Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Strange messages

THE future is a fabulous place – according to politicians.

It's a place where there’s zero inflation, exceedingly low taxation, incredible economic growth and unprecedented job creation, an all-time low crime rate, and climate change has long been remedied.

Welfare benefits are available for whoever needs them, poverty is a thing of the past, our laws on equality and civil rights are the envy of the world, and Britain has become a model utopia.

Of course, this future, set out in the pie-crust promises of the politicians, always lies just out of reach, lingering tantalizingly in the distance - perpetually a few years or more, away.

The politicians dangle it before us, a shimmering mirage we can only reach once we’ve endured a few more years of austerity.

That's the future as most people see it, but scientifically speaking, where is the future?

Physics says you can't separate space from time, they are welded together in the space-time continuum, and although you may think the future has not yet ‘happened’, a lot of scientific theories say it is as real as today and yesterday.

If the future is already 'there' further up the time dimension, then this would explain the phenomenon of premonitions, where people seem to receive information (often in dreams) about events that have not even taken place yet, at least from our point of view.

The following story is a case in point.

One sunny Saturday afternoon in July 1999, a radio ham named David went into the back garden of his Heswall home with his 18-year-old niece Sarah and they entered a large hut that was crammed with all sorts of electronic paraphernalia – long distance radio transceivers, computers, tape recorders, oscilloscopes and so on.

David switched on his home-made radio telescope, a parabolic dish some 12 feet in diameter which allowed him to listen to signals from space and orbiting satellites, and he could even bounce radio waves off the moon – a practice called “Moonbounce”.

On this day, David let Sarah point the satellite dish to any point in the sky and she jiggled the joysticks and then David said, ‘That’s strange,’ as he gazed at his computer screen. 'A repeating series of numbers are coming through.'

Something out there was transmitting seven numbers over and over. Those numbers were, '49, 43, 39, 33, 8, 3, 1'.

After about thirty seconds the signal stopped. ‘Is it a code?’ Sarah asked, looking at the glowing orange numbers on the computer monitor.

'Probably,' said David, pondering on the meaning of the numbers, 'but that part of the sky where the signal came from has no satellite orbits.'

'So the signal might be from an alien civilization?' an excited Sarah asked.

'The frequency they came in on is 1.4 Giga-hertz, which is the frequency of the hydrogen line. Two of the numbers are primes – 3 and 43. Not sure if that’s of any significance.'

'Will you tell Jodrell Bank about it?' Sarah asked, but David smiled and shook his head.

'I don’t think it’s a message from the depths of the Cosmos – I think it’s from somewhere more local. Let’s leave the channel open and see if there are any more transmissions.'

Uncle and niece heard no more, and David left a tape recorder running just in case.

The unexplained transmission was forgotten eventually. David plotted the seven numbers on a graph and they traced an exponential curve, but he could not make sense of data.

And three months later in September, David received the shock of his life.

Those seven numbers he had received were broadcast on the TV and printed in newspapers; they were the seven winning mid-week Lottery numbers.

Had David backed those mysterious numbers he’d received from someone out there via his back garden radio telescope, he’d have won £3.6m.

I interviewed him on the radio and a self-proclaimed "expert" – a psychologist – called in and said the whole thing was down to coincidence.

That would have to be some coincidence, though; the odds of picking the correct seven numbers in the lottery are one in 85,900,584.

So where did that mysterious signal bearing the winning numbers come from?

I calculated from the coordinates David supplied that they would have come from the spot where the future earth would have been, three months later in its orbit.

It was as if someone, three months in the future, had somehow managed to transmit the winning lottery numbers into the past. Whether the originator of the message was human or alien I do not know.

Perhaps it was some mischievous inventor way ahead of his time, trying to send lucrative information back in time to himself, and David picked up the message instead. We can only speculate.

In September 1975, a housewife named Barbara noticed something very strange one morning when she entered the kitchen of her home on Gloucester Road, Wallasey.

Someone had left a row of Scrabble tiles on the kitchen table, and the letters spelled out the word 'Foxwood'.

Barbara and husband Sid hadn’t played with the Scrabble game for years and so Barbara assumed her 14-year-old daughter Judy or 16-year-old son Mike had been playing the game, but both of them said they hadn’t touched the Scrabble set.

Barbara had a weird feeling about the tiles being left on the table and she told her husband Sid about the incident over breakfast and he just returned a blank look – but then, as he read the newspaper, he suddenly said to his wife, ‘What was the word the tiles spelt out?’

'Foxwood,' Barbara told him, 'why?'

Looking over the top of the racing page, Sid replied: 'There’s a horse running today called Foxwood Boy, in the two-thirty at Edinburgh. I wonder . . .'

'Sid, you said you were finished with gambling,’ Barbara reminded him, but Sid backed the horse and won sixty quid.

Imagine Sid's face on the following morning when Barbara went down to make breakfast at a quarter to eight and saw more Scrabble tiles left out on the kitchen table.

She shouted Sid down and said, 'Your joke isn’t funny, Sid', and pointed to the words, ‘Woodlands Girl’ spelt out by the tiles.

'What are you on about?' Sid asked his wife with a look of bafflement.

Barbara was from The Woodlands in Birkenhead and so she assumed Sid had spelled out the words with the tiles and was referring to her, but Sid swore he hadn’t put the tiles on the table – and – he discovered that a horse called Woodlands Girl was running at Worcester at odds of 9-1.

Sid put a tenner on it and won a hundred quid. He bought a bottle of wine, flowers and a box of Black Magic chocolates for Barbara and said 'I don’t know who or what is leaving these tips on the table but long may it continue'.

The news of the phantom tipster captured the imagination of Sid and Barbara's young daughter Judy, and she resolved to catch the so-called ghost in the act.

Judy crept out of her bed in the wee small hours and stood in the hallway with a torch, ready to switch it on if she heard anything.

Then she would storm the kitchen and she’d see who the joker was behind the Scrabble tile tips.

Judy had a prime suspect: the next door neighbour Jim.

He had built a rude snowman in the back garden last January and claimed kids had made it.

Judy started to doze as she stood in the hallway and was just about to call off her vigil and go back to bed when she heard noises in the kitchen.

She heard a cupboard being opened and the soft rattle of someone handling the little bag of Scrabble tiles.

Judy switched on her torch – but the battery was almost dead and so it was just a dim orange point of light.

The girl switched on the hallway light, burst into the kitchen and switched on the light, and as the neon tubes on the ceiling flickered for a moment, Judy saw a little man about five feet in height at the kitchen table and he looked shocked.

His eyes were of a very pale blue and he wore a brown tweed jacket, shirt and tie, and odd matching brown trousers tucked into his socks.

'The game's up' Judy announced – and the man vanished. Judy's screams brought Sid, Barbara and their son Mike down the stairs.

Judy told them what she had done and how she had seen a ghost of a small man.

After that morning, no more tips appeared on the kitchen table.

I researched the case, hoping to find that a jockey had perhaps lived at the address before Sid and Barbara moved in but – no – and elderly couple had been the previous occupiers and they don’t appear to have had any connection to the world of racing.

Tom Slemen’s Haunted Liverpool 37 is out now, along with many other books on Amazon.