Haunted Wirral: The most terrifying ghosts and creatures

MOST ghosts are very low-key characters - and you may only notice them by their dated attire - but at the other end of the spook spectrum, there are entities that have been known to manifest with such intensity and malevolence that they’ve driven people to the brink of madness or nearly scared them to death with their horrifying presence.

One ghost that truly made the flesh creep is said to have made several visits to Leo’s Supermarket on Birkenhead's Woodchurch Road in the early 1990s.

The first visit took place on Valentine’s Day and several of the staff at the supermarket looked on with a mixture of bemusement and uneasiness as a man walked into the store dressed as a clown in a black outfit with a shiny, satin-like texture.

The costume consisted of a loose-fitting top with a ruffled white trim at the collar and three large white pom-poms running vertically down the centre of the chest. The pants were also black and matched the material and style of the top.

The clown's face was painted white, with exaggerated black eyebrows and dark eye makeup that extended from the inner to the outer corners of the eyes. The mouth was outlined in black with downward strokes on the sides, giving a sad or solemn expression, and the nose was a bright red bulb shape, emphasizing the traditional clown appearance. The clown was also wearing a black conical hat with a white trim, which matched the rest of the outfit. In one white-gloved hand, the clown held a single red rose.

He walked up to a woman with a wire shopping basket and, without uttering a word, offered the rose to her. She nervously accepted it, and the clown walked out of the supermarket.

The woman, along with other shoppers and a member of staff, looked around, wondering if some hidden cameraman was filming the strange episode for a reality TV show along the lines of Beadle’s About – but saw no such cameraman.

Later that day, the woman who had received the rose dropped dead at her home. She was 32 years old and had died from that vague condition known as 'natural causes.' 

Immediately, people who knew the woman recalled that she had received a rose from a sinister clown on the day she died, but sceptics said it had just been a mere coincidence – until the clown appeared at another supermarket in the Heswall area, and again he offered a lady a single red rose.

This time, he walked around the store and appeared to be browsing the products on the shelves.

He was not seen to leave the supermarket and did not appear on closed-circuit TV footage exiting the store. Again, the woman who received the rose died – this time in her sleep from what is known as Sudden Death Syndrome.

There were then further claims that the clown in black had visited libraries, pubs, and reportedly even appeared in a school playground in Bebington.

The female teacher who received the rose threw it away and told the weirdly dressed man to leave the playground at once. That teacher became ill that day but did not die, yet all of the other people who had received the rose and kept it were said to have died the same day.

I suspected that the entire clown in black thing was an urban legend and mentioned it on local radio, but we received a lot of calls from people across Wirral (and even some from Liverpool, where the clown later appeared) telling me that the sinister harbinger of death did exist and that they had either seen him or heard about him.

A security guard from a Wirral supermarket called me on air and said he had intended to escort the clown off the premises, but he had vanished into thin air as he walked down the aisles.

So, why do I bring up the subject of the clown in black now? Well, a very similar figure has allegedly been seen in several supermarkets across Wirral.

Although he did not offer roses to people, the clown seems to appear and disappear in a very uncanny fashion. Of course, Halloween is just around the corner, and you can never rule out a clever hoax.

A ghost that left a woman unable to speak manifested one lunchtime at a hamper-packing business in the vicinity of Valley Road, Birkenhead, in 2008. The woman was with several other workers at the factory, packing Christmas hampers, when most of her colleagues left for their lunch break.

The woman was about to join them when she experienced the unsettling feeling that something was watching her. She turned – and saw what she later described as the horrifically mutilated face of a man gazing at her. He was leaning forward, with the upper part of his body protruding from a solid wall while the remainder of his body was somehow inside the wall.

The woman tried to scream, but no sound came out of her mouth, and she almost passed out from shock. The grisly apparition then stepped out of the solid wall and reached out for the lady with a hand missing a thumb and forefinger. The terrified employee ran off.

The woman could not speak for a whole day; the condition is known as traumatic mutism, and it was caused by the intense shock of encountering the entity at the hamper-packing factory. The woman left her job, and theories abounded as to what she had seen, including a story of a docker who received gruesome, fatal injuries in an accident on the site of the factory in the 1950s. Some people claim the shocking ghost still occasionally puts in an appearance at the site of the factory.

In October 1978, a Wirral ufology group investigated multiple sightings of a large pulsating orange light that had been seen over the region, and they urged groups of people interested in UFOs to form a sky-watch group at places such as Bidston Hill.

A young couple named Barry and Glynis, both in their early twenties, went up Bidston Hill on the Monday night of October 16, 1978 – the night of a full moon – to keep a lookout for UFOs.

Barry had brought along a pair of binoculars, and Glynis had brought a thermos flask of hot oxtail soup.

They found a spot near the windmill on the hill, and Barry scanned the heavens with the binoculars. Glynis whispered, ‘Barry, there’s someone up here.’

‘What? Where?’ Barry asked, gazing about, and Glynis pointed to two shadows of men further down the slopes, and as they drew nearer, Barry and Glynis could hear them swearing. ‘They’re having one hell of a row,’ remarked Barry, when suddenly, the full moon emerged from a cloud, and the hill seemed as bright as day in the silvery light - a light that revealed that the arguing men were naked.

‘I think we’d better leave here,’ said a nervous Glynis, and then suddenly, the two men started to fight one another, and one seemed to bite the other, who let out a scream.

'What in God’s name - ' Barry gasped, and then the fighting men slowly turned into what the young couple took to be large dogs at first.

Barry looked through the binoculars at the unearthly sight and did not tell Glynis what he had seen; instead, he grabbed her hand, pulled her with him, and they made a quick and dangerous descent of Bidston Hill as they heard the ‘hounds’ getting nearer.

Barry told Glynis to get behind him as he hid behind a tree, and the couple watched what looked like two men running impossibly fast on all fours towards them.

The men were covered in silvery grey hair and had pointed ears and large snouts where the faces should have been. One word occupied Barry’s mind as the figures of fear ran past: werewolves.

One of the creatures stopped and looked over at the couple, growling and baring its pointed white teeth, but then it turned and continued on its way down the slopes.

The frightened couple eventually reached the roadway, where they were almost run over by a car driven by an old school friend of Barry’s – a man named Richard. He asked the couple what they were doing on Bidston Hill late at night, and Barry said, ‘We have just seen something really scary, Richard.’

Before Barry could tell his friend about the encounter with the werewolves, Richard said, ‘Whatever it was, it’s nothing compared to what I saw a few minutes ago: two figures that looked like wolves ran across the road – on two legs!’

‘That’s what we’ve just seen!’ said Glynis, and Richard said, ‘No, I’m serious—I nearly ran over them.’

And then he saw something in the rear-view mirror—the silhouettes of the ‘man-beasts’ he had seen minutes ago—running towards the car.

Richard sped away like a bat out of hell. There is a legend of a single werewolf on Bidston Hill that dates back to Victorian times, but I cannot explain the double werewolf encounters.

• Tom Slemen’s Haunted Liverpool 37 is out on Amazon with all of his other books and audiobooks.