Haunted Wirral – The Prense Well timeslips

IN 2009, a 27-year-old woman named Jenny went to have a look at the prams at a shop called Baby Business on The Mount, Heswall.

Jenny had only moved to the Heswall area a few months ago and on this sunny September afternoon looked at the prams while her eight-month old baby was being minded by her mother at Jenny’s home on Whitefield Lane.

On this afternoon, Jenny got quite a start when she turned to see where her six-year-old son Kyle was – and found him missing. She ran out of the shop and looked right, and there he was, playing on what looked like a huge boulder, located in the driveway next to the Ravenscroft pub.

Jenny went to the boy and yelled at him for wandering away from her and then she grabbed his hand – and noticed that the Ravenscroft pub was now called The Prense Well.

Jenny assumed the pub had changed its name since she had visited The Mount in Heswall five days back.

She walked back to the Baby Business store – to find it had gone. In its place there was a very modernistic premises called Kettle Design – an interior designer’s shop. The Army & Navy Stores was still there next door but Baby Business had gone. Jenny stood there, confused.

‘Mum, what’s to do?’ Kyle asked, seeing that his mother looked worried.

‘The shop we’ve just been in has gone,’ she said, still trying to process what had happened in the last few minutes.

It scared her, and she considered everything from early onset of the menopause to having some rare neurological disorder. Jenny experienced a hot flush and Kyle yanked at her hand and said, ‘How could a shop be gone, mum?’

She snapped at her son. ‘Kyle, be quiet a moment!’ And she thought about the pub changing its name and now this shop vanishing – what was going on?

Just then, a tall smartly dressed man in a dark blue suit, white striped shirt and black tie seemed to appear out of nowhere, and he gently placed his hand on Jenny’s upper arm, and she jumped, startled by his appearance.

In a warm, reassuring voice the stranger said, ‘It must seem confusing. Come on.’

And he nodded towards The Prense Well public house and walked in that direction. Jenny felt herself walking with him, something she would never do – accompany a stranger – but here she was feeling as if the man was not a stranger but some old friend, and Kyle in turn walked along with his mum as she gripped his hand.

'Mum, who's he?' the boy asked, looking at the well-dressed man. That man took Jenny and Kyle to that boulder in the driveway beside the pub, and then he calmly walked away and then the boy and his mother saw the man literally vanish.

Kyle asked his mother if the man was a ghost, and Jenny was lost for words.

She wandered away, clutching her son’s hand, and she saw that the pub behind her was now called the Ravenscroft again, and when Jenny looked about bewildered, Kyle said, ‘Mum, is that the shop you were looking for?’ and he pointed to Baby Business.

Jenny went to the shop and went in it and felt as if she was sleepwalking. Now she was in no mood to look at prams and she went home to Whitefield Lane.

She told her mother what had happened and her mum sat her down in the kitchen and said, ‘A strong cup of tea will sort you out,’ and Jenny smiled; her mum had always regarded a cuppa as some panacea whenever she had received bad news or felt under the weather.

Her mum said her daughter probably had low blood sugar and sort of hinted that the vanishing shop, the pub with the changing name and the disappearing man were all illusions brought on by stress, but Jenny said, ‘Mum, it wasn’t all in my mind, Kyle experienced these things too.’

Kyle nodded and told his Nan about the ‘ghost man’ vanishing and even wanted to draw him, but then there came a confirmation of what had happened that afternoon from a surprise source.

As Jenny sat in her kitchen her mobile rang; it was her husband, a glazier who was still at work.

He asked his wife who that man had been; the one he had seen her walking with outside the Baby Business shop. He had seen the man holding Jenny by her arm and was naturally suspicious as to who he was.

It transpired that Jenny’s husband had been in the front passenger seat of a van on his way to a job and he had seen her with the man as the van passed her on The Mount.

This proved the weird happenings had not been imaginary. Jenny told her husband what had happened and Kyle backed her up and the whole thing was just put down as one of those mysterious occurrences that happen to people from time to time.

It was only some years later, when the Baby Business store closed and an interior designer shop opened at the address on The Mount called Kettle Designs when Jenny realised that she and her son had somehow walked years into the future, and of course, the Ravenscroft pub later became The Prense Well.

The question remains: who on earth was that dapperly dressed man who seems to have guided Jenny and Kyle back to 2009? Kyle deepened the mystery a little by recollecting that he had seen a faintly glowing mist around that boulder at the side of the Ravenscroft pub.

The whole thing bears all the hallmarks of a timeslip, and in this case the phenomenon ties in with a very strange incident that happened on The Mount one morning in June 2017.

A 60-year-old man named Paul was suffering from a bout of insomnia caused by a recurrence of his tinnitus, a condition he’d had since his late thirties.

He told his wife he was going to drive to alleviate his condition and she told him not to, but Paul insisted he’d be okay and he drove off from his home on Delavor Road.

The time was then around 1:40am, and Paul turned the radio on and relaxed as he watched the nightscape scrolling by.

He saw a fox sitting in the middle of the road near The Mount and slowed down and beeped his car horn once but the animal didn’t even react so he had to drive around it. The roads at this unearthly hour were deserted.

Paul turned the car around and at one point as he passed the place where the Exchange pub should be (and this pub was another incarnation of the Ravenscroft pub mentioned in the earlier story) he noticed something very strange: the pub was not there – all of that side of the road were houses, and by the numerous bell buttons on the doors they looked as if they had been subdivided into flats.

This did not make any sense because three nights back, Paul and his wife had had a few drinks at the Exchange pub.

As Paul pondered on the baffling replacement of the pub with a row of terraced houses, the car radio went dead, and then Paul saw a dazzling green light hovering above the road ahead, about thirty yards away.

That green light shot towards the car and as it passed overhead the car radio came back on and Paul pulled over.

He turned the radio down and watched the green light travel towards Feather Lane then vanish as it turned right. Paul assumed the light had been a UFO or perhaps an example of ball lightning, a poorly-understood weather phenomenon.

The insomniac then noticed that the Exchange pub was back and that row of terraced house he had seen lining the place where the pub stood had gone. Only then did it dawn on him that he had been through some shift in time.

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