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 tale of a young pair who fell in love at first sight but all was not what it seemed.

It was a Saturday afternoon, Christmas Eve, 2011.

He stood in the packed railway carriage heading for Bromborough Rake when his eyes chanced to meet her face – and at first Jon Trent thought she was someone famous because she looked so familiar, but then he realised she was not someone off the television – he simply couldn’t place her, and he was going to be forthright and ask her who she was, but the train decelerated and she walked away from him, ready to exit.

‘Excuse me,’ he said, but she didn’t hear him. The train stopped with a slight inertial jolt, and people crowded about her before the doors slid open.

They all poured out at Port Sunlight, and Jon watched her through the window, walking away, her back straight as a plank, and she had an elegant and confident way of walking, he thought.

He watched her until she was out of view and the train moved off.

All through the remainder of that Christmas Eve he thought about her at his terraced home on Beechwood Road, and he could not drive her face from his mind.

Who on earth was she? How could he know her yet not recall seeing her anywhere? Had she been some model in a magazine? No.

Some girl he’d gone to school with? No, she seemed to be about 26 and he was 36.

Someone he’d met on holiday? No.

He sat down in his gaming chair with a glass of wine and entered a meditative state as he recalled the mysterious lady.

What had she been wearing? A woollen roll-neck jumper, skinny jeans and Keds. She’d held a River Island carrier bag and other bags.

He muttered to himself: "Come on; where have you seen her before?" 

He found his mobile and called his best mate Charlie and told him about the girl on the tip of his memory and Charlie said: "What it is mate is this: they all look the same nowadays, these girls, especially blondes – like clones they are." 

"She was a brunette," Jon told him.

Charlie yawned.

"Whatever. They all dress the same – that’s why you think you’ve seen her before." 

This was Jon’s first Christmas alone since he split with his girlfriend Joely, yet he did not feel at all sad nor did he wallow in self-pity because he was too preoccupied by the mystifying girl he’d seen on the train.

Christmas came and went, and at 5:10pm on Wednesday, January 18, he boarded the train at Lime Street to take him home after work – and she was standing in the crowded carriage.

Jon felt his heart go into freefall for a moment as he noticed her.

This time she turned to look at him – and her large green eyes widened – as if she knew him.

She was looking at him the way he had looked at her on Christmas Eve.

He smiled.

She blinked, looked away – then slowly turned to look at him again.

Simultaneously, Jon and the woman said to each other: "How do I know you?’ then started to laugh.

Jon told the girl – who gave her name as Saffron – that he couldn’t place her, and that since he’d seen her on the train three weeks before, he had been driven to distraction trying to identify her.

Saffron said that was odd because she somehow knew his face and yet she couldn’t work out why.

When Saffron got off the train at Port Sunlight, Jon disembarked too and he stood there for a moment on the platform looking awkwardly at the highly recognisable face of a woman he felt he’d known all of his life, and she hesitated, half turning away, ready to walk on, when he said, "Saffron, you might think this really cheeky of me, but I have to see you again."

She returned a quizzical look and with a smile she asked: "Why?"

"It’s bizarre," he confessed, "but I feel as if I’ve always known you." Jon and Saffron started to see one another, and the mystery of the way they seemed familiar to one another deepened over the coming weeks.

Saffron said she’d had recurring dreams of being with a man who looked just like Jon for years and the couple found they shared so many tastes in books, art and music.

They visited a seaside fortune teller in Blackpool one day, and she told Jon and Saffron they were both “old souls” who had shared many previous lives.

Jon eventually visited a clinical hypnotherapist in Liverpool, and he was ‘regressed’ to what seemed to be some life in 18th century France.

He was an aristocrat during the Revolution – and Saffron was his wife.

They both died on the guillotine.

Saffron was regressed, and although she did not know the facts about Jon’s regression, she too recalled her life as a well-to-do lady during the French Revolution, and remembered fainting as she was taken to the guillotine.

The hypnotherapist eventually determined that Jon and Saffron had shared four other lives stretching back into medieval times.

The couple were later married, and one wonders – will they meet again in some future existence?

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

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