Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: two 'out there' tales

THIS week, I have two unbelievable tales of the supernatural.

Since starting this column, I have amassed many strange stories from readers that often defy explanation, but the following two are, in my estimation, really 'out there'.

Let us visit the first bizarre account.

You may typically associate the world of the occult – ghosts, vampires, witches, doppelgangers, and the like – with dark, wintry nights and leafless, gnarled branches silhouetted against the waning moon.

However, some of the most peculiar and unsettling incidents I have researched occurred in broad daylight during the height of summer.

While encountering a phantom in the dead of night can indeed be terrifying, it is just as easy for one's courage to falter in the bright light of day, particularly in the midst of a heatwave, as it did for two painters on a sweltering June day in 1982.

The oppressive heat began to creep into the country by the end of May, causing road tar to bubble and tempers to inflame.

By early June, the authorities had already suggested the possibility of a hosepipe ban and on one particularly sweltering day, a perspiring 17-year-old apprentice decorator named Dominic Bassett removed his paint-splattered T-shirt on the roof of an office building in a high area of Birkenhead, not far from Bidston Hill.

From somewhere high in the burning blue sky, the painters heard distant shrieks – female shrieks – followed by girlish laughter. Both painters looked up, squinting as the ultraviolet rays stung their eyes.

'That came from up there!' Dominic shouted, shading his eyes with his hand, as though saluting, but could see only a passing gull.

The female screams pierced the air again, followed by melodic laughter. This time, the sound seemed to come from behind the painters.

Turning, they gazed out across the river, towards the Liverpool skyline, shrouded by the heatwave’s haze. A light breeze carried the scents of tar and the salty air of the Mersey. In the distance, some 400 yards up in the Alice-blue sky, they spotted three coloured dots.

'Balloons,' Eric muttered. However, Dominic, with the sharp eyesight of youth, could clearly see three figures.

'It’s three girls!' Dominic exclaimed.

His hay fever began to affect him, causing his eyes to water. He rubbed them and looked again. The three figures seemed to move northward, gradually becoming mere specks over the river.

Then, they vanished. Eric clung to his balloon theory, but Dominic, still sneezing, knew what he had seen. Eric attributed it to Dominic’s hay fever, but after about ten minutes, the men resumed their painting.

Eric climbed a ladder, and just as Dominic felt paint trickling onto his head, he looked up to find his workmate staring in a daze, paint dripping from his brush.

This time, the three figures were close enough to touch as they passed by, and Eric swore in shock.

The first woman in the formation was a brunette, around 30 years old, sitting side-saddle on a broom and wearing a flowing pink dress.

The second woman, a young blonde, flew behind her, her hand on the brunette’s shoulder. The third figure, a much younger blonde, possibly a teenager, flew closely behind the second woman.

All three were laughing and giggling, oblivious to the painters below as they soared towards Bidston Hill. The brunette screamed as she nearly lost her balance on the broom.

Eric, so stunned by the sight, had a fainting spell and had to go home.

Years later, I recounted this incident on The Billy Butler Show on BBC Radio Merseyside and was inundated with calls and emails from people of all ages and backgrounds, many recalling the ‘witch scare’ of that summer.

The identity of the modern witches and the coven they might have belonged to remains unknown to me, but I suspect that someone reading this may hold the key to the truth, however unbelievable and strange that truth may be.

In 2005, a group of friends, all in their fifties, gathered for dinner at a sprawling house in Heswall and talked of many subjects as the evening drew on, including the latest pop music, sport and politics.

Then the topic of the conversation turned to nostalgia, with each of the guests recalling their Wirral and Liverpool childhoods – all but one guest. His name was Mike; he claimed he could not remember his childhood.

‘Oh, come on, Mike,’ said a guest named Helen. ‘You must remember your schooldays, your friends, etcetera?’

‘No, not a thing,’ said Mike. He was serious. He said there was some mental block in place, and it was frustrating. He had to ask his mother and older sister about his early days because he could not remember them himself.

He only recalled starting a certain grammar school in Wirral, and everything before that was a blank; it was like he had not existed before then.

