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

In this latest tale, Tom explores the mystery behind Upton's ghostly clown...

It first started to manifest one evening in the autumn of 2014 in the bedroom of a 20-year-old girl named Kyrie at her home on Manor Drive, Upton.

Kyrie was a hypochondriac extraordinaire, and when she first noticed the shadowy something out the corner of her eyes, she thought it was the first symptoms of a serious illness.

She texted her best friend Kait and mentioned these ‘indicants’ but Kait texted back a profanity and told her she was just overtired and experiencing eyestrain from gawping at the Facebook profiles of her three ex-boyfriends night and day.

Then Kait came over, and Kyrie once again described the life-threatening symptoms, and Kait was saying, "Oh Kyrie, don’t start all that again, you are not –" when she suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and swivelled her huge eyes to the left.

"What’s up?" Kyrie asked, and quickly followed the line of her friend’s vision.

"I saw something moving out the corner of my eye," Kait said, and she squeezed her eyes shut then looked back to the spot where she thought she had detected something flitting towards the curtains.

"You’ve got the same symptoms," muttered Kyrie, and then she said, "oh my God, maybe we’ve both been drinking contaminated water.

"Remember that bottle of water I bought with that weird brand name and you said it tasted weird?"

The colour seemed to drain from Kait’s face, and she put her hand to her throat, and gasped, "I can’t breathe – I’m not taking air in." 

"Doesn’t Legionnaire’s Disease get carried by water?" Kyrie speculated, and Kait started to have a panic attack.

Fortunately Kyrie’s mum came into the room and calmed down the Neurotic Twins (as she called them).

Still, every now and then, Kyrie saw that 'thing' moving in her peripheral vision, mostly in her bedroom.

At Christmas, Kyrie and Kait were invited to a Fancy Dress Christmas Party at a house on Arrowe Park Road, and Kait went as Alice from the Alice and Wonderland books, whereas Kyrie went as a zombie.

The girls were hit on by Batman, Iron Man, Jack the Ripper and the Godfather among others, and then, at around 11.20pm, a clown confronted Kyrie on the upstairs landing of the house as she exited the toilet feeling sick from too much tequila.

Half of his satin, puffed-out outfit was yellow, and the other half was red, with polka dots of these colours, and a conical hat with two red pom-poms on it.

The face was ghastly – plastered-on white make up, too much rouge on each cheek, and a wide mouth of thin lips slicked with lipstick.

He leaned forward and planted two ice-cold kisses on Kyrie’s cheek, and she pushed him away – and the girl was a little stunned because this clown seemed to have nothing inside his suit – he felt like an inflatable life-size doll and this really unnerved Kyrie.

She wondered if her drink had been spiked with LSD and went to seek out Kait, who was now kissing a boy dressed as Spiderman under the stairs.

Kyrie pushed the drunken lad out the way and told Kait: "There’s a weird clown following me! I think it’s a ghost – he has no insides!" 

Kait just smiled inanely and seemed to think her friend was joking, and she beckoned to the libidinous Spiderman.

Kyrie stormed off, and saw no more of that strange pneumatic clown that night.

On the following day, Kyrie dismissed the weird clown incident as a product of too much plonk, but then on Boxing Day at 9.30pm, that thing out the corner of her eye was perceived again, and this time it materialised into that clown she had seen at the fancy dress do.

It stood there in the corner of the bedroom, smiling, and now Kyrie knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the thing was some ghost and she didn’t even scream; she ran out of her room and recalled that her parents were out visiting friends in Chester and weren’t due back till 11pm.

Kyrie ran out of the house and all the way to her friend Kait’s home on Ford Road, half a mile away.

All the way to Kait’s house, Kyrie glanced back now and then and saw the ghostly clown following her at a leisurely stroll.

Kait thought her friend had suffered a breakdown at first, but then she too saw the clown that evening in her back garden, but when the girl’s dad went to look, the apparition had vanished.

A month later, the ghost reappeared again at 8.30pm outside the Horse and Jockey pub on Arrowe Park Road, where Kait and Kyrie were going to meet two lads.

On this occasion the clown seemed to have what looked like a dagger partially hidden behind its back.

No one else appeared to notice the sinister ghost, and when Kait tried to video the entity on her phone, it vanished into thin air.

Why the ghost chose to haunt Kyrie is a mystery, though I know some spirits often become fixated on certain people because they remind them of partners they had when they were alive.

To date, the girls have not seen any more of Upton’s ghostly clown.

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

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