Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: Strange disappearances

IN July 1981 two Greasby sweethearts, Thomas and Lauren, both aged 15, had a picnic in a field in the Irby Hill area.

Each brought along a basket crammed with fruit, cakes, sandwiches and lemonade – and Thomas had brought a bottle of white wine that he’d taken from the rack in his kitchen.

Lauren laid a large red gingham tablecloth on the grass and put the food and drink upon it in a very orderly manner under the hot July sun.

The young couple then sat with their backs to the thick trunk of an old oak, eating and drinking and chatting. Lauren warned Thomas not to ‘try anything’ as she wasn’t that type of girl.

Thomas was very well-behaved anyway and he talked of his ambition to be a car mechanic when he left school and Lauren said she wanted to write a book; it was going to be called The Lost Roads of Wirral, about the ancient lost tracks and byways of the peninsula from pre-Roman and Saxon times and she’d even discussed researching the book with her history teacher Mr Cochrane.

Thomas became jealous at the mention of Cochrane, as he was a young and very handsome teacher in his early twenties and he suspected Lauren of having a crush on him.

Lauren let out a scream as a huge purple butterfly with orange spots fluttered out of nowhere into her face. The girl had lepidopterophobia – a terrible fear of moths and butterflies – and this strange butterfly was huge, twice the size of a swallowtail – its wingspan was more like that of a small bird.

Thomas chased it as it flew around the other side of the oak; he was determined to capture the butterfly but it seemed to vanish into the long grass. Thomas came back around the oak tree to tell Lauren the butterfly had got away – but she was nowhere to be seen.

Thomas thought she might be hiding because she was scared of the butterfly but he looked behind the tree and surveyed the field – Lauren had gone – but to where? He shouted her and received no reply.

Panic started to set in; had someone taken her? But if they had where would they go?

Thomas could plainly see that there was nobody in the field and there were no places to hide – no nearby trees – except the one a few feet away and no one was hiding behind it.

He shouted Lauren’s name again and then it dawned on him that the disappearance had to be something supernatural. He took one more look behind the trunk of the oak tree and decided he’d leave the food and drink and wicker baskets where they were and run all the way to Lauren’s home to notify the girl’s mum and dad of the disappearance.

The boy ran off but had only covered about forty feet when he heard Lauren shouting to him. Thomas stopped and turned and saw that Lauren was sitting exactly where she had been before she had vanished.

Thomas ran to her and she asked him why he had run away. ‘You disappeared! I looked everywhere for you – where did you go?’ Thomas explained, and Lauren returned a puzzled expression. She insisted that she had been sitting under the tree and hadn’t moved an inch. Thomas sat down by his girlfriend and told her how the butterfly had escaped when the two teens heard what sounded like a woman’s voice behind them.

The voice said, ‘Excuse me,’ and Thomas turned around and beheld a sight that he would never forget. Under the oak, and somehow partly inside of the trunk, were three strange beings with large bulbous heads sitting in a row. The skin of the three weird beings looked pure white and plastic-like. The one in the middle with the feminine voice said, ‘We may take the girl and if we do you shall remember nothing.’

Thomas then found himself paralysed – he could not budge a muscle. He felt his heart palpitate as he panicked because of his inability to move. Out of the corner of his eye, Lauren seemed to be as still as a statue too.

The being to the female one’s left sounded male and he said, ‘I don’t think we should take her,’ and then suddenly the trinity of unearthly entities vanished and immediately, Thomas found he could move again. Lauren seemed to let out a gasp and she told Thomas, ‘Just then, I couldn’t move!’

‘I couldn’t either, and you won’t believe this,’ said Thomas, still eyeing the spot where the figures had been sitting, ‘but there were three weird people with huge heads sitting against the tree behind you!’

Lauren turned to look at the tree, ‘Are you just saying that, Thomas?’

‘Lauren, I swear on your life – and mine! There were three people with big round heads and the one in the middle was a woman and she said to me, “We may take the girl and if we do you shall remember nothing,” and they looked artificial, like they were made of plastic.’

Lauren knew Thomas had zero imagination and his account of what he had seen scared the girl. ‘Thomas, let’s get away from here – now!’ she said, getting to her feet.

The couple quickly put all of the food and drink and gingham tablecloth into the baskets and left the spot. They went to Lauren’s home and the girl told her parents what had happened but her bemused mother and father didn’t believe her.

Thomas told Lauren, ‘They might have taken you for a short while at one point because you vanished and I looked everywhere for you, and then you reappeared under the tree; don’t you recall anything?’

‘I remember seeing you walk away and I shouted you but it was as if you couldn’t hear me,’ Lauren recalled, but Thomas insisted that she had vanished during that time as he searched for her. The couple never ventured anywhere near to that spot in the Irby Hill area ever again.

From the description of the three peculiar beings that sat behind the couple, the entities remind me of the so-called Greys – the frequently reported bulbous-headed aliens of the UFO phenomenon – but Lauren and Thomas saw no UFOs anywhere in the vicinity of their picnic spot that day, so what were those three sinister beings?

Had Lauren been abducted that day, she would have been just another baffling statistic – one of the many people who have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again.

I think of local people such as David McCaig, the 13-year-old Wallasey schoolboy who kissed his mother goodbye and set off on a short bicycle ride to his school in March 1970 – but he never arrived and has not been seen since.

On March 7, 1922, experienced Flying Officer Brian Holding took off from RAF Shotwick and he and his plane were never seen again; not a stick of wreckage of the Avro 504 plane was ever found.

In 1967, a seven-year-old child named Peter was playing on his rocking horse in the nursery of his home on Bedford Road, Rock Ferry, and when his mother called him to come and get his dinner there was no reply.

The rocking horse was still rocking in the nursery but Peter was nowhere to be seen. The house was searched from top to bottom and the police were notified, and then Peter’s sister saw her missing brother slowly reappear on the rocking horse in the nursery.

When the boy’s parents quizzed him about his inexplicable absence, Peter burst into tears and said "a man with stripes on him like a zebra" had come into the nursery and told the boy he was taking him to play with other children he had taken and Peter fell into a sleep.

He had awakened on the rocking horse to see his sister looking at him in shock. Peter, like Lauren was lucky, for they were taken but subsequently returned, but what was the fate of the “other children” the zebra-striped man had taken?

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