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 strange case of the Birkenhead possession case...

One night around 11pm in May 1958, a 34-year-old woman named Sherry returned from the pub with her 55-year-old partner, Stan.

Upstairs at the terraced house on Birkenhead’s Craven Street, Sherry’s 10-year-old son Craig listened as his mum and her fellah laughed and chatted.

Craig expected his mother to come up to his room with a bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps from the pub, but on this night she burst into song downstairs in the parlour.

She started to sing the Connie Francis hit of that month Who’s Sorry Now? as Stan laughed and added his out-of-tune vocals to the song.

Then there were three slow knocks at the front door, and Craig heard the singing stop.

"Who’s that?" Sherry asked.

"Well let’s open the bleedin’ door and find out!" cried Stan, full of drunken bravado.

"Stan, be careful – you don’t know who it is!" Sherry cautioned him.

Craig got out of bed, went to his bedroom door and opened it a few inches.

He heard the door downstairs being opened, followed by his mother exclaiming: "Ooh!"

"Oh God, no!" Stan said in a voice laced with fear.

Then came the sound of echoing laughter – the laughter of more than one person, and Craig could hear his mum’s shrieks, followed by a hard silence which allowed the boy to hear the clock downstairs on the mantelpiece ticking.

He then heard the front door slamming shut, and he cautiously went downstairs to see that the parlour light was off, and the only light filtering into the room was from the kitchen.

Craig saw Stan standing there, facing the drawn curtains, but the boy thought his mother was standing in a very strange posture.

Her head was tilted sideways, to the right, and her arms at her sides were behind her back.

Her hands were pointing back to the kitchen floor.

"Mum?" Craig went round her to look at her face, and saw that her mouth was wide open with the tongue protruding and her eyes were white and bulging; they had no irises in them, as if the eyeballs had rolled back.

Stan’s eyes were the same, and the two figures stood as stock still as statues.

The unnatural expressions of the couple and their inertness naturally scared Craig, and then the boy jumped when Stan started to make a strange jabbering sound.

Sherry then started to make a whining noise and started to drool, and when Craig touched her and asked, "Mum are you sick?" she swore at him in coarse language he had never heard.

Stan’s body then tilted backwards by about thirty degrees, yet he remained rigid and did not topple over.

Craig ran out of the house in tears and went to the home of a neighbour, and she in turn attracted the attention of two policemen who were on their beat on Craven Street.

Even the hard-boiled coppers were spooked by the blank eyes of the couple and the way Stan was apparently defying gravity with his backward tilt – and then the policemen, Stan and two neighbours saw strange elongated shadows appear on the walls of the parlour.

Sherry’s arms started to thrash about, and she hit one of the policemen in the face with such force, he was knocked across the room and landed on the sofa.

A medical student living a few doors away heard of the strange events unfolding in the house, and he visited and told the policemen that the couple looked as if they had some contagious fever, as both of them were now sweating profusely, and the student advised the police to take Sherry and Stan to the New Ferry Isolation Hospital, but he was told by one of the constables to mind his own business.

One of the neighbours ran to the house of a Catholic priest, and convinced him to come at once and see a case of possession.

At this time, the Catholic Church was the only denomination of Christianity to have a Rite of Exorcism, and the priest told the policemen that this rite would have to be carried out.

The police refused at first and two more constables arrived, and all four of them could not make Stan budge; it was as if he was stuck to the floor at that strange backward angle.

The gibberish Stan spoke was construed as 'tongues' – the voices of demons, according to the priest.

At one point a reverend and a Methodist minister turned up and they, with the Catholic priest, prayed openly until Sherry and Stan collapsed.

The couple was taken away and never recovered from the strange ordeal, and it is said they were committed to a mental hospital.

Craig was put in the care of his aunt in Flint when his father refused to look after him.

There were rumours that Sherry had been dabbling with a Ouija board before the strange incident, but this seems to have been pure conjecture, and whatever called at the house on Craven Street that evening in May 1958 remains a mystery.

Haunted Liverpool 29 is out now on Amazon.