‘Well, what about photographs of when you were a child?’ asked Peter, a psychiatrist who started to show some interest in Mike’s claims.

‘Oh yes, I have plenty of photographs in the family album, some of them show me with my head sticking out the hood of a pram, but it’s like looking at a stranger.’

Another guest, an artist named Penelope, addressed the group. ‘Thomas De Quincey said there is no such thing as forgetting, that traces in the memory are indestructible.’

Peter, the psychiatrist, adopted his official voice, something he often did without knowing, and his friends would always grin upon hearing it.

He said, ‘The age at which people can remember their earliest memories varies greatly, but most people recall events from around three to four years old. This phenomenon, called childhood amnesia, refers to the inability to recall memories from early infancy and toddlerhood.’

‘Toddlerhood?’ chortled Helen. ‘Sounds like an American term.’

‘Childhood then,’ replied Peter. ‘And I have had patients who have told me they have recalled being in their mother’s womb – and one man in Hoylake assured me he had lived many lives before.’

Penelope, the artist in the group, said, 'I believe we all have more lives than one. Peter, couldn’t you hypnotise Mike and see what is causing the block?'

'Is Peter a hypnotist?' Helen asked. 'I never knew that.'

‘Yes, he’s delved into the murky psyches of many a patient,’ said Penny.

‘It’s helpful, but it doesn’t always work. But if Mike was all for it, I could book him in -’ Peter was saying when Helen cut in and excitedly suggested, ‘Oh, Peter, you’ve got to put him under the influence now! It’d be fascinating to see what’s causing his mental block.'

'It’s not a parlour game, Helen, said Peter, and with a weary sigh, he slipped off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose; the gesture was a clear sign of frustration.

‘The human mind is a delicate mechanism; it’s not for amusement.’

But peer pressure prevailed, and the members, including Mike, urged him to give the hypnosis a try. It turned out that Mike, who was lying across the sofa with his eyes closed, was a good subject for hypnosis – most people resist being ‘put under’.

Peter took Mike backwards into his life and asked him to give a description of the times he was living in.

He described days in the Nineties, even describing a song by Blur being on the radio, and then he was on a date in 1984 and said he was watching the aftermath of the Brighton Bombing on TV. He could recite the words the newscaster was speaking, which sounded eerie to the guests listening in.

Peter retrograded Mike through the seventies, through the drought of 1976 when ladybirds covered Mike in the garden of his home. Then came the sixties and Beatlemania memories, with Mike’s voice sounding so much younger. Helen smirked at the sound.

And then came 1953, when Mike was four years old. He spent most of the time talking in a very childish voice, talking about his 'mummy' and then Mike whispered to the guests, ‘So much for the mental block.’

Then Mike, in his little boy voice, started to cry, and sobbed, 'Go away'.

'Who are you telling to go away, Mike?' Peter asked.

There was no answer. Then he realised he should call young Mike 'Michael', and he asked the same question, this time addressing Michael, the little boy.

'The monster,' said Mike. 'It’s coming out of the wall in the nursery, and its mouth is around the top of my head.'

The guests looked on in great trepidation at the mention of a monster.

'Can you describe the monster, Michael?' asked Peter. 'What does it look like?'

'It’s like an octopus! It comes out of the wall and I can’t get away. Help me! Help me! Mummy!'

Mike then let out a scream and started to lash out with his eyes open, but those eyes were white because they had rolled back. Helen and Penny screamed. Peter and two other guests had to restrain Mike as he kicked his legs in the air and tried to run from the sofa. It took five attempts before Peter could get his subject to snap out of the hypnotic spell.

The Mike that emerged from the session ended up having a complete nervous breakdown. He claimed a horrific entity with six limbs, more like tentacles, had preyed on him when he was a child, attaching itself to his head and drawing out his very mind – that’s what it had felt like.

The entity could not be explained, and five years after the hypnosis session, Mike died in his sleep from what seems to have been a particularly bad nightmare. His wife had lain beside him and said he had been screaming, ‘The monster!’ before he became silent.

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