Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: strangers in the night

SOME very strange things are seen in the dead of night.

Ghosts do walk by day, but are often taken as members of the living if their attire is relatively modern.

In the night, when the hubbub of traffic diminishes to an uneasy silence, and most of the other mundane sounds of the day have faded, the atmosphere shifts dramatically.

The ghost, no longer cloaked by the clamour of the living world, comes into its own after nightfall; it tends to become more noticeable.

The mind, deprived of the reassuring stimuli of broad daylight, becomes more attuned to the slightest anomaly - a faint whisper, or a flicker of movement out the corner of the eye.

I know many high-noon cynics of the supernatural who become nervous believers in the deadness of the wee small hours, when imagination becomes your worst enemy as the rest of the city sleeps.

The ghost, elusive and indistinct in daylight, becomes tangible - its spectral presence heightened by the eerie quiet and the primal fear that the night evokes.

It was in the silence of the night when a group of intriguing yet frightening ghosts materialized in the bedroom of a couple at their detached home on Caldy Road in October 1997.

The couple, Bryan and Claire, both 29, had gone to bed at 11pm, but at midnight, Claire nudged her husband awake, telling him she had heard what sounded like voices singing a hymn. Bryan, however, could hear nothing and assured his wife that she must have been dreaming.

He and Claire eventually went back to sleep, but about twenty minutes later, the sounds of men chanting roused the couple from their slumbers.

Claire opened her eyes and saw the bedroom was bathed in a silvery light. She and Bryan saw the ghosts at the same time and recoiled in terror.

They were seven hooded men, dressed like monks, and each had a thick beard.

The figures were glowing with an ethereal silvery-blue light, and each of them had their hands clasped as if in prayer.

There were three on each side of the top of the bed and one behind the heads of the couple, which should have been impossible as the wall was there.

The ghost standing behind the couple in the centre wore what looked like antlers or branches on his head. Claire thought she heard one of the ghosts chant, ‘Bring back our ways!’

Bryan jumped out of the bed and ran to the light-switch. He turned the light on and in that instant the seven ghosts vanished.

The couple went downstairs and sat in the kitchen sipping coffee for almost an hour, trying to rationalise what they had seen and heard.

As far as Bryan and Claire knew, no monasteries had existed in the vicinity of Caldy Road.

The only monks they could associate with Wirral were the ones at Birkenhead Priory nearly seven miles away on the other side of the peninsula, so whose ghosts had they encountered?

Had either Bryan or Claire seen the ghosts alone, the experience might have been dismissed as a vivid dream.

But since they both witnessed them, it became much harder to explain away. The couple had lived at the house for two years and had never experienced anything paranormal there before.

The couple eventually went back to bed and slept soundly until the morning, but three days after this, the seven spectral singers returned in the dead of night.

Just after three in the morning, Claire recognized the same chanting sounds from the last time the ghosts had materialised, and she opened her eyes to find the room once again flooded with silvery light.

This time there was a ghost at each corner of the bed and three of them stood about four feet from the bottom of the bed.

Also, on this occasion, one of the hooded phantoms – the one who wore the 'antlers' on his hooded head - held a staff, and he pointed it at Bryan, who was still asleep, and the ghost intoned, ‘Bring back our ways!’ in an eerie, echoing voice.

'Bring back our ways . . .' Bryan said in his sleep and Claire shook her husband awake.

Bryan looked startled as he saw the bed surrounded by the figures, and said, 'Druids; they are Druids!’

The ghost pointing the staff closed his eyes and kissed the wooden rod and he and the other six phantoms vanished, leaving the room in pitch-black darkness.

Bryan switched on the bedside lamp and looked at Claire with a puzzled expression.

He said: ‘I had a dream I was standing before a huge rock and a man was being sacrificed on it.

'Those hooded ghosts were standing around and someone told me that they were Druids.'

Bryan later identified the rock he saw in the dream as the "Thor’s Stone" – a sandstone outcrop on Thursaston Hill, just under a mile from Bryan and Claire’s home.

Some believe the stone was the site of ancient religious ceremonies whilst others think it is just a natural formation.

Whatever those seven ghosts were at the house on Caldy Road, Bryan and Claire never saw them again.

In recent years, a strange nocturnal phenomenon has been reported to me across Wirral and other parts of Merseyside, including Liverpool, and it is people being awakened in the middle of the night by hearing their name being called.

Psychologists refer to these ‘phantom voices’ in the night as auditory hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, and they are supposedly caused by stress or sleep deprivation, but many people who have heard their name being called in the night have told me they were not stressed at the time and were not suffering from sleep loss.

There was a cluster of these incidents in Upton a month back, which contradicts the idea of the voices being psychological in origin.

A woman living on Warwick Road in Upton heard her name being called at one in the morning, and was so sure the voice was not in her mind that she immediately got out of bed and went to her front door, convinced there was someone standing outside.

The voice had sounded so real and familiar that she felt compelled to check – but she looked through the wide-angle door viewer and saw no one was there.

The woman's husband was still in bed, fast asleep and she never told him about the ‘phantom’ voice, but days after this, her husband heard someone calling his name at around two in the morning, and he got up and went to the bedroom window but saw no one downstairs.

A young lady living on Upland Road (a stone’s throw from Warwick Road) in Upton also heard her name being called around three in the morning in September of this year, only she thought the caller was in her bedroom.

On the night after this, the woman’s mother clearly heard her name being called at four in the morning and she heard it twice as she went downstairs to her front door, only to find no one there.

The same thing was heard a quarter of a mile away from the last incident on Birch Avenue in Upton in early October; a woman in her forties heard her name being called in her kitchen at 11pm as she was in bed.

She went downstairs and saw nothing amiss in the kitchen and assured me she had not been dreaming. She then heard her name being shouted from the stairs of her house at around 4am but thinking there was something spooky about the incident, she remained in bed.

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