Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Two ghostly saviours

AT exactly nine o'clock on the evening of Friday, March 20, 1887, Duncan Alexander, a 50-year-old doctor, hastened from his Birkenhead surgery, carrying his Gladstone bag and clutching his hat in the fierce out-of-season gales which had just blown the Ferry Landing Stage out into the Mersey.

Dr Alexander followed 13-year-old Obadiah Walker towards his nearby Conway Street home, where his young sister Martha was in a semi-conscious state after choking on a boiled sweet.

Young Obadiah kept stopping, and turning to the physician, urging him to hurry to the aid of his beloved six-year-old sister.

Unknown to Obadiah, Duncan Alexander was a man with a serious addiction problem; he was an alcoholic and whenever he encountered the slightest degree of stress, or whenever he came under the least amount of pressure, he sought refuge in a bottle of gin.

Tonight, the doctor knew he would have to perform a tracheotomy - a delicate incision into the choking child's windpipe to allow air into her bursting, oxygen-starved lungs.

Already his hands were trembling. The delirium tremens was upon him. With his body tremoring, his mouth started to dry up, and a sickening dizziness overwhelmed him.

As he strode along after the anxious boy, the yellow lights of the street lamps seemed to dance about before his gaze. Practically convulsing, the distracted doctor turned a corner and became transfixed by the sight of a nearby public house.

The shadows of the drinkers against the frosted window panes and the faint hubbub of singing and laughter gripped his fevered mind. Like a moth to a flame, the pub lamps drew him in, and he suddenly announced to Obadiah, "Run ahead and inform your mother that I'll be along shortly. I have to see the landlord in here, but I shan't be very long."

Obadiah returned a puzzled grimace, but before he could question the doctor, Duncan Alexander had slipped into the public house.

The boy ran homeward through the blustery night and told his mother, Mrs Lydia Walker, who was waiting anxiously for their return. She was outraged by the doctor's detour into the pub, but dared not leave her sick daughter unattended.

It was not until half-past nine that Dr Alexander hammered on the door of the Conway Street house, and was greeted with a rain of blows from an hysterical Mrs Walker.

Her little girl Martha was dead. He was too late to save her.

Nevertheless, Dr Alexander queasily pushed past the distraught woman. He looked up and saw Obadiah standing on the stairs in tears, and so he rushed up to the bedroom where he found little Martha, lying cold and blue on the bed.

The doctor desperately tried smelling salts and every trick in his medical repertoire, but the little girl couldn't be revived. Not long after the tragic loss, the doctor was found dead at the bottom of the staircase at his home, after stumbling down the stairs in a drunken haze.

It was a year after his unexpected death that a stranger knocked at the house in Conway Street at 9.30pm. Lydia Walker's sister Phoebe answered - and was faced with a sad-looking man standing on the doorstep, wearing a Homburg hat and a cape. He carried a doctor's bag.

'Dr Alexander,' he announced, and rushed past Phoebe into the house.

He quickly made his way up the stairs in silence, but when Phoebe chased after the stranger, she found the rooms upstairs empty. Naturally concerned, the girl soon related the strange incident to Lydia, who shuddered when she heard the doctor's name.

The unknown visitor had obviously been the restless ghost of the guilt-ridden, late Dr Alexander.

But the unusual occurrences did not end there.

One sweltering evening in May 1976, a 12-year-old girl named Amanda was put to bed. She lived at the exact same house in Conway Street that had once been inhabited by the Walker family. At around 9.30pm, Amanda was startled to see an old fashioned man come into her room.

He wore what she described as a "funny black hat and a cloak" - and clutched an old leather bag.

He took off his coat and went to the bathroom along the landing to fetch a bowl of water and a flannel. He dabbed Amanda's forehead and used a long-handled spoon to administer a purple, sweet-tasting medicine from a bottle.

The girl assumed he was some modern - but eccentric - doctor, that her mother must have called. The physician smiled benevolently and seemed to have tears in his eyes as he gently bade her goodnight.

That morning at one o'clock, Amanda rose from her sickbed with a sudden ravenous appetite and went down to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

Her feverish sickness had completely gone. Her parents were alarmed by her explanation about the doctor, for they had not called out any doctor. Immediately they searched the house - but the mysterious doctor could not be found.

A month afterwards, an elderly neighbour told them the sad story about the alcoholic doctor, and how his restless guilty shade called at the house each May, forever trying to save the little girl he had let down so badly.

In the following May the ghost failed to call, so we must assume that he is now at peace.

We now move forward to the early 1970s, to a house on St Andrew’s Road, Prenton. A 20-year-old lady named Judy was heavily pregnant and had run away from her home in Caldy to stay in a room with her Bohemian boyfriend Bill, a workshy man her parents despised because of his alleged drug use and hippie ways.

Bill said Judy should have a natural birth at home, and one evening at the house on St Andrew’s Road, Judy went into labour.

She screamed in agony, and Bill basically left her to it and went down to the pub. Bill’s best friend, Robin, told Judy he was going to call an ambulance, but she begged him not to.

It soon became clear that there was a problem with the birth, and Judy believed it was a breech birth - where the baby is positioned feet or bottom first instead of head first. A few hours later, Robin saw the distress Judy was in and decided he’d go and call an ambulance, but Judy’s drunken boyfriend Bill returned from the pub.

When Robin told him where he was going, Bill butted him in the head and knocked him clean out.

Another tenant at the house heard the commotion and Bill had a blazing row with him. During the altercation, a woman came up the stairs and entered the room where Judy was in labour.

She told the young lady she was a midwife and gave her name as Eveline. She was dressed like a nurse and wore a long royal blue raincoat, which she took off.

She examined Judy and said something about “turning the baby.” She really put Judy at ease and gently guided her into a hands-and-knees position. About an hour later, the midwife delivered the baby—a girl—and Judy wept with joy.

Someone had tipped off the police, and an ambulance turned up at the house, and three constables stormed the place. Judy then realised that the midwife, Eveline, had seemingly vanished into thin air.

After all the turmoil had died down and Judy was examined at the local hospital, a midwife and the matron quizzed Judy about the woman who had delivered her baby girl.

All Judy could remember was that the woman had given her name as Eveline and, to distract Judy when she was in labour, had told her funny stories about 'St Faith's Home'.

The older matron asked Judy what the midwife looked like, and her description of Eveline's hair and eye colour, her height, and build convinced the matron that Judy had been visited by the ghost of a midwife the matron had known in her youth.

Her name had been Eveline, and she had been based at St Faith’s Home on Palm Grove, just around the corner from the house on St Andrew’s Road, where Judy had given birth.

Eveline had died many years ago. The matron believed she had returned from the hereafter to help Judy in her hour of need.

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