HAUNTED WIRRAL: The haunted house on Highfield Road

In this latest tale, Tom explores the Highfield Road haunting...

In February 1996, a family from Bebington moved into a house on Highfield Road, Rock Ferry.

It was a rented abode, and the rent was quite cheap, because – according to the landlord - a railway ran parallel to Highfield Road and passed the bottom of the back garden.

James and Sarah, the couple who had rented the house, had four children – Tom, aged 15, Barry aged 13, Stephen, aged 10, and 8-year-old Polly.

Polly said she didn’t like the house, and told her mother there was ‘something dark about it’ but her mother said she was just being silly and that she’d soon get used to her new home.

Sarah was very green-fingered and made plans to transform the overgrown wilderness of the back garden into a colourful sanctum of flowers, and her husband, a bricklayer by trade, repaired the crumbled wall of the front garden.

Polly was given the attic as a type of playroom, because no one could find a use for the room and it had a large old-fashioned radiator in it.

By Wednesday, February 7, the playroom had been papered and carpeted, and the mound of toys belonging to Polly was put up there.

Polly’s best friend Zoe came and visited and she said there was something ‘spooky’ about the playroom and the house too, and this upset Polly.

At 8.30pm that night, Polly went to bed complaining of a sore throat, and at 9.30pm, just as James and Sarah were settling down to watch Hetty Wainthropp Investigates on BBC1, they heard Polly scream.

They ran upstairs, burst into her bedroom and found their daughter hiding under the blankets, trembling.

She said an old man – described as being bald with glasses, a white beard and moustache – had shaken her awake and asked, ‘Why is Goldilocks sleeping in my bed?’ And he was smiling as he said this.

Polly had flaxen blonde hair and her mother had often jokingly called her Goldilocks in their old home in Bebington, but she had never used the affectionate nickname in the present house.

‘It’s okay, love,’ Polly’s father told his daughter, ‘you’ve had a nightmare, that’s all.’ Sarah felt Polly’s forehead – she did not seem to have a temperature with the sore throat.

‘He was a ghost,’ Polly insisted, ‘he vanished,’ she said, and her large blue eyes darted about as if she was looking for him.

The parents sat with the girl for a quarter of an hour, and Polly’s big brother Tom came into the room and assured her he was only next door, and that he’d be in like a flash if she shouted for him.

The girl reluctantly tried to get back to sleep, and everyone left her room.

James was watching Sportsnight on the telly at around 10.45pm, Sarah was taking a pizza out of the oven, when they heard Polly scream again, and this time the child came running down the stairs.

She said that the bearded old man had returned, and this time he had three horrible dolls with him – dolls that could move and talk, and one of them had brandished a little hatchet.

Polly became hysterical and said she wanted to go back to her old home, and then Tom and his two brothers came downstairs, and to his mother, Tom said, ‘We heard a man’s voice.’

James went up to Polly’s bedroom and saw that the mattress had been pulled from the bed and the pillows had been put on top of the wardrobe.

There was also an aroma of pipe tobacco hanging in the air, and yet James and his wife were both non-smokers.

Polly said the old man had told her: ‘I killed three girls like you a long time ago, and they are my dolls now. Do you want to be my doll?’

The three dolls with the man then climbed on the bed.

One was dressed like a sailor, one said her name was Miss Flitch, a teacher, and she struck Polly’s hand with a cane.

The third doll had a striped blazer, and his stringy hair was combed over his head.

He held a hatchet and in a plummy well-spoken voice he said: ‘I could kill you quite quickly Polly – you wouldn’t even know you were dead.’

‘She would know,’ said the sailor doll, ‘because she wouldn’t be able to go back to her mammy and daddy.’

Polly had then thrown herself out the bed and screamed as she escaped from the room.

Polly slept in her parent’s room after that night, and the family heard 1920s music coming from the attic each evening.

The family finally moved when a neighbour told them the house was a ‘hard-to-let’ because it was said to be haunted by the man who had killed a child named Nellie Clarke in the 1920s.

Nellie Clarke was an 11-year-old child who had been raped and strangled, literally just across the road from the haunted house one wintry night in January 1925 whilst running an errand.

She had called at a nearby house as she fled from her killer and had shouted through the letterbox “Help! Father Christmas is after me! Let me in!’ But by the time the door was answered, Nellie had gone.

Her body was later found propped up against a telegraph pole in an alleyway off Spenser Avenue. The killer was never caught.

Polly had described that bald bearded ghost as looking like Father Christmas – now isn’t that strange?

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.