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 devil worshippers who took over a Wirral church...

On the Friday evening of 6 May 1955, 13-year-old Tina and 14-year-old Dean, both hopelessly in love with one another, tried to elope (albeit rather unrealistically) to Gretna Green.

But the parents of the couple were waiting at Birkenhead Central, so the teenage lovers fled and decided to hide in a church all night until they could make another escape attempt in the morning.

This was Dean’s idea.

They eventually found a suitably deserted church after walking for miles, and they hid under benches and waited and waited as they embraced and kissed, and then a silence fell upon the cavernous interior of the house of God.

It looked as if Dean’s plan was working.

The hidden juveniles heard the doors being locked and bolted, followed by soft footfalls and jingling keys.

The lights went out and a vestry door slammed and its echoes reflected off the walls as the eerie plaster statues stood like miniature sentinels in the moonlight filtering through the stained glass windows.

Full of caution, Tina and Dean got up and sat on the bench with their satchels at their feet.

Dean looked at the altar and said:“We should be getting married at an altar like that.

“Why won’t they just let us be?”

The young romantics kissed for a while, then out came the bottles of lemonade and chocolate bars stashed away for the train journey to Dumfriesshire, where runaways could be joined in marriage – or so Dean had heard.

When the snacks and lemonade ran out, the teens tried to sleep on the benches, but they were too cold and hard.

1955 was the year it snowed in May, so Tina and Dean had to sleep with the hoods of their coats up.

At some point, around 10pm, Tina and Dean woke up.

Unable to get back to sleep they walked around the nave, and Dean even preached his undying love for Tina from the pulpit.

By midnight, they started yawning and so they dozed off on the pews using their satchels as rough pillows.

They were awakened sometime after 3am.

Tina rubbed her eyes and thought she was dreaming.

A crowd of about thirty people dressed like monks in hooded robes came into the church wheeling a bizarre tall statue of a winged man with horns.

The right claw-like hand of the statue pointed up and its other hand pointed down.

This sounds like a description of Pazuzu – an ancient Mesopotamian demon.

The castors on the base of the statue squealed harshly as it was brought to the altar rail.

Tina and Dean hid on the floor and peeped over the benches at the weird proceedings; this was no Christian Mass – so what was going on?

Candles were lit, and a man in a strange boxlike hood with two eye holes went onto the altar and began the ‘service’.

He wore an upside-down Celtic cross on his chest and he swore and used blasphemous words that scared the teenagers.

He spoke of the Devil being the saviour of mankind, and the officiating speaker bragged that he could easily murder without ever being captured because he was shielded by occult forces.

Eventually a naked couple appeared at the statue of the demon.

It seemed to be some sort of satanic marriage ceremony.

On the walls of the altar behind the ‘priest’ a massive shadow of a man with horns was cast, and this really frightened Tina.

By now, the church was filled with sulphuric and sweet-smelling incense, and it was making Tina want to cough.

At the end of the service, the people removed their hoods, and Dean recognised a teacher he knew, a bank manager who was a friend of his father, and Tina recognised adults she knew.

Overcome with the stifling fumes of the intoxicating incense, Tina coughed out loud, and she and Dean ran as fast as they could to the side entrance of the church – where the ritualists had come in.

Dean drew back the bolt in the nick of time.

The teenagers were chased by the robed Satanists for quite a distance until Dean waved to a passing police patrol car.

The police didn’t believe a word of the teens’ story and Tina and Dean were sternly told to go home immediately.

No one believed Tina and Dean.

For many years they received anonymous letters warning them to say nothing about the ‘mass’ or they’d be killed and no one would ever find their bodies.

Tina also received threatening telephone calls in the dead of night, years after the incident, when she had moved to Liverpool, and the voice was always the same: gruff and menacing, and the caller seemed to know when Tina was alone.

Most self-proclaimed modern Satanists will tell you that they do not wish anyone any harm, but the mysterious hooded spokesman of the band of hooded cultists in that Birkenhead church in 1955 spoke gloatingly of murder and other evil acts.

He might have even represented some splinter group of Devil worshippers.

His latest book Haunted Liverpool 29 is out now on Amazon.