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

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 policeman who has a disturbing dealing with a timeslip in Birkenhead.

We assume we know what time is – until we have to define it. How long does “now” last, for example? A second? A microsecond?

A femtosecond (one millionth of one billionth of a second)? We soon see that “now” is too slippery to pin down, but we are told it’s where the receding past and oncoming future meet – the ‘present’ in other words.

Even before we are born we are defined by time.

When you were but a bump in your mum’s tummy people would say, ‘Mrs Jones is six months,’ and long after the baby is born some might remark, ‘He’s a big lad for a two-year-old,’ or ‘She’s clever for a three-year-old’, and then the child is indoctrinated with time-telling (confusing algorithms concerning, minute hands, second fingers, hour hands) and the observation of birthdays.

We then eat, sleep, study, work and take holidays by the clock, and some people even receive a gold clock on retirement – but very few of us ever wonder what time is; is it something measured by clocks or is it all in the mind? Throughout history there have been strange incidents that have made a mockery of our notion of time – and they are known as timeslips.

Until a few years ago, slippages in time were found only in the realm of science fiction, but now they are accepted scientific fact.

In June of this year, physicists detected gravity waves generated by two black holes merging three billion light years from earth, and they actually measured the warping of the space-time continuum with ultra-sensitive laser interferometers in the US.

Einstein had stated that time and space was warped by gravity, but now we have the proof, and that means that time travel is a step nearer, and may be achieved by using superdense materials and sophisticated electronics to distort time and provide portals into the past and future.

But some force has been doing this for years, and it has subjected everyday people to mind-blowing experiences where they have literally found themselves in another time period.

In Liverpool, I have catalogued a concentration of timeslips in the Bold Street area, and in Wirral, Grange Road – and Grange Road West in particular – seems to have a high incidence of timewarps – and I am not sure if the geology of the area is the culprit, for in Bold Street, there are large subterranean deposits of quartz, and also a stream that runs parallel to the street.

In 2005, a woman visited me at Radio Merseyside to tell me how her late husband Jim, had been haunted by a very strange incident which had taken place at Charing Cross, Birkenhead in the 1950s when he was a policeman.

There had already been a terrible accident involving a police motorcyclist which had left Jim traumatised, and now, on this particular night, a dense fog had invaded Wirral and yet some idiotic motorists were still speeding towards the busy roundabout at Charing Cross where five roads converge.

A lorry had ‘conked out’ with the cold and Jim directed traffic in the thick fog around it, and visibility was that bad, he could hardly see anything beyond twelve feet.

A man on a bicycle ran into him at one point, and it was now the rush hour with dusk gathering.

All of a sudden, everything went as silent as the grave, and Jim could hardly see his gloved hand in front of his face because of the fog.

He could see no headlamps nor hear any engines – and then the policeman heard a low rumbling which shook the road and made Jim’s teeth chatter.

Whatever the thing was, it was coming his way – and then he saw its ghostly outline as it came from the direction of Grange Road West.

It resembled a military tank – but it was like no tank he had ever seen before.

It was enormous – as big as a house - and beams of red light shone from a dome on top of the weird vehicle and dazzled the shocked policeman.

He bolted to the left just in time, or he would have been crushed to pulp under the gargantuan caterpillar tracks of the unknown armoured vehicle, and then he saw something even more terrifying and inexplicable – a towering robotic figure about 20 feet in height – was marching towards him.

It was a grey silhouette, but as it approached, it slowed down and stooped – and a massive metallic hand made a grabbing motion towards Jim.

He ran off, and saw other similar giant robotic figures in the distance, but Jim then heard an explosion of traffic sound, and as the fog thinned, he found himself near the familiar Martins Bank building.

There was no sign of any gigantic tank or that mechanical goliath.

Jim told no one about his frightening experience, and only told his wife about the incident many years later. I believe Jim entered some timeslip at Charing Cross and glimpsed a future war of some sort – hopefully a very long way off...

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