Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: The party never ends

THE following weird tale took place in 1982.

The time was around 5am and a low haze hung over the Mersey, which sparkled majestically in the first rays of the July morning sun.

The thinning vestiges of a night fog from Liverpool Bay still lingered in the Sunday streets, and a strange stillness pervaded Wallasey's Alfred Road.

Along that street, roamed two sisters, Amanda and Holly, aged 16 and 14, and they were in big trouble.

They had stayed the night at the New Brighton house of a 20-year-old man named Stephan and although nothing untoward had taken place, the girls had told their mother that they were staying at the home of their cousin Marie.

However, Amanda had had an argument with Stephan, and he had sent the girls packing at ten past four in the morning.

Now they were walking back to their home in Seacombe, but were faced with a dilemma.

Amanda had lost the latch key and didn't like the idea of waking up her parents at five in the morning. They'd want to know why the girls were back so early, and they'd no doubt then call cousin Marie to check out what was going on.

Amanda and Holly's deception would be discovered, with predictably nasty results. So the girls wandered aimlessly about, and they came upon two snappily dressed young men, aged about twenty, who were walking down Alfred Road.

"Good morning, good morning, good morning to you" one of the men sung to the sisters. He seemed drunk.

Amanda and Holly giggled to one another.

"Hey, do you want to come to a party?" asked the taller of the young men. He was dressed in a dark blue suit and wore a loosened cherry red tie.

His slicked hair looked over-gelled and his voluminous black quiff was very reminiscent of Elvis.

The sisters sniggered again. Amanda replied, "Yeah, okay. Where is it?"

The tall young man took Amanda by the hand and his associate put his arm round Holly.

"What's your name, little sister?" he asked.

Amanda noticed that they were walking towards a three-storey house that looked grey and spectral in the waterfront mist. From that house came the faint hubbub of voices and music.

As the girls got nearer, they heard a song playing on what sounded like a radio or a record player. It was a corny old song which their mother had in her record collection: Mr Sandman by The Chordettes.

"Do you like Pat Boone?" asked the man with his arm slung around Holly's shoulder.

Holly shrugged, and glanced nervously at her sister.

"Who was Pat Boone?" she thought to herself.

The men escorted the girls into the hall of the house. The front door was closed behind them by a third man who looked a similar age to the men who had accosted Amanda and Holly. He held a bottle of beer in his hand and smiled at the two girls.

Amanda and her sister were ushered into the parlour, where there was an old record player with loud music crackling out of it.

A blonde woman stood in the corner; she was about 18 and wore outdated clothes that Amanda and Holly had only seen in the movie Grease. She placed another record on the rubber turntable and carefully lowered the arm of the record player over the spinning disc.

The loudspeaker boomed out Rock Around The Clock by Bill Haley and the Comets, and the blonde girl started to dance in a ludicrous way.

Two more men came into the parlour and started to paw at Amanda and Holly.

The girls backed away, but the men pursued them, and their faces transfigured into expressions of pure hatred.

"Mandy," Holly yelped, and clutched her sister's arm.

"Get away from us!" Amanda shrieked, and ran between the men, with Holly holding tightly on to her wrist. The girls hurried out of the parlour and raced down the hallway to the front door.

Just like a nightmare or a scene from a horror movie, the door wouldn't open, and the men were emerging from the parlour close behind them. One of them produced a penknife and unfolded its blade menacingly.

Holly bent down and slid the bolt off the door. Amanda wrestled with the lock and undid a catch. She managed to open the door, and she and her sister ran out into the street screaming. They heard the footsteps of the men running behind them.

The frightened girls ran up the street and when they reached the front door of their home, they hammered on the door frantically.

Their bleary-eyed father opened the front door and demanded to know what all the screaming was about. Amanda and Holly rushed past him and into the living room, where they held on to each other, trembling.

When their father heard about the leery men who had tried to attack his daughters, he grabbed a cricket bat and went to the house where the party was in progress.

However, when he arrived at that house, he found it deserted, and on either side of the dwelling were closed down factories. The father of the girls had seen the house many times but did not know whether it was still inhabited.

The mystery deepened when a man from a nearby garage told the girls' father that the empty old house was haunted. He said that, for many years, various people living in Alfred Road had heard the sound of a party going on in the house, usually on a Sunday morning.

Complaints about the loud revellers had even been made to the police, but every time the authorities investigated, they always discovered the house in question to be still empty, as it had been for years.

In June 2002, John, a listener to my slot on The Billy Butler Show, called me and told how he had lived in Wirral all his life.

He related various supernatural stories about the peninsula, and mentioned the 'chug chug' of the phantom train that glides unseen through New Ferry in the small hours of the morning, and he also tantalised me with an account of the strange 'man-beast' hybrid who is said to rest in Flaybrick Hill Cemetery.

John then surprised me further by relating the eerie story of 'the party that never ends'.

He described in great detail how he had once been invited to a party at a house on Alfred Road by a blonde woman he had met in Victoria Place.

This had happened after he had left a pub one night in 1969. The attractive blonde had said her name was Violet and seemed real enough at the time.

When they arrived at the house on Alfred Road, John danced with Violet and even drank a bottle of Mackeson's stout, handed to him by one of the other party-goers.

Violet had then excitedly shown him a bundle of vinyl records, and asked John if he would like her to play any particular song from the collection.

"Let's see what you've got," John had smiled, looking through the discs and reading the titles. The Ballad of Davy Crockett by Bill Hayes and I'm Walking Behind You by Eddie Fisher, to name but a few of the out-dated selection with which she presented him.

"Have you got anything by The Beatles or the Stones?" John asked, only to be met by a blank stare from Violet. She had never heard of those groups, nor had anyone else at the party.

Obviously, at that moment, John started to suspect that something was amiss in the parlour. The decor, the clothes of the people present, the records, the small talk; it all seemed so outdated.

John made an excuse to leave, and was met with a sudden and abrupt silence as everyone stopped drinking, chatting and dancing. Violet switched off the record player and John left the house hurriedly.

On the following morning he decided to call on Violet out of curiosity - and found that the house he'd visited the night before was completely boarded up.

Perhaps somebody out there knows the story about the ghostly party that never ends on Alfred Road.

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