Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Travellers in time?

THE Archers pub on Mark Rake, Bromborough, opened in December 1957 and quite a few paranormal incidents allegedly happened on the premises in its lifetime, which unfortunately came to an end in 2013.

Of all the strange occurrences that took place in the Archers, the most intriguing, in my opinion, anyway, unfolded one day around September 1958.

An octogenarian Wirral Globe reader named Harry was there that day in the pub as a fresh-faced 20-year-old shop assistant on his lunch break and he was one of the people who witnessed the weird incident.

The conversation was the usual mixture of sport, politics, and in young Harry’s case he was discussing the previous evening's immensely popular TV comedy show, Hancock’s Half Hour, and quoting the titular comedian’s lines to a bemused girl named Janet, who worked in a local chemist.

Sunlight was streaming through the windows, creating a blue haze in the bar as people smoked their cigarettes and pipes – this was decades away from the smoking ban of 2007 of course.

Janet noticed it first – the cigarette smoke started to whirl about; it started with a thin ribbon of blue vapour that coiled lazily in the air, gathering into a delicate spiral. It twisted and turned, and Janet drew Harry’s attention to it.

In turn, Harry pointed out the inexplicable spiralling vortex to an old gent named Peter, who reacted by blowing a ring of his pipe smoke at the swirling column.

Moments later, Peter excused himself to go to the toilet, leaving Harry and Janet to resume chatting about their jobs.

Suddenly, Harry let out an expletive — a rare thing for him to do, especially in front of a lady. He did it out of pure shock, because where the smoke had been behaving so strangely, there now stood a man, dressed in a bizarre one-piece suit of garish colours – it was dark blue with white stripes running diagonally across the chest and sleeves of the jacket, as well as down the legs of the pants.

The stranger who had literally appeared out of thin air was tall and well-built, with a firm, upright posture. His expression was serious and composed, and he had a faint smile on his face.

All of the conversations in the bar fell silent. Janet’s mouth dropped open, and she instinctively stood up and took a step back, standing on Harry’s toe, and she clutched her handbag against her chest as if for protection.

For a moment, Harry thought his eyes were playing tricks on him. Looking back on the incident years later, Harry realised that the man had been wearing a tracksuit – a modern one – and there were no jogging suits or sportswear like that in 1958.

The living anachronism walked out of the bar after saying 'hiya' to Janet.

People rushed to the windows to see where this ‘ghost’ was going but saw nothing. Some of the braver drinkers, Harry and Janet included, left the pub to see where he was, but the man had vanished as mysteriously as he had appeared from the smoke in the bar.

The account of what happened that day was exaggerated and embellished with each retelling and I had heard different variations of it, but finally tracked down several people who had been in the Archers that day via a BBC radio programme.

Janet sadly passed away in the 1970s but a few witnesses called me on air, including Harry, and it was the latter who came to believe that the man was not a ghost, but some traveller from the future. Had the tracksuited man inadvertently stepped into some timeslip unaware, he was remarkably calm about it – unless he was someone who had retrograded into the past before perhaps, and at this point I am clutching at straws, because I simply do not have enough data on the man.

If he was someone exploring the dimension of time of his own volition, he made no effort to blend into the dreary, muted fashion of the 1950s; instead he wore his bright, futuristic outfit – a jarring anomaly – almost as if he wanted to cause a stir.

Another possible visitor from the future was encountered by a 10-year-old girl named Ann in Wallasey in 1966. Ann was playing with her friends near her home on Albion Street when a blond-haired boy riding a bright orange scooter and wearing a helmet passed by.

The boy pulled up and smiled at the group of children. Then, with a curling forefinger, he beckoned Ann over. She eagerly ran to the boy, who appeared to be a little older than her—perhaps 12 or 13 years old.

Ann got on the back of the scooter and her friend Janet told her not to go with the boy but the blond lad drove off on the aerodynamic scooter and Ann held onto him.

She was gone for quite some time and Janet ran to Ann’s home and told the girl’s mum what had happened. The mother panicked and went in search of her daughter and ended up reporting what she suspected to be some abduction to the police.

Ann returned to her home at 7pm and told her sobbing mum she had been over to Liverpool with a boy named Felix, and the girl's mother and father doubted her story because Ann said she had gone across the water via a bridge. 

She described other people she had seen on ‘electric bikes’ and described the strange clothes and shops she had visited – but her mother sent her up to her room as punishment and chided the girl for telling fibs – even though all of Ann’s friends saw the blond boy on the scooter.

Years later, Ann realised she had somehow experienced a timeslip, and believed Felix, the boy on the scooter (which was electric and very quiet) had been a child of the 21st Century, and that he had taken Ann to Liverpool via a bridge that is only now being proposed – the Mersey Barrage - which will run between New Brighton and the Brocklebank Dock in Bootle.

There are plans for green cycle lanes on the bridge if it becomes a reality.

The more we look into the strange but fascinating workings of the universe, the more we must keep our minds open.

Nothing is too strange to believe and the word "unthinkable" seems redundant today, especially in the light of the bizarre world of quantum physics.

The eminent quantum physicist Avshalom Elitzur has argued that the past might not be as fixed as traditionally thought in physics.

This concept challenges the classical view of a deterministic past, suggesting that quantum processes could allow for a certain degree of "openness" or indeterminacy, even after events have occurred.

His perspective invites a rethinking of time, causality, and how quantum events influence both past and future. In other words, time travel into the past may be possible.

We are all travelling into the future all the time at a rate of one second per second, but science has always been reluctant to look into the possibility of going backwards in time.

In 1830, one of the most intriguing candidates for a time traveller visited Liverpool, Wirral, and Cheshire - and he was an enigmatic figure known as the Count of St. Germain.

He attended the opening of the first railway in Liverpool and made mysterious visits to Wirral, possibly to influence the development of iron vessels and submarines at the newly established Cammell Laird shipyards in Birkenhead.

The Count famously warned Marie Antoinette of the French Revolution years before it occurred and astonished historians with vivid descriptions of life during Ancient Egyptian times, as if recounting from personal experience.

He openly talked of meeting Jesus and lamented, ‘I had always known Christ would meet a bad end.’

He also described the court life of Henry VIII and hinted that he was able to travel through time and also astral project himself over long distances, telling King Louis XVI, ‘We moved through space at a speed that can be compared to nothing but itself . . . for quite a long time I rolled through space,' and the Count claimed he travelled so far into space that the earth looked like a star.

The lifespan of the Count is truly remarkable; despite having the appearance of a man in his forties, he must have been at least 120 years old – in an era when life expectancy was about thirty-five.

All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.