TOM SLEMEN'S HAUNTED WIRRAL: The thing in the toy pile

CRYPTOZOOLOGY is the study of unknown creatures – creatures that we haven’t caught and classified yet, and cryptozoologists refer to these unidentified beings as cryptids.

It is still classed as a crackpotology, a pseudoscience and subculture by most scientists, but of course, in the long history of human stupidity, many scientific fields that are accepted today were also once firmly regarded as pseudoscientific; things like germ theory, quantum mechanics and plate tectonics were branded as nonsense, and even meteorology – weather forecasting – was once dismissed as a form of fortune-telling.

So what’s the problem with cryptozoology? Why is it not taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community?

The problem lies not in the concept itself, but in the things cryptozoology is associated with – the Loch Ness Monster, Bigfoot, the Surrey Puma, the Yeti and so on, and there is a fringe area of cryptozoology that evaluates reports, many of them made by level-headed professional people, of beings such as werewolves, the Little People, winged humanoids and entities that seem to be of a supernatural nature, and Wirral and Merseyside seem to be crawling with these strange beings.

Here is just one example of what I am referring to.

On the humid night of Friday August 18, 1978, a seven-year-old child named Malcolm was finding it difficult to get asleep in the bedroom of his home on Moreton Road in Upton.

He turned to face the window and saw the full moon casting its dead silvery light on the pile of toys in the corner which the lad had long tired of playing with.

Malcolm could hear the opening theme to the American legal drama Petrocelli on the telly downstairs. The boy turned back towards the wall, sighed, and closed his eyes.

He heard a noise in the room, and for a moment thought it was his cat, Perkins. Wanting to play with the feline, Malcolm eagerly turned back towards the window – and saw it was not the cat making the noise; something was emerging from beneath the pile of toys.

Malcolm sat up in bed and watched as something black and shiny with glowing white eyes came up out of the pile of discarded plaything.

Already the boy was poised to get out of that room, but his curiosity slightly outweighed his fear and he wanted to know what the thing was.

It had a round black shiny head, long neck, and long arms that were almost like tentacles, and it reminded the boy of Morph, the terracotta-coloured plasticine man who appeared on Take Hart, the children’s TV show about art, presented by Tony Hart – only this thing looked very sinister as it crawled out from the toy pile. It had fangs; small grey pointed teeth showed as it opened its mouth.

'Dad!' Malcolm yelled, and then he ran to the bedroom door, opened it, looked back, and seeing the elongated thing was now moving towards him on all fours with the motion of a spider, the boy fled.

He found his mother and father on the sofa in front of the telly, embracing and looking as if they had nodded off. Malcolm shook his mother awake and she yelped in shock.

He told them about the little man with glowing eyes and fangs in his room and predictably, his mum said: 'Oh Malcolm you’ve had a nightmare, calm down!'

The lad’s father groaned something, possibly a profanity, and opened his reddened eyes, and when Malcolm gave a garbled account of the creepy little man from the toypile, his dad agreed with his wife’s assessment – that it had been a bad dream, but Malcolm raised his voice and told his parents they were wrong and his mother snapped back, 'Aye-aye! Don’t you dare talk to us like that!'

Malcolm’s father got up in a huff and told him, ‘Look – I’ll go up there now and prove it was just a nightmare – you bloody – ‘ And he had to restrain himself from swearing.

‘Dad don’t, it looked horrible, it might bite – it’s got fangs!’ Malcolm warned, and he stood on his mother’s bare foot and she yelled at him to calm down.

Before the boy’s father could reach the doorway of the living room he and his wife and son heard a loud hissing, growling, screaming and spitting sound upstairs – Perkins the family cat was fighting with something. That cat almost threw itself down the stairs and then it ran into the living room, glancing off the shin of Malcolm’s dad, who jumped with fright. ‘See? I told you!’ Malcolm told his father, who now seemed to have second thoughts about going upstairs. He looked back at his wife and said, ‘Wonder if we’ve got a rat?’

‘How would we have a rat?’ his wife replied.

‘With you jangling in the garden with that woman next door with the door wide open,’ said her husband, ‘only takes a second for them to sneak in and next thing you know you’ll have a colony of them in the house.’

‘Do you want me to go upstairs and have a look?’ his wife asked, getting up off the sofa with Malcolm hanging onto her hand. ‘You seem frightened!’

Malcolm’s father bent down, stuffed his trousers into his socks, and said: 'It’ll be a rat. I saw one of them run up the trouser leg of a man on a golf course once.’

Malcolm’s mum stormed past her husband and muttered, ‘Men – no backbone!’ and went up the stairs with her husband close behind her.

The parents found the toypile scattered but there was no sign of the little man with glowing eyes and fangs. Still, the boy was too scared to sleep in that room for two nights and his mother let him sleep between her and her husband and the lad jumped at every little sound he heard in the still of the night.

Just over a week later, Malcolm went to bed around 9:30pm and dozed off in the heat, and when he awoke – he came face-to-face with that nightmarish being.

It was kneeling on his chest and its round black shiny egg-shaped head with its glowing eyes was clearly visible. The thing held its spindly forefinger to its fanged mouth, gesturing for Malcolm to be quiet, and it whispered, 'I won’t harm you. I am hiding from someone. Let me be your friend.'

Malcolm hit the little man with the top of the duvet and he heard it make a squealing sound as the impact sent it against the bedroom wall. He was out of that room in a flash and he ran downstairs screaming for his mum and dad – but it was much later than he thought and the living room was empty and in darkness.

Malcolm rushed into the hallway, ready to go up to his parents’ room, but that little man was slowly descending the stairs, apparently with some difficulty, as if it was not accustomed to the steps. Malcolm screamed so loud he later tasted blood which came from the back of his throat.

He heard his father and mother tumbling out of their bed and the boy backed into the kitchen and switched on the neon light. He went to the cutlery drawer and grabbed a huge carving knife.

From the kitchen, Malcolm could see the little man fall down one of the steps and writhe about like a worm. He then saw his mother come down the stairs and, unaware, she stepped over the entity in her slippered feet and when she saw her son with the dangerous knife she shouted, ‘Malcolm! Put that down before you hurt yourself! What were you screaming for?’

She then heard her husband behind her let rip a string of swear words and cry out, ‘It’s on the stairs!’

The thing hopped up the steps but Malcolm’s mum and dad did not pursue it – they clung on to one another until the sinister figure reached the landing and ran to one of the rooms. Malcolm’s father snatched the knife from him and then he opened a bottom drawer in a cupboard and grabbed a roofing hammer.

He swore continuously and his wife tried to pull him back but he rushed up the stairs, two steps at a time and looked in his son’s room first.

He saw something moving in the toypile and he switched on the bedroom light then launched into an attack on the toys, plunging the knife into the pile and striking out with the roofing hammer. This attack seemed to go on forever until Malcolm’s mother screamed ‘Stop it! Stop it!’

Her husband picked up a toy cricket bat and prodded the pile of toys – and he could find no trace of that menacing creepy little figure. He stood there, panting, his chest heaving with exhaustion, the hammer still clutched in his left hand.

Malcolm's mother approached him cautiously, her eyes wide with fear and concern. ‘It's gone,’ she whispered, as if afraid to speak too loudly. ‘Whatever it was, it's gone.’

Had Malcolm’s parent never set eyes on the unknown terror that had invaded their home, they would have continued to believe it had been a mere bogeyman, a figment of their son’s nightmare, but they saw it with their own eyes, and thankfully, after that morning they never set eyes on it again. What that thing was remains a complete mystery to this day.

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