SEVERAL weeks ago, I documented a number of baffling paranormal incidents from my files and, in response, received a variety of strange stories from readers.
What follows are some of these intriguing, yet unexplained, accounts shared with me by the readers of the Wirral Globe.
Where should I begin? Let us start with the sweltering summer of 1971, on a pleasant, almost tropical evening, when a regular patron of the Shrewsbury Arms pub named Stanley left his home on Olive Road in Neston.
This particular pub, incidentally, is not to be confused with the establishment of the same name located on Claughton Firs in Oxton. The one I am referring to was situated at the junction of Chester High Road and Hinderton Road and is now known as the Hinderton Arms.
Stanley, aged fifty, walked nearly a mile to reach the pub, and on the way, he saw whom he believed to be Beryl, the beautiful and widely popular barmaid at the Shrewsbury Arms.
She would later that year win the Merseyside heat of the Whitbread Ideal Barmaid Competition, such was her charisma and beauty. However, Stanley was taken aback to see her dressed in a long green satin robe. He was curious and increased his pace, trying to catch up with her, but she began to jog and quickly left him behind.
Then something exceedingly strange occurred.
The figure in the green satin robe began to emit a faint glow as she hurried along Hinderton Road. Suddenly, a ghostly yet spectacular medieval-looking village appeared in the distance.
The houses bore the black-and-white ‘magpie’ stripes of typical Tudor dwellings, and the streets and buildings glowed with a faint blue phosphorescent light. Stanley ran towards the ethereal village, but a painful stitch in his side caused him to stop. He watched helplessly as both the phantom village and the mysterious woman in green slowly vanished.
When Stanley finally reached the Shrewsbury Arms, he was astonished to see Beryl on duty behind the bar, serving customers. She was not wearing anything green — certainly not a long satin robe — so who had the woman been, whom he had mistaken for the barmaid?
Stanley decided it would be wise to say nothing. However, about ten minutes after his arrival, a young man named Roy entered the pub. Stanley overheard Roy say to three of his friends, “You will not believe this, but here goes—you have all heard of ghosts, but what about a ghost village? I have just seen one on Hinderton Road.”
Roy then described the Tudor dwellings he had seen in what he called a “vision.”
His friends laughed and thought he was joking, but Stanley approached the group and confirmed that he, too, had seen the same thing.
Roy also mentioned the woman in green. Stanley remarked on her resemblance to the curvy barmaid, to which Roy replied, “Yes, you are right. She was a dead ringer for Beryl.”
Just who the ghostly woman was, and whether she had any connection to Beryl or the village, remains unknown. It seems likely that the phantom village was the spectral remnant of a long-vanished settlement that once existed in Neston, perhaps centuries ago.
Another reader of the Wirral Globe, named Gillian, recently contacted me to share her own puzzling encounter with the paranormal. In July 2015, Gillian, then aged 35, had met her old school friend Jayne at the Lidl supermarket on St Paul’s Road.
The two women, who had known each other since childhood, had bumped into one another while shopping and decided to walk home together. They both lived on the same housing estate, just a few hundred yards from the supermarket.
It was a bright, sunny afternoon, and as they strolled eastwards along St Paul’s Road, reminiscing about their schooldays, something truly bizarre occurred.
The next moment, they found themselves almost a mile in the opposite direction — on Borough Road, directly beside Prenton Park, the well-known home ground of Tranmere Rovers Football Club.
Naturally, they were stunned. Neither woman had any recollection of how they had travelled such a distance in what seemed to be the blink of an eye. There had been no taxis, no buses, no sudden acceleration—just the normal pace of a casual walk. They began to question their own sanity, half-jokingly suggesting they were losing their minds.
However, the mystery deepened. A friend of Jayne’s later reported that she had been walking approximately one hundred yards behind the pair and had witnessed something truly inexplicable: she saw a strange white mist envelop the two women for a few moments. When the mist dissipated, both Gillian and Jayne had vanished.
Remarkably, Gillian and Jayne stated that they had felt nothing unusual at the time of this strange transference — no dizziness, no loss of balance, no awareness that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
To this day, they remain unable to explain what took place on that sunny summer afternoon.
I would personally describe it as a textbook example of teleportation — the hypothetical instantaneous transport of matter or energy from one point to another, bypassing the intervening space entirely.
In conventional Newtonian physics, such an event is regarded as impossible. Atoms, according to that framework, do not simply vanish and reappear elsewhere.
Yet quantum physics presents a different view.
At the subatomic level, particles behave in ways that defy everyday understanding. Electrons, for instance, do not orbit the nucleus in neat circles. Instead, they exist as probability clouds, appearing and disappearing in unpredictable patterns across atomic distances.
They can tunnel through energy barriers they theoretically should not pass. They can flicker into and out of existence, and even perform sudden, unexplained “quantum leaps” from one location to another, without traversing the space in between.
Perhaps what Gillian and Jayne experienced was not madness or magic, but a rare instance in which the bizarre and bewildering rules of the quantum world briefly intersected with our own.
Or, just possibly, some higher intelligence intervened — teleporting the women as a kind of psychological experiment, simply to observe how two ordinary minds might react to something well beyond their comprehension.
Turning now to a story from much earlier, a reader named Mike contacted me with a memory that continues to baffle him.
In August 1976, during the legendary heatwave that turned Britain into the “Tropics of Albion”, temperatures peaked at an astonishing 96.6°F. At that time, twelve-year-old Mike and his older sister Alison were spending time on the beach at Hoylake, which was crowded due to the unprecedented sunshine.
Alison noticed a commotion near the water’s edge. Groups of children were shouting and wading through the sea, and adults stood watching, pointing in the same direction.
Alison went to investigate, with Mike following close behind. About fifty feet out into the water, there was a very pale hand protruding from the surface.
It was clad in a wide white sleeve and holding a sword upright by its metal hilt. The blade was long, and the summer sun shimmered off its surface.
To those familiar with Arthurian legend, it immediately brought to mind the image of the Lady of the Lake — her arm emerging from the waters, offering the mighty Excalibur. The hand holding the sword remained motionless for approximately ten minutes.
Mike, being shorter, could not get a clear view, but Alison described the spectacle in detail. Eventually, the mysterious hand and the sword slowly sank beneath the sea.
What was most curious was the reaction of the crowd. No one — child or adult — ventured out into the water to investigate. Instead, they stood silently, many waiting for the hand to re-emerge. It never did.
Mike has often pondered the meaning of the event. It is worth noting that the Wirral Peninsula features in a number of tales and poems associated with King Arthur.
When the legendary monarch was mortally wounded in his final battle, he instructed Sir Bedivere to cast Excalibur into a lake. Some versions of the legend claim it was not a lake, but the sea—specifically, Muir Éireann, the Irish Sea.
* All of Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available on Amazon.