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

Tom is a renowned expert on ghostly phenomena and is well-known locally, having written a best-selling series of books about Merseyside hauntings.

This week Tom tells the chilling tale of a ghostly stack of playing cards and the young woman who discovered them.

I’ve had to change a few names in this strange story, but beyond that, I am reporting events exactly as they were related to me.

Her name was Christina Wedlake, the 26-year-old fiancée of a fairly well-known television actor we shall call Graham Pye.

In the autumn of 1977, Graham and Christina moved into a small cottage in Frankby, and on the day after the house-warming party, Graham was off to Sussex to shoot scenes for a TV drama for three days.

Most of the year, Graham was away, filming on location, and Christina was looking for any work at all to fill the void created by Graham’s periodic absences, and she’d recently been interviewed at a local cafe where a waitress was needed.

She was now waiting to hear if she’d landed the job.

On this grey Monday afternoon of 31 October, Christina found herself feeling quite depressed as she sat alone in the cottage, pining for Graham.

The telephone rang and she eagerly answered it.

The voice she heard cheered her up immediately; it was Graham, doing his usual Inspector Clouseau impersonation.

‘Who is this?’ she asked, knowing very well it was her fiancé, and Graham replied, ‘Jacques – Jacques Clouseau speaking on zee fern.’‘I might be able to get home a day early,’ said Graham in his real voice, ‘the weather’s been too bad to film some scenes.’

Christina was so glad to hear this, and after the conversation ended, she went for a spin in her Triumph Herald to the church of St John the Divine, to visit the grave of an uncle in the cemetery.

On the top step of a plinth supporting a towering Celtic cross in the cemetery, Christina noticed a purple box about 5 inches long, 3 inches wide, with a depth of some two inches to it.

She looked about, and seeing no one was around, she picked up the box and saw that it contained vintage, velvet-backed playing cards.

Who would leave cards in such a hallowed place? She wondered, and walked off with them – and she had the eerie feeling someone was watching her.

She went for a drive to West Kirby, then headed back to the cottage. She felt so down eating alone, and so she kept the sorrow at bay with wine, and around 10pm she dozed off on the sofa.

She awoke at midnight, put on her nightgown and went to bed, but couldn’t get back to sleep.

She finally got up around 3am, and she recalled the pack of cards she’d found, so she picked them up, shuffled them, and sat at the table in the kitchen playing Patience.

She thought it might be a good idea to marry Graham at the church of St John the Divine, but her pleasant reverie was shattered by a heavy knocking at the oak door of the cottage.

Christina tiptoed to the door and nervously asked, ‘Who’s that?’‘Jacques!’ came the reply.

Christina excitedly slid the bolt off and unlocked the door, thinking it was Graham doing his Inspector Clouseau impersonation.

She imagined he’d got away from filming early and had driven home through the night - but when the door was swung open, the young lady saw it was a strangely-dressed man with seven other people standing behind him, and their attire was also outlandish.

‘Hello there, mademoiselle, I am Jacques the Knave,’ said the man who had knocked, and he wore the exact same style of hat and gaudy clothing as the Jacks on the playing cards.

The “Knave” had a prominent broken nose and facially he reminded Christina of the French actor Jean Paul Belmondo.

Then it hit her – Graham knew some oddball thespians – had he arranged for this motley crew to pay her a visit as some Halloween prank?

The other figures included two stout and stern looking Kings, a Queen, another Knave, a sinister-looking joker who continually sniggered at her, and an abnormally tall figure in a medieval-looking outfit of black velvet with a spade symbol emblazoned on his chest.

His face was pale and elongated and he had piercing eyes like black buttons.She just knew he represented the traditional death card – the Ace of Spades.

‘Is Graham behind all this?’ Christina asked, and gave a nervous laugh.

Jacques seized her, kissed her hard, and tried to rip off her night gown.

She screamed and tore herself from his icy-handed embrace.

‘You shall be our new Queen!’ said the square-shouldered King, and he thrust a piebald costume with a ruffled collar at Christina, but she ran out of the cottage screaming.

She was found by a policeman on his beat at 3.40am that morning as she hid behind a hedge on Hillbark Road, over a mile from the cottage.

He didn’t believe her story – no one did – and those cards were nowhere to be found - but Graham was convinced something strange had happened to his fiancée and the couple moved to Heswall and later married.

Over the forthcoming weeks Tom will tell you more tales of the mysterious and the uncanny in the Globe.

His latest novel, Haunted Liverpool 28 is another dazzling collection of supernatural stories by Tom Slemen, arguably England’s greatest writer on the paranormal.