cul-de-sac off Woodchurch Road, not far from where Sainsbury’s supermarket now exists.

The doll, a simulacrum of the most unsettling authenticity, donned the original trappings - hair, skin and teeth - harvested from the very body that once harboured the vitality of a couple’s deceased daughter.

To add a surreal twist to this peculiar narrative, the doll seemed to become animated after dark, and many of the curious who ventured down that dead-end avenue to gaze upon the little house swore they saw the doll wave at them from the window and sometimes peep out the front door.

I had grave reservations about the tale of the Prenton Doll, but so many people have told me that they saw the thing with their own eyes.

Most of their accounts are set in the late 1960s and early 1970s and mention the grieving couple inhabiting the house at the bottom of the cul-de-sac and these accounts tell the tragic tale of the heartbroken couple’s cherubic daughter, snatched away from their life in some accident by the cruel hands of fate.

Left in perpetual lament, the couple had the little house built in their garden as a memorial to their only girl.

Now, brace yourself for the downright eerie bit: the doll, so they said, sometimes appeared in people’s dreams and caused them to suffer heart attacks in their sleep and even slip into a coma.

One of the many people who said she encountered the Prenton Doll is Kathleen, a lady who is now aged 76 and lives in Canada, but one hot summer’s night in 1976 she was a 28-year-old walking hand in hand with her boyfriend Mark Sinclair down Fairview Road, Prenton on her way home, when the subject of their conversation somehow led to the eternal topic of the supernatural.

There was a full moon out that night and because of the legendary heat wave of that year, Mark and Kathleen knew they’d find it hard to get to sleep because of the oven heat hanging in the air.

Mark said he knew of a haunted doll’s house in a nearby cul-de-sac and Kathleen smirked, thinking he was pulling her leg, but Mark led his love to the suburban blind alley off Woodchurch Road, a 20-minute walk away, and being in love, and whispering sweet nothings to one another during the moonlit stroll, the journey seemed to just last a few minutes.

And there was the little lit-up house Mark had described, in the garden of the last house on the right in that cul-de-sac.

The couple stood there in the leafy avenue silvered by the full moon, gazing at the pale amber light shining through the windowpanes and the green drapes in that window. But where was the ghost? Kathleen wanted to know, and squeezed Mark’s hand and gazed up at his face, but then she saw his smiling face become serious.

‘Look! That’s the thing I was telling you about; the Prenton Doll,’ he gasped, and Kathleen followed the line of his gaze, only to recoil in shock at the stark silhouette of a girl in pigtails who was now at that amber window.

‘Who’s working it?’ Kathleen asked, ‘Must be someone moving her like a puppet.’

That “puppet” lifted its hand and waved to the couple, and Kathleen stepped back, and stepped on Mark’s toe.

The two of them backed away and then turned and hurried from the strange sight. Kathleen glanced back and yelped – the door of the little house in the garden was open and the girl was peeping out at her.

Mark escorted Kathleen to her home on Holm Lane and the two of them sat in the kitchen sipping shandy with ice cubes, talking about the “doll” as Kathleen’s mother made a toasted cheese supper.

She told her daughter that the so-called doll had probably been a child messing about, but Mark said he had heard about the ‘living doll’ in that little Wendy house for years. 

Kathleen’s mother laughed and started to sing the Cliff Richard song, Living Doll – but neither Mark or Kathleen found it the least bit funny.

Mark left the house around a quarter to one and soon after Kathleen went to bed. She lay on top of the thin duvet in her nightie with the bedroom window open.

At around 2:20am, Kathleen awoke and saw the moon shining through the net curtains, which were billowing gracefully in the warm zephyr. For some reason, Kathleen got up off the bed and went to the window and thought she’d breathe in some cool air, but that air, even at this time in the morning, was warm and sickly.

She looked out into the long back garden – and there, in the bright moonlight stood that familiar pig-tailed girl in silhouette!

'Oh God', Kathleen panted in astonishment, and quickly reached out and tried to shut the window but closed it on one of the net curtains at first.

She opened it again and then slammed the window shut and by now the sinister figure was nearer.

Kathleen went next door to tell her mother what she had seen and found her parents lying across their bed in just their underwear on this unbearably warm night. Her mother and father did not appreciate being rudely awakened because of what seemed like some nightmare Kathleen had mixed up with reality in their opinion. They all went to the window but now the girl had gone.

Mark called around the next day at noon and before Kathleen could tell him about the sighting of the "doll girl" in her garden. Mark said he had seen her in his front garden at his home on Northwood Road at 3am.

After that night, both he and Kathleen started to have graphic nightmares as the girl began to invade their dreams each night, always chasing them.

In the end, the couple went to a priest and he advised them to sleep with Bibles in their rooms and the dreams stopped.

Around that time there were strange stories in circulation of the Prenton Doll appearing in the dreams of other people in the area, and how some of these people later died from heart attacks in their sleep.

One young lady is said to have gone into a coma for two months and, when she came to, told the nurses a girl with pigtails and huge dark eyes had constantly chased her through old-fashioned streets as she lay in her comatose hell.

Are these stories a mere urban legend that snowballed in each telling of the Prenton Doll tale, or is there some hidden unsettling back story behind the weird tale of the doll’s house in the cul-de-sac?

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