Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: Timeslips on the golf course

ON the afternoon of Saturday April 29, 1995, a 55-year-old man named Paul broke in his new bicycle.

He left his flat on Grosvenor Road, Hoylake and set out on what he had calculated to be a 10-minute one-and-a-half mile ride to Riversdale Road, where his brother Charlie lived, and then, after coffee, Jammy Dodgers and a chat, he'd cycle back home.

Paul wanted to go much further on this beckoning sunny Saturday but his doctor had advised him to take it easy on the bike at first.

And so, Paul set off, but something which worried him started to happen as he pedalled his way down leafy Meols Drive – he felt a prickling sensation which started on his face and progressed down his body to his toes. 

Forever the hypochondriac, Paul believed it was the onset of a coronary and pulled over. He glanced towards the area where the Royal Liverpool Golf Course was supposed to be and saw hi-rise flats.

Now the hypochondriac in Paul believed he had lost his memory and absent-mindedly cycled somewhere else – obviously a sign of some neurological disorder in Paul's reckoning.

The heat was now unbearable, and the sun seemed unusually bright. Paul fumbled for his sunglasses in his pocket, put them on and looked around to see that Meols Drive looked very different from the road he'd just travelled down.

He rode his bike towards the flats, knowing full well that they could not have gone up within days; he had only passed this way on Tuesday evening and everything had appeared normal then.

Then Paul saw a huge sign which bore the futuristic chrome logo of Wirral Council, and on this same sign it said 'Miramar' in block letters and an arrow beneath this curious name was positioned next to the words 'Wirral Golf Course'.

Paul turned to see where the arrow was pointing and saw that a golf course now existed about 500 yards to the west of the place where the usual Royal Liverpool Golf Course had been last Tuesday.

Paul turned to two young men in white suits and matching white trilbies who were chatting to one another nearby and asked them, 'What’s this Miramar thing?'

One of the men returned a perplexed look and he said, ‘Huh?’

Paul asked them when all of the flats went up and what Miramar was and the man he addressed seemed unable to speak English. The man turned to his friend, who looked Paul up and down and smiled before asking, 'You looking for someone in Miramar?'

At this point Paul heard a faint humming sound coming from above and glanced up to see a craft that looked like an orange-liveried bus, with mirrored windows, and it was flying towards the hi-rise flats. Paul cycled away and realised he was having a panic attack.

He believed he had lost his mind and then he heard a voice shouting his name. It was a friend on his way to the Lawn Tennis Club.

Paul told him about the flats and some development called Miramar and his friend said he must be mistaken.

The two men went to the spot where Paul had seen the complex and the two men in the white suits and his friend quipped, ‘Men in white suits eh? They’ll be coming for you soon, mate.’

Paul didn’t find the remark funny. He told his daughter what had happened and the incident was never mentioned again until Paul passed away ten years later. His daughter then related the intriguing story to me, believing her father might have been involved in a timeslip.

It sounds more like a parallel world scenario to me, where history has turned out differently from the history we know, as I find it hard to believe that developers would be able to build flats on the site of one of the country’s most famous golf courses at Hoylake – surely?

Here is another unexplained mystery of the space-time continuum and, as chance would have it, it also concerns a golf course.

"The distinction between past, present and future is an illusion," said Albert Einstein, "although a very persistent one." 

Einstein was always decades ahead of the scientists of his day, and nowadays we know that what he said is true – that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, and what we perceive as the course of history is like the groove on an old vinyl record; the ‘present’ is merely the stylus needle playing a certain part of the groove.

All of the songs on the record are like the periods of our history, and to travel in time you have to ‘lift the stylus’ - detach yourself from the present - and move up or down the ‘groove’ to the desired period in the past or future, and sometimes nature uproots people from the here and now in what we label as timeslips, and I have documented so many of these fascinating and often terrifying occurrences in this column.

In the autumn of 1998, two schoolboys, both aged 15, named Nigel West and Gareth Watson, played truant one afternoon, and ended up on Bebington Heath, where something frightening and unexplained took place.

The truants approached Brackenwood Golf Club, but then the thwack of golfballs in the autumn stillness was steadily replaced by a roar of voices, like a crowd at a football match only much louder, and this din became so loud, Nigel and Gareth pressed their palms to their ears.

Coming from the fairway of the golf club the boys saw a sea of people stretching back as far as their eyes could see – and this vast mass of thousands of people came swarming towards them.

'They’ve got swords and spears!' cried Gareth. Nigel saw his friend was right and so the boys turned to flee – and found themselves confronted with another oncoming crowd of immense proportions – and these people were dressed in what was obviously the attire of ancient soldiers.

They were wearing helmets and they held huge round shields, and they were thrusting swords and spears as they thundered into the petrified schoolboys.

The lads heard arrows whiz over their heads, and these projectiles came from both directions. The boys realised they were somehow in the middle of a battle of Biblical proportions.

They were smack bang in the middle of a no man’s land where two mighty armies were about to clash.

Gareth froze with fear, but Nigel somehow dragged him onto Bracken Lane, where the teenagers hid behind a garden wall. There were screams and shouts of unintelligible words and the sounds of swords clashing – and then – nothing. Complete silence.

The schoolboys looked over the wall and saw that the unknown battalions had vanished.

On that golf course, in the year 937, King Athelstan of England, with his united Saxon tribes, defeated a vast invasion force of Scottish, Welsh and Norwegian Vikings.

This bloodbath, known as the Battle of Brunanburh (Bromborough) is regarded by historians as a far more important battle than the ones at Hastings, Bannockburn and Waterloo, for it was the first time all the tribes of England united as one - and fought under one king. Ironically, the two schoolboys had always found history lessons dull, but this was one ‘history lesson’ they would never forget.

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