Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: Some very sinister mysteries

ON five separate occasions between 1991 and 1995, someone left a wedding dress and sometimes a bridesmaid’s dress - in Birkenhead Park.

The wedding dresses were always in an immaculate condition and the person leaving them draped over branches, hanging from various trees, was never found.

Not once did people walking through the park or persons taking their dogs out for a stroll see anyone leaving the gowns.

They were found by members of the public and sometimes the park rangers, and despite appeals from the newspapers asking the public if they had seen the mysterious dress-draper at work, the riddle of the wedding dresses remains unsolved.

Some thought there might be a clue in the wording on one label on one of the dresses: 'Made by Josh Charles' – but no one seemed to know who this dressmaker was. The only Josh Charles most people were aware of was the American film and television actor, and he obviously had nothing to do with the mystery.

The wedding dresses were never claimed and so they were loaned to theatre groups and some were auctioned to raise money for the Claire House Appeal to build a children’s hospice at Clatterbridge Hospital.

Park Ranger Dave Cavanagh pondered upon the mystery of the wedding gowns, commenting, 'We just don’t know what it is all about. When this first happened we thought the dresses may have been dumped after a house burglary.

'But they seem so carefully placed that someone is obviously leaving them there for a reason.'

Psychologists and sociologists chipped in with their explanations, saying there was a 'ritualistic' element in the arrangement of the beautifully-made wedding trousseaus.

There was talk of an 'abandonment complex' a paraphiliac fetish obsession with the gowns and one psychologist said the person felt compelled to dump the dresses in the park as part of a ritual or coping mechanism.

The repetition and the care with which the dresses were left (sometimes on hangers) suggested a deliberate action that could be rooted in psychological distress or obsession.

It was even thought that the person hanging the dresses was influenced by some personal superstition or local folklore, believing that leaving the bridal gowns in the park would bring closure or good fortune.

Some of the locals of Birkenhead Park who saw the dresses hanging in the breeze said they believed that they symbolized a broken-hearted man’s lost love, and that perhaps he had been jilted at the altar on what would have been the 'big day'.

Other folk thought there was something sinister about the white wedding dresses.

One dog walker named David said he had the creepy feeling that the person who had draped the gowns over the tree branches was keeping watch on him to see what reaction it would provoke and David said there was a macabre aura about the scene when he saw two of the dresses dangling from a tree, reflected in the nearby top lake in Birkenhead Park.

A local man spoke of seeing a stout gentleman with a bushy beard, standing near one of the gowns in 1991, and he had thought there was something odd about him and had the impression the man had just placed the dress on the branch.

Another local, a man named Graham, said he had seen young girls trying on one of the wedding dresses while a stocky bearded man watched them from behind a tree.

Around the time of the discovery of the fourth wedding dress, there were reports of a circle of nine naked women who appeared to be carrying out some ritual in the park in the morning, just before sunrise, so some believed the dresses might be connected to an arcane Wiccan ritual.

The dresses were beautifully preserved but old-fashioned and made of ivory nylon with a lace top.

The mystery of the Birkenhead Park wedding dresses will baffle us for a long time to come - unless someone out there who knows the real story behind them would like to give the Wirral Globe a call.

Another Wirral mystery unfolded in 1995, oddly enough as the fifth wedding dress was being found in Birkenhead Park and this was a sinister "chain letter" which started doing the rounds in places ranging from Heswall to Wallasey.

The letters were always in a manila envelope and the writer hinted that a curse would befall the recipient of the letter unless he or she made three perfect copies of the letter and sent them on to three people.

The letter contained a bizarre list of deceased famous people including JFK, General Patton and John Lennon and warned that they had broken the chain letter by not sending on the three copies.

All of the letters bore a strange symbol that resembled one of the letters from the so-called Witches Theban Alphabet.

Some people who were superstitious did what the letter instructed because they actually believed they’d be cursed if they didn’t whereas others threw the letter straight in the bin.

I had a look at one of the letters and saw that it was a very close copy in style and handwriting to a chain letter that had been in circulation in Liverpool in the 1960s.

Some people swore they suffered bad luck for not sending on the letter but this was merely down to unfortunate coincidences.

The worrying chain letters eventually died out and their originator was never traced and the reason behind the missives was either someone getting a kick out of generating a wave of dread via the postal system or simply a person with a very twisted sense of humour.

Just as annoying as the chain letters was the anonymous sinister woman who systematically attempted to split up married couples via the telephone.

In 1955, Birkenhead was gripped by a bizarre and sinister series of phone calls aimed at sowing discord among happily married couples. The story, sensationalized by The Daily Mirror under the headline Poison phone calls, with the subheading: 'Glamour-voice Girl tries to break up happy marriages', centred on an unknown woman with a sultry voice who called multiple homes, mostly across Wirral and some parts of Liverpool, creating suspicion and tension between spouses.

The malicious campaign began in October 1955 when newlyweds Lorraine and David of Birkenhead's Arthur Street received a call asking for David. Lorraine, suspicious after the mysterious woman implied David was hiding something, became upset, straining their evening plans.

Just minutes later in Upton, another couple, Penny and Huw, were also targeted. The caller insinuated that Huw had a secret meeting planned, leaving Penny distraught and doubting her husband.

As the calls continued across Wirral, the police and the General Post Office launched an investigation to trace the caller.

Theories about the caller’s identity ran wild, with some believing she was a disfigured woman seeking revenge on happy couples, others speculating she worked for the telephone exchange, and one man swore the spiteful home-wrecker was a female impersonator.

By December, police disconnected public telephone boxes the woman had a habit of using, and the calls eventually ceased.

Rumours spread that the woman had taken her own life. However, a year later, the calls resumed briefly, and one was traced to a derelict house.

There, police found the body of an unidentified woman, dead for several days, clutching a telephone - bringing a chilling end to the mystery.

• Tom Slemen's latest book, Haunted Liverpool 37 is out now on Amazon with many other books and audiobooks