WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world-famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

ON a beautiful summer's day in June 2012, a 24-year-old Wallasey man named Michael left Seabank Road Post Office and turned left down Cambridge Road, heading for his home, less than seventy yards (64 metres) away.

Suddenly, someone - or something - struck him on the right side of his head with such force that he was thrown sideways over a low wall into a hydrangea bush, where he lay, stunned.

Two teenage girls passing by saw Michael lying in the bush, groaning. They helped him to his feet and asked what had happened. 'Someone punched me', he told them, still unsteady, 'but there was no one there.'

The girls exchanged glances, likely wondering if Michael was intoxicated or under the influence of drugs. At that moment, a man emerged from a nearby house.

He explained that he'd happened to glance out of his bay window earlier and had seen Michael walking along, before witnessing him suddenly being knocked sideways into the bushes. The man had even heard the loud thump of the impact.

Michael was persuaded to go to hospital for a check-up, where he was diagnosed with concussion and a swollen right ear, before later being sent home. This incident is a classic example of an attack by an unseen assailant.

Such entities, often labelled as poltergeists, strike innocent people without rhyme or reason.

Yet, as these occurrences are so inexplicable, they are often dismissed as having a rational explanation - if only the full facts were known.

In August 2012, Sam and Brenda, a Woodchurch couple in their forties, had visited friends in Upton, and on their way home at around 4pm, Sam suggested going to McDonald’s for a bite to eat instead of going home to make their tea.

As the couple’s car was travelling along the Upton By-Pass towards the roundabout near the fast-food outlet, they saw tiny holes appear in the windscreen, rear window, and side windows of the car, and then the windscreen seemed to explode into granules of glass.

Sam pulled over and looked around. Brenda thought their vehicle had come under fire from someone with a pellet gun or air rifle, but the holes had slowly appeared on all four sides of the car simultaneously.

The man who came out to replace the glass said he knew of two incidents where similar strange holes had appeared in car windows; one incident took place on West Road, Noctorum, a few years back, and there was a more recent case on Prenton Dell Road two months previously, where tiny holes appeared in the windows of a van that could not be explained.

The driver of that van said the holes had appeared on three sides simultaneously, and then the windscreen had shattered.

I have heard of similar window-shattering incidents in Liverpool where the usual explanations are trotted out: poorly-fitted glass, stress, changes in temperature, or small pebbles kicked up by the rear tyres of the car in front - even though some cases of exploding glass occurred in cars travelling along deserted roads with no other traffic.

Moving from exploding car windows, we come to what seems to have been a very personal attack on a man - and again it is unexplained and appears to have been supernatural in nature.

It took place one sunny November morning in 2002 on one of the leafy avenues off Telegraph Road. Bebe and Zoe, two young female students in their twenties, had just moved into a flat, and their landlord had decided to paint the exterior of the house in a shade of Tuscany orange.

At around 11am, the two students brought out a tray of coffee and Jammie Dodgers and chatted to the landlord, a man in his fifties named Leonard.

He thanked the girls for the elevenses and then asked if they fancied going for a drink with him later in the evening. The young ladies said they’d love to and then something very strange happened.

A broad paintbrush flew through the air and slapped Leonard across the face, leaving a large orange mark on his left cheek.

'Hey! What are you playing at?' Leonard asked the students, thinking one of them had thrown the paintbrush - until he realised they were standing behind him and the brush had come from the front.

Then, one of the students - Bebe - let out a yelp and shouted, ‘Look out!’

A pot of Tuscany orange masonry paint floated through the air over the landlord and tipped its contents over his head and shoulders.

Both students witnessed this and then saw another, smaller paintbrush whizz past their heads.

Leonard, a superstitious chap, suspected the students of involvement in the strange goings-on, possibly through witchcraft.

He hired a professional decorator to finish the job and later told the students he couldn’t take them out for the drink because something had come up.

Over the next few days, poltergeist activity erupted in the students' flat, and the two young women did a moonlight flit, leaving without a forwarding address.

I later discovered that reports of a noisy ghost at the house on the avenue off Telegraph Road date back to the 1970s.

A lady named Janet once called in when I was on The Billy Butler Show on BBC Radio Merseyside, discussing local paranormal mysteries. Janet said that one sunny afternoon in the spring of 1963, when she was aged 12, she was walking to her aunt’s house on Ingleby Road, New Ferry, when she felt someone claw at her face.

Janet screamed from the pain and the shock of seeing no one else around. She ran, sobbing, with tears and blood dripping down her face, and when her aunt saw her, she exclaimed, 'Your face! It's destroyed!' which made Janet hysterical.

A neighbour of Janet’s aunt, a nurse, treated the deep scratch marks on the girl’s face, seeing that although they looked severe, they were only superficial. Nonetheless, Janet bore the scars of the unearthly attack for many years, and they didn’t fade until she was in her early twenties.

Her aunt claimed that a witch had clawed Janet’s face out of jealousy, and that the same wicked ghostly witch had pushed a 16-year-old local boy named Nicholas off his bicycle in 1929, leading to his tragic death under the wheels of a lorry on New Chester Road.

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