Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral – Astonishing teleportations

ON a bleak and frostbitten evening of February 25, 1934 at around 9:45pm, Jimmy Johnson, a 60-year-old plumber, emerged from a pub (and some accounts state this was the Old Nag's Head on Rake Lane) in Liscard, in a drunken but not fully paralytic state.

He had been trying to drink a little less of late after suffering some terrible hangovers on the mornings after, and being an early riser in his profession, the dreaded post-drinking horrors were taking a toll on what we would now call his mental well-being.

With staggering steps, Johnson navigated the short distance to his lodgings, a humble boarding house a mere six minutes away.

There, in the privacy of his draughty room, he disrobed, donned his nightshirt and set his old but trusty brass alarm clock for the hour of seven, before surrendering himself to the welcoming oblivion of a much needed slumber.

Awakening sometime later, he found himself shivering in the grip of a cold so severe it seemed to penetrate his very bones. A blinding light assaulted his eyes, and disembodied voices reached his ears.

The policemen stood over him, their torches casting stark beams upon his prone form on the icy pavement of Slatey Road in Birkenhead.

The two constables assisted him to his feet, but Johnson, bewildered and disoriented, could offer no account of how he had traversed three and a quarter miles in his nightshirt from the confines of his bedroom to this unfamiliar locale.

Taken into custody for drunkenness and disorderly conduct, Johnson found himself within the austere walls of Slatey Road police station. There, he learned with some astonishment that it was only a few minutes past eleven.

The enigma surrounding his nocturnal journey deepened the following afternoon, when, back at the boarding house, his landlady recounted hearing strange, inexplicable sounds emanating from his room at approximately ten to eleven.

Despite knocking and calling, she and two other lodgers had found the room vacant.

In an age where the supernatural still held sway over the collective imagination, such occurrences were not dismissed lightly. Jimmy Johnson, gripped by fear and uncertainty, insisted upon the presence of a Bible at his bedside thereafter because he thought the Devil had transported him from his bed, and perhaps because of his drinking,

Old Nick might come calling again to take him somewhere much hotter than a wintry Birkenhead.

We next fast forward to the year 1961, to a July afternoon where a Mrs Mills, a simple and hardworking mother of three, stepped into 'Englands', a modest shoe shop on the corner of Grange Road and Coburg Street in Birkenhead.

Selecting a pair of shoes for her mother’s birthday, she faced a moment of acute embarrassment upon discovering she was half-a-crown short.

As she rummaged through her purse, a coin seemed to materialize from thin air, landing on the counter. It was the very half-a-crown she needed. The young female shop assistant in Englands also witnessed this astonishing materialisation and laughed at the strange spectacle.

Upon returning home, Mrs Mills discovered that the half-a-crown she had set aside on the mantelpiece for her son's pocket money was inexplicably missing, though her son had not yet returned from his auntie’s home.

In an age where rational explanations held court, Mrs Mills could not escape the unsettling feeling that some helpful paranormal force had transported the coin from her home to the shoe shop.

The incident, steeped in an aura of the inexplicable, left her pondering on whether some angel was responsible.

The two previous accounts – of a sleeping plumber finding himself three miles from his bed and a woman receiving a half-a-crown out of mid-air, were probably examples of teleportation – the process by which a solid object, be it a person or an animal, can be transferred from point A to B without travelling physically through space.

The person vanishes at one location and appears at another one in an instant, often many miles distant.

The phenomenon has been reported for centuries and only recently has it been achieved, with several physicists, such as Yuchuan Wei publishing scientific papers on the subject and some experiments have suggested that viruses and molecules could in theory be teleported soon.

But occasionally, something – some force, perhaps a force of nature – seems to have caused teleportations of people and objects over the years. In October 1593 for example, a soldier of the Spanish Empire named Gil Pérez appeared in front of the palace in Mexico City.

He claimed that a moment ago he had been on guard outside the Governor’s Palace in Manila in the Philippines, and then he had felt dizzy and worn out.

The next thing he was in a place he discovered to be Mexico City. Gil Pérez was interrogated by the authorities and he told them the Governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas had just been assassinated by Chinese pirates.

The soldier was accused of desertion and being a servant of the Devil and he was duly imprisoned – until a few months later when the news reached Mexico City – shocking news which confirmed that the Governor Pérez Dasmariñas had indeed been assassinated by Chinese pirates just as the Spanish solider had claimed.

The soldier was released and sent back to the Philippines – 8,833 miles away – and this time Gil Pérez went by ship.

But back to Wirral. In March 1975, two friends, Terry and Alan, who hailed from Greasby, went for a drive to meet up with Alan’s cousin at the Ring O’Bells pub in West Kirby. When Terry and Alan came out the pub later that day, Terry discovered his stereo cassette player had been stolen from his vehicle in the pub car park. An old man came out the pub and told Terry he’d seen two youths near their vehicle about five minutes earlier and then he pointed to two young men nearby and said, ‘I think that’s them.’

Terry and Alan walked over to the two teenagers who suddenly started to run, and seconds later Terry and Alan thought they’d been struck by lightning.

A bright light shone down on them, momentarily blinding the two Greasby men and then they found themselves in a busy pub they had never seen before.

People stared at them in astonishment and some regarded them with fear in their eyes. Terry and Alan were in a pub on Liverpool’s Lime Street called The Crown Hotel.

Both men thought they were suffering from amnesia at first because they could not recall the past few minutes and then Alan told his friend about the stolen cassette player and how they’d been in the car park of the Ring O’Bells.

Several of the drinkers in the pub told the men they seemed to appear out of thin air and after the men had had a few drinks to treat their shock they had to get the train back to Wirral. Terry was relieved to find his unlocked car had not been stolen from the pub car park.

Terry mentioned the incident to me on the Billy Butler Show many years ago and told me how his wife believed the unexplained transference had something to do with witchcraft.

Old superstitions die hard. In July 1978, a man in his fifties named Tony Moore took his wife to see her mother at a nursing home on Neston’s Leighton Road. After the visit, Tony got in his car with his wife Joan and they set off for their home in Thurstaston, a half-hour journey of six miles. Joan was a bit tearful after the visit to her mother and distracted her husband by crying.

Tony looked at his wife, but then he quickly glanced back at the road; he was an experienced driver and knew about the dangers of such distractions – but he was amazed to see that the car was now travelling past the Cottage Loaf pub. In the space of less than a minute, Tony and his wife Joan had travelled to Telegraph Road from the nursing home on Leighton Road in Neston, a distance of just over six miles.

The astonishing experience provided a welcome distraction from Joan's grief regarding her mother. The couple believed there was something supernatural about the ‘telescoped’ journey, but it was probably just another occurrence of the poorly understood teleportation effect.

Perhaps now is not the time for the human race to unravel the secret of teleportation, in an era when we are seeing certain nations invading other countries, the teleportation of whole occupying armies would be a horrifying Pandora’s Box.

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