Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: The ghosts of Halloween

'FROM ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us' - so runs the ancient Cornish prayer.

But deliverance, as regards the world of the supernatural, is rarely so simple; ghosts can be exceedingly hard to remove from their haunting ground.

For centuries, men and women, sensible and sane, have claimed they've glimpsed something else - a face in the mist, a shadow at the foot of the bed, a whisper that chills the marrow.

Could all these witnesses, these ordinary souls, be merely victims of overworked imaginations? It seems unlikely.

So, what was it that clutched at their reason, leaving them shaken, uncertain?

What moved in the gloom, just beyond the reach of daylight’s reassurance?

Were these visitations from the dead, stepping through some invisible door to reach out and touch the living?

Or do they suggest something far more dreadful - a glimpse into a realm we can barely comprehend, a dimension unknown, where something ghastly awaits us all, like a hidden spider in the cobwebs of reality?

Or perhaps, most terrifying of all, the answer lies within the fragile maze of the human mind, which, when left to wander, sometimes reveals its own monsters.

Imagination can be your worst enemy in the still of the night.

I’ve been investigating the supernatural on both sides of the Mersey for many years, and I still don’t have all the answers.

As Halloween looms once more, some people’s thoughts will certainly turn to the eternal mystery of ghosts, and Wirral has so many of them.

Take Oldershaw Grammar School in Wallasey (now known as The Oldershaw School) – one of the great ghost investigators of the last century, Richard Whittington Egan, once told me how the school was haunted by the phantom of Hubert Mayo, Oldershaw’s first headmaster, who died in 1921.

Teachers, pupils, caretakers, and cleaners at the school saw the ghost.

Near Halloween one night in the 1950s, a cleaner was going around the classrooms filling the inkwells when she came face to face with the ghost, who wore his old-fashioned headmaster gown.

He looked like a solid person until he glided away toward his former study.

The cleaner dropped the can of ink and ran off in terror. She alerted the school caretaker, who went to fetch his trusty old Army revolver before going in search of the ghost—but he found the place empty. I am not sure if the ghostly headmaster still roams the school; perhaps someone out there will know.

Another local ghost is the unknown woman who haunts Dibbinsdale Road between Spital and Bromborough. For decades, pedestrians and motorists have seen a ghostly young lady - said to look like a nun - who strolls along this stretch of road. In 1981, a Prenton woman named Eleanor was driving along the haunted stretch of road at 10pm to pick her husband up from work when her car suddenly stalled and she saw what she took to be a girl in her headlights.

The figure wore a rusty-coloured long dress and carried a small lamp.

The girl appeared to be floating about two feet off the ground.

Eleanor was opening the door to her car, thinking the girl might want a lift, but the girl then shimmered and vanished. This same figure has been seen again and again, and I have noted that a majority of the reports take place from late October to Christmas for some reason.

Local legends say the ghost is that of a girl who left Poulton Hall to visit a nunnery but never arrived because someone raped and murdered her - though evidence of this purported event is lacking in the local chronicles of crime.

Over the Halloween period of 1976, the ghost of a hanged man brought terror to the Mearns family at a terraced home on Paterson Street in Birkenhead.

Family members heard coughing and choking sounds that followed them all over the house and subsequently witnessed the shadow of a tall man hanging by a rope from the banisters.

The mother of the family even resorted to the ritual of bell, book, and candle with a priest from St Saviour's Church in an effort to exorcise the ghost, but it was not a success. When the young twins of the family first noticed the ghost, they would shout, 'Man! Man!' and then the infants would start screaming and yell 'Man gone'.

The priest researched the ghost and discovered that a very tall man, about 6' 4", had been found hanging from the stair banister at the house many years before, and his body had not been discovered until four days after the tragedy. A housing and environmental officer later dealt with the case.

One of the most terrifying Halloween hauntings I know of took place on Wood Lane, Neston, in 1993.

The lane is little more than a track and runs for almost a mile between Boathouse Lane and Leighton Road.

Just before midnight on the Wednesday night of October 31, a 22-year-old woman named Sophie walked the length of Wood Lane with a camera because she had been told that a ghostly nun had been seen there.

Sophie was an ardent sceptic towards anything paranormal and had never heard of any ghostly nun haunting the lane. She asked a fellow disbeliever in ghosts - a friend named Joanne - to accompany her, and Joanne said she’d be there at the appointed time, but later bottled out with an excuse not to keep the rendezvous.

And so, Sophie strolled along the shadows of the lane, which was brightly illuminated by a full moon. She lived on Park Street, just off Leighton Road, and was planning to enjoy supper and a bottle of wine if the ghostly nun didn’t turn up to have her picture taken.

Sophie was halfway down Wood Lane when she saw a silhouetted figure approach; it looked like a nun.

She immediately turned on the flash of her camera and grinned, thinking the “nun” was probably her friend Joanne trying to scare her on Halloween night.

But then the figure lit up as if it was made of some translucent material with a bright lamp inside - and Sophie saw a skeletal face within the wimple (that’s the hood) of the nun’s habit.

The ghastly mouth of that skeletal head opened wide and the thing let out a shriek. Sophie fled in terror, but the nun ran after her. She stumbled and fell, and when she got up, the nun was bending over her.

The entity stooped down, and a pair of bony hands seized Sophie by her head. In one heart-stopping moment, the nun tried to bite into her neck and face. Sophie screamed, pushed the apparition away, then got to her feet and ran.

Sophie wore glasses and realized that in the terrifying encounter, her spectacles had fallen off. She could only see the blurred orb of the moon, but she could hear running footsteps getting closer. Turning, she saw the luminous figure heading toward her.

She screamed and ran all the way to her doorstep on Park Street. Sophie hammered on the door of her home, and her mother answered just in time - she too saw the figure running toward her daughter.

Sophie ran into the kitchen in tears and her mother asked her who had been chasing her and if it had been some Halloween prank.

She also asked her daughter why she wasn't wearing her glasses. Sophie told her mum about the nun, and her mother could see bite marks on Sophie's face and neck. Sophie's grandmother later said she had heard of a nun haunting a lane in the area.

Sophie looked at the dial on the camera and saw she had accidentally taken a picture while being attacked by the ghost. When the picture was developed, it showed what looked like a thick mist with a black coffin standing up in it.

Not long after this, Sophie’s grandmother died in her sleep.

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