HAUNTED WIRRAL: The ghost of Nellie Clarke

In this latest tale, Tom explores the ghost of Nellie Clarke...

Since the Globe published my story of Highfield Road’s haunted house in Rock Ferry (7 February), I have been inundated with stories from readers concerning the ghost of a child referenced in the story – Nellie Clarke.

Nellie, aged 11, was brutally raped and strangled one Saturday night in January 1925 whilst running an errand for her mother.

The body of the child was found in a weird position - propped up against a telegraph pole in an alleyway that ran behind Spenser Avenue, Highfield Grove, and a forty-yard stretch of Highfield Road.

The killer was never brought to justice and there were false confessions to the crime by lunatics, reports of an omnibus passenger laughing hysterically in the Rock Ferry area on the night of the murder, and dozens of other suspects who were eventually cleared by the police.

Then came the “Pink Letter Clue” – an anonymous note posted to the police from Manchester, supposedly authored by a woman who claimed that she and her boyfriend had been embracing and kissing in that dark alleyway in Rock Ferry when they had seen a silhouetted man carrying something into the entry on his back.

He had placed the object against the telegraph pole where Nellie’s corpse was later found.

Despite an appeal by wireless for the letter-writer to come forward, he or she never did, and the appeal was also put in most newspapers across the land, all to no avail.

Martin Doran of 1 Highfield Grove, who found the child’s body almost at his back door, said there had been no strangers in the alleyway that night – as his dog always barked if anyone even tiptoed past his yard, and Mr Doran, his wife, and teenaged son, were all light sleepers, and the bedroom window of the Doran couple faced that alleyway.

And yet the anonymous letter claimed a man had dumped a body by the backyard door and a courting couple had also been there, whispering sweet nothings to one another.

The letter does not ring true, and it could have even been penned by the child killer to throw police off his scent.

The dog in the yard never barked when certain people known to it passed by, said Mr Doran.

The case seemed to be an embarrassment for the police; the public wanted justice and yet the killer seemed to have evaporated after the murder.

Vital clues were overlooked; why, when she was being chased by someone on the night of her murder had Nellie screamed into the letterbox of Mrs Green of 88 Spenser Avenue: ‘Help me! Let me in! Father Christmas is after me!’

The girl was gone – perhaps dragged away by the killer – by the time Mrs Green answered her door.

A solicitor’s bloodhound that sniffed Nellie’s clothes bolted off to waste ground near to the place where the child’s body had been found and started to scratch away soil, uncovering a rosary Nellie had lost weeks before her death.

The dog ran down Rock Lane West and proceeded to an alleyway near some allotments behind Rock Ferry Congregational Church.

When the bloodhound reached a corrugated iron-sheet shed used as a tools store, the dog stopped dead, and looked at its owner, indicating something relevant there, but the police took this lead no further.

There was a large can of lubricating oil in the shed – and such oil was unaccountably found on Nellie’s underwear.

Nellie’s mother almost had a breakdown.

She had already lost two children in the last four years – a baby of 18 months, and a four-year-old girl who was knocked down and killed on St Paul’s Road.

Nellie’s mum talked of the premonition she’d had about her daughter’s death and urged the police to find the murderer.

The police later stated that the killer of Nellie Clarke was some sailor from the Continent, and his ship had been berthed in the Mersey on the night of the rape and murder.

The unnamed man had been executed for similar crimes abroad.

And that was it.

Well not quite; unsettling rumours circulated that the real killer of Nellie Clarke was still at large, and was often seen revisiting the scene of his crime as well as stalking young girls.

Then came the sightings of the ghost of Nellie Clarke herself.

In 1935 a nine-year-old girl named Maureen took a shortcut through the Spenser Avenue alleyway one February evening and saw a curious thing – a little doll leaning against that telegraph pole – the spot where Nellie had been found.

Maureen heard a girl’s voice cry out, ‘Go back! He’s waiting round the corner!’

The face of a man with a white beard peeped around the corner 20 feet away and Maureen screamed and ran home.

Her mother later told her she’d been saved by Nellie’s spirit.

That doll had been the murdered girl’s beloved little “Betty”.

Days after that, a gang of young girls playing in the Spenser Avenue alleyway one evening saw Nellie’s ghost standing close to that telegraph pole, and again that doll was leaning against it.

The mouth of the ghost was wide open and its eyes were bulging.

The figure vanished, and the children fled.

Decades later, in the 1990s, a student saw a little girl apparently enter the alleyway behind Spenser Avenue, even though it was “alley-gated” and when he peered through the bars, he saw a child in a red beret and quaint old clothes sit down and rest against a telegraph pole.

She bowed her head and vanished.

They say that even today, the girl’s restless ghost is still occasionally seen...

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.