THE long square of Wirral — technically known as a rhombus — is thirteen miles in length and six to seven miles wide.
This area has been the scene of some truly bizarre and inexplicable paranormal events.
In my study sits a well-stuffed folder brimming with reports of uncanny occurrences that defy logic and easy explanation. Here are just a few of the most peculiar tales, and I would say that both concern a twist in time itself.
I’ll start with an incident which took place in August 1971.
A 21-year-old Heswall man named David was driving his 18-year-old girlfriend Natasha to her home in Parkgate on his Lambretta, but took a wrong turn after he decided to visit a friend in the Windle Hill area.
David also seems to have taken a wrong turn in time, because he arrived in what seems to have been the Neston High Street of either the Victorian or Edwardian times.
Natasha noticed a single car had not passed them on the road, and she found the surroundings vaguely familiar, but there were parts of Neston where buildings were missing, and parts where there were grand old-fashioned residences that should not have been there.
The couple pulled up in front of Prentice’s Ironmonger shop, and soon realised that everyone around them, from a group of children playing marbles outside the shop to a man in a dark suit and straw boater eyeing them suspiciously, were all dressed in old-fashioned clothes.
A man came out of Prentice’s shop and shouted to a policeman, ‘Mr Cooper’ and then the man pointed David and Natasha out to the policeman, who marched towards them with a curious expression.
Natasha felt as if everything around her, the whole scene, was unreal and almost dreamlike, but David had the growing suspicion that he had somehow driven into Neston’s past on his Lambretta, and he felt a mixture of intrigue and nervousness.
David heard two men standing close by who were looking at him and Natasha and one of them mentioned the word “anarchist”.
The police constable said to David ‘I don’t know what that thing is but you have no business to ride it up the High Street’, then looked at Natasha, who was sat on the scooter’s dual seat.
He remarked upon her outfit, stuttering: ‘Young lady, your skirt is scarcely longer than a bootlace. That’s most improper. Showing your knees like that’.
‘We’ll be on our way, constable,’ said David, about to release the clutch, but the policeman said, ‘Hold your horses, dismount that thing, come on’ And he lunged forward, but David and Natasha shot off and the scooter started to accelerate.
Two young lads tried to run after the Lambretta and then things got even stranger. A thick fog enveloped David and Natasha, and the visibility was such that they could not see more than thirty feet.
David saw a horse coming towards him out of the fog, pulling a cart, and he just swerved to avoid hitting the animal as Natasha screamed. ‘What’s going on?’ David yelled and flicked the toggle switch on the handlebar and on came the headlight, but its beam showed nothing but swirling fog.
Then David realised that the road no longer existed; he was driving over grass and mud, and the suspension groaned with every bump.
The fog started to thin out and daylight came seeping through, but now David and Natasha beheld another scene that told them they were not back in 1971.
They saw a row of about twenty men viewed side-on, drawing what looked like longbows and firing arrows into three scarecrows in a field.
The archers turned, startled by the Lambretta’s engine, and one of the men, who seemed to be dressed in a brown tunic, quickly took aim at the Lambretta with his bow and arrow, and David curved to his right to take evasive action and he heard Natasha scream and swear.
She said the arrow had whizzed past her head, missing by inches. David ended taking the scooter into a 180-degree turn, and the fog returned. The couple heard the distinctive sound of the scooter’s tyres hitting tarmac again and the fog thinned out.
David and Natasha found themselves on Neston’s Brook Street. David drove Natasha to her home and she brought him in to meet her parents for the first time and she told them what had happened.
Natasha’s father, Patrick, asked if she and her boyfriend had been taking drugs, but the girl’s mother was more open-minded and suggested that they had perhaps gone into the past via some timeslip phenomenon.
David avoided the Neston High Street whenever he picked Natasha up or dropped her off, but he and his girlfriend (later his wife) never experienced any further paranormal incident in the area.
I did some research and discovered there was a Prentice’s Ironmonger shop where the couple had seen it, back around 1910, and there was a policeman who patrolled that part of Neston in that same time period named Frederick Cooper; he may have been the constable referred to as “Mr Cooper” by a member of the public who alerted him to the couple on what would have seemed a very strange machine. Just who the archers were is unknown; they could have been from medieval times.
Our next mystery concerns a father in his seventies and son in his forties in the 1980s who lived in an apartment with a beautiful view in the luxury high-rise block of flats: the Cliff at New Brighton.
The father was a widowed man and had moved in with his son in the flat.
The son came home one day with a large antique brass telescope which he had bought, and it required a tripod to support it. The son acquired a tripod and mounted the vintage telescope, which had a magnifying power of about 30×70.
He scanned the waterfront of Liverpool, and saw that the images were crystal clear, despite the telescope dating back to the 1900s.
The son then turned the scope on the various homes of Wirral and his father told him to have some respect for people and intimated that his son was like some peeping Tom.
When night fell, the son was excited to see the moon rising across the Mersey and he had a look at it and said he could see its craters and “seas”.
But then he started to scan the multicoloured windows of New Brighton and parts of Wallasey as his father watched TV. The son saw something through the telescope and he said to his father, ‘Dad, I’ve just seen something shocking’.
‘Will you stop ogling women through that thing? You’ll be reported to the police’ the father warned him and continued to watch the telly.
‘Dad, I think I’ve just seen a murder’ the son gasped and took his eye away from the telescope and looked over its length, trying to gauge where the window was in a vast constellation of lights out there.
‘What?’ the man’s father got up from his armchair and looked at him.
‘Dad, I’m not pulling your leg; I saw a woman on a little veranda and this fella came behind her and he seemed to strangle her and then he dragged her backwards into the room, and then he peeped out from behind the curtains, maybe to see if anyone had witnessed it.’
‘Light can play funny tricks at night, you know, son,’ said the old man.
‘Dad, this was not light playing tricks or an optical illusion or whatever you call it — it really happened; I’ve just seen a murder.’
The son seemed to be in a daze. He looked at the telephone and said ‘I’ll have to report it’.
‘You’ll get done for wasting police time,’ said the old man, ‘it might have been a couple larking about, pretending to strangle her.’
‘Dad, he did not look as if he was messing about; he looked as if he was throttling her. Oh my God, I’ll have to work out where the window was and direct the police to the house before he gets shut of the body’.
The son persuaded his father to go to the neighbourhood with him where he worked out where the window with the veranda was, and the father and son called at the house and a landlady answered the door.
When she heard about the murder the man had witnessed she told them that the flat with the veranda was vacant and had lain empty for months.
Three nights after this, the son saw the very same “murder” take place again; the woman stood on the veranda, and this time the son yelled to his father, rousing him from his catnap in front of the telly, and he showed his dad the scene through the telescope.
The man came behind the woman and then he seemed to strangle her. Again, the father and son visited the house and the landlady assured them the flat was empty, but the son went to a telephone box and called the police. The police investigated and said the flat in question was indeed empty.
The phantom murder was seen one more time later that week, and the son got rid of that old brass telescope. He believed he had seen a ghostly re-enactment of a crime of long ago; a crime in which the killer may have got away scot-free.
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