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 the Prenton Mummy...

I have a record of an encounter with the Prenton 'Mummy' dating back to 1894.

The ghastly-looking apparition of a man covered in bandages from head to toe appeared at Number 2 Gerald Road, the palatial Prenton residence of one Charles Aldridge, a renowned architect and president of the Liverpool Architectural Society – not a man who was prone to seeing ghosts.

Mr Aldridge had been working late, drawing up a blueprint, and was now ascending the stairs to his bedroom at around 2am on Wednesday of February 14 with an oil lamp, when he saw a motionless figure on the landing above.

Naturally, the architect was startled by what he initially assumed to be a burglar, but then, by the feeble light of the lamp, he saw that the intruder was swathed in yellowish bandages which coiled about his entire body, and as Aldridge halted on the steps, he noticed the stark-looking eyes staring out two holes in the bandaged head, and then he saw the ragged mouth, with a fringe of frayed strands, open and close as the mummy spoke.

"I have no heart! Look!" the strange bandaged trespasser shouted in a very deep and unsettling voice, and his mitten-like hands fumbled at the ragged and stained gauze of his chest and pulled at the fabric to reveal a hole with something red inside.

Mr Aldridge felt faint at the sight of the gaping aperture.

"But I am dead! You are living and you also have no heart!" 

Somehow, Charles Aldridge knew what this terrifying phantom was referring to; he had just cruelly dumped a woman he had been having an affair with after he had persuaded her to break off her engagement with her fiancé.

The figure in bandages made a growling sound and dashed forwards down the stairs, and the architect turned and fled.

He couldn’t get out of the house because the servants had long locked up, so he hid in the pantry, and thankfully the thing did not enter there.

Mr Aldridge never saw the bandaged monstrosity after that, but upon mentioning the ghost to an elderly friend, he was told that it had been seen in the area for years, and no one knew whose ghost it was, but on its previous manifestations it had always said something similar about having no heart.

I gave a brief summary of the Aldridge incident on a local television programme, and afterwards received three emails and many letters from viewers who had either heard of the heartless mummy or had encountered it themselves.

One of the latter was a man in his sixties named Brian who had been a hackney cab driver in his younger days.

In February 1969, at around 6.30 am, he was driving up Gerald Road, on his way to pick up an old woman in Prenton, when he heard a weird deep voice in the back of the vehicle.

Brian looked into his rear view mirror and saw the head and shoulders of someone sitting in the rear seat of the hackney, and the presence of this person startled the cabby.

He switched on the interior light, and saw what seems to have been the very same ghost seen 75 years before on that same road.

It was a grotesque mummy – a figure wrapped in dirty stained bandages, and the dark eyes of the thing were twinkling through the two torn holes in the tightly-wound gauze strips.

The mouth was a torn open hole with stringy strands hanging from its edges.

This hole moved as the unearthly hitcher spoke in what Brian could only describe as a groaning voice.

"I have no heart," the creepy figure moaned, "and neither do you, and you serve to die!" 

Brian swore out of pure fear, and started to brake, and yet, as the taxi came to a screeching halt, the resulting inertia did not affect the ‘mummy’ – it did not lurch forward as any normal solid object would have done.

Brian was feeling for the crowbar he kept under his seat in case he was ever held up, and in the mounting panic as his hands searched for the ad hoc weapon, the bandaged figure in the rear seat shoved its mitten of a hand deep into its chest, and it spoke in a guttural manner, saying "No heart!" 

Brian found the crowbar, lifted it to strike the sinister entity, but caught the rear view mirror with it and shattered it.

He slung the crowbar at the horrific figure and it glanced off its head, bounced off the seat, and fell to the floor of the vehicle.

As Brian wrestled with his seatbelt and tried to get out of the taxi, he heard the menacing phantasm say: "You left her in Liverpool to die on the streets!" 

And then that bizarre and frightening man vanished into thin air.

Brian knew what the ghost was referring to, and the fear in him turned to shame.

Yesterday he had dumped his pregnant dog on the Landing Stage at Liverpool, and he had managed to get back on the ferry without her.

As the ferry had moved away, the abandoned dog had spotted him, and it howled and whined at him.

Brian’s conscience was pricked so much, he drove to Liverpool and after hours of searching he found the dog he had deserted and took her back.

That strange bandaged being was last seen in a certain bedroom in Prenton one night in 2003 and maybe it is still being seen, but the identity and history of the ghost, how it came to lose its heart, and why it pricks the conscience of the living, remains a mystery.

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.