Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: There's someone at the door

ONE of the most unnerving things that a person can experience is lying in bed at night after you have switched the light off and hearing the dull thuds of footsteps coming up the stairs.

You know you locked and bolted the front and back doors and the windows are secured, but someone has gained access to your home.

And then the footsteps stop at the door of your bedroom and the door handle turns...

This frightening scenario happened many times to a Bebington lady named Audrey, sending chills down her spine on seven occasions as she lay frozen in fear in her bed, her heart pounding in her chest.

The chilling incidents always took place when Audrey’s husband was working on the night shift, and always after she had been visited earlier in the day by a bogus caller wanting to come into her home.

She called the police after the first two occasions in 1983 and was told to keep the security chain fastened on her door and to always ask for identification, but it transpired that the same caller – a man with a distinctive mole on his face – had menaced the previous occupants of Audrey’s Bebington home twenty years before.

In 1963 the man called at the house when a Mrs Ryan lived there and told her he had been sent from her GP to examine her for possible TB (tuberculosis) because she had been to the doctor’s with bronchitis.

Mrs Ryan was just going to let the man in when her postman arrived, and seeing the "medical" visitor, he said: "You again! Still up to your old tricks, eh?"

The man left in a hurry without saying a word in reply and the postman told Mrs Ryan that the alleged health official from her doctor’s surgery was an impostor who had called at the house several times a year back, before Mrs Ryan had taken up the tenancy.

The same man returned weeks later and stood on the doorstep wearing a beard and a dark blue boiler suit and this time he carried a toolbox and claimed the landlord had sent him to check the plumbing, but Mrs Ryan saw through the disguise because of the persistent deceiver’s distinctive mole and she stepped back and slammed the door in his face.

The strange conman returned wearing spectacles, sporting a shaven head and claiming he had come from the “housing department” to measure the size of Mrs Ryan’s rooms to see if she was entitled to a cut in her rent.

She closed the door in his face again and through the letterbox she shouted that she was going to call the police.

The bizarre but dogged impersonator called a few more times in different disguises but eventually gave up on Mrs Ryan when she called the police.

Audrey heard about the pushy phony visitor of 1963 from her elderly neighbour and thought it was a coincidence that the bogus caller who had visited her multiple times and the one who kept coming to Mrs Ryan’s door in 1963 had moles on their faces and resorted to wearing false beards.

The 1963 doorstep conman and the man trying to gain access to Audrey’s home in 1983 had also donned a boiler suit and professed to be a plumber sent from the landlord.

Things finally came to a head when the tenacious trickster of many disguises somehow gained access to Audrey’s home at one in the morning and was heard coming up the stairs while her husband David was at home and asleep in bed besides her. Audrey heard the footsteps on the stairs and shook David awake and he too heard the intruder.

Audrey had told him repeatedly about the relentless caller and David had thought his wife had been imagining it all because Audrey had always been nervous alone at the house while he was at work.

The footsteps stopped at the bedroom door; the handle of the door squeaked and David threw back the duvet, grabbed a cricket bat from under the bed which he kept there for any burglars and he yelled, 'Who is that?'

David and Audrey then heard heavy footfalls going back down the stairs and David gave chase – but he saw no one.

The sounds of the retreating intruder stopped dead in the hallway and despite a search throughout the house, the burglar was never found. The front door, the back door, and all of the windows to the house were locked and secured. After that unexplained incident, the calls to the house stopped.

Audrey believed there was something supernatural about the caller; he seemed unable to cross the threshold of her home during the daytime visits under various guises but could apparently enter a house of locked doors and fastened windows with ease in the wee small hours.

What on earth did he want? Was it Audrey or was there some ritualistic aspect to the baffling periodic visits? When he did gain access to the house, he tried the bedroom door to Audrey’s room yet never entered it.

Another puzzling aspect of the mystery is the time-scale of the ‘scams’ – they dated back to 1963 and perhaps even prior to that and yet the man always looked as if he was in his thirties.

Another persistent eerie caller visited a semidetached home on Pensby Road, Heswall, in December 2010, only this time the doorstep deceiver was a female.

A woman in her forties named June was making the tea for her 13-year-old son Malcolm around 5pm when they both heard the doorbell ring.

Malcolm went into the hallway and saw someone looking through the letterbox. ‘Help me . . . please, help me,’ moaned the female caller, and Malcolm was just going to open the door when his mum told him not too.

June put the door chain on and looked through the wide-angle viewer in the front door and saw a woman with long white hair and a black jacket and calf-length black dress standing there, grinning into the lens of the door peephole.

‘What do you want?’ June shouted on the other side of the door, and the woman, despite her grin, seemed to start crying on cue, then sobbed, ‘I have nowhere to go; they threw me out and now they’re after me!’

‘Go to the police then,’ said June, ‘I can’t help, sorry.’ June thought the woman might have had accomplices lurking out of sight, waiting to waylay anyone opening the door to the woman out of sympathy.

‘Let me in!’ yelled the caller, and the letterbox opened and the woman’s hand slid through the door and her thin forearm reached out and grabbed Malcolm’s wrist.

He had some difficulty freeing his wrist from what was a very icy grip until his mother struck the woman’s hand with the metal spatula she was still holding from making the tea.

The hand released Malcolm’s wrist and the woman outside swore at June, saying she’d be back.

The woman was heard to walk away, and when Malcolm looked through the letterbox he noticed that although there was a layer of fallen snow on the path outside, there were no footprints to be seen.

The boy’s father then arrived home from work a minute later and said he had seen no white-haired woman in black, but the nuisance doorstep caller returned to the house at one in the morning, hammering on the door and claiming, with that whimpering voice, that she had nowhere to go and that there were people out to get her. June and her husband crept from their bed to the window and peered through the net curtains at the woman below as she fell on her back.

She lay there in the snow, laughing, and then went into all sorts of contortions as she yelled something about a terrible curse that would fall upon the residents of the house unless they let her in. ‘I’m going to call the police before she does herself some harm,’ June’s husband declared and went to the bedside telephone but then June said, ‘Oh my God! She’s gone.’

‘What?’ June’s husband put down the receiver and went back to the window.

‘She was there one moment then gone,’ said June.

The woman called again on Christmas Eve at 9pm and this time, June’s brother opened the door despite June telling him not to, and he went to confront the woman but she ran off laughing and turned right at the end of the path, where she was obscured by a tall hedge. When June’s brother reached the spot, literally seconds later, the woman had vanished.

The mystery then deepened when a neighbour later told June that she had seen the white-haired lady vanish into thin air as she walked towards her one night on Pensby Road.

Who the caller was remains a mystery.

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