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 tale of the Arno ghost...

On a pleasant March evening in the late 1950s, three boys, all aged 10, and pupils at St Saviour’s Primary School on Storeton Road, were playing in the Arno – a veritable adventure land for children with its disused quarry (which once belonged to the Earl of Shrewsbury), magnificent rose gardens with well-manicured lawns, an intriguing sundial, and even a duck pond.

The name Arno has nothing to do with the Italian river – it is a corruption of the Old English for “Hill of Eagles” (‘erne’ meaning eagle and ‘ho’ being hill in Anglo-Saxon), and this place-name was derived from the days, long ago, when eagles soared over the peninsula.

Upon this spring evening at around 7.30pm, the boys – Chris, Derek and Pete, were playing cowboys, firing imaginary Colt 45s and slapping their thighs as they rode make-believe horses from a quarry that doubled as Utah’s Monument Valley – when Chris spotted a lone figure standing by the sundial.

The figure wore a navy blue anorak with the hood up (which struck Chris as odd, considering it wasn’t raining or cold), black trousers, and possibly brown shoes, and the build of the person looked male, being quite broad-shouldered.

‘Who’s that?’ Chris asked, drawing the attention of his friends to the lone visitor at the park.

The boys decided they’d sneak up on whoever it was, shout names at him, then ‘leg it’ out of the Arno, hopefully with the stranger in pursuit.

The mischievous trio crouched and walked like early ancestors of the human race as they giggled.

As they drew nearer, the lads heard the man in the anorak talking to himself.

‘I’ll kill them all,’ he was heard to say, and he came out with a string of obscene swear words that made the schoolboys think twice about bothering him, but then Pete, who had always been the cheeky one, shouted: ‘Who you talking to mate?’

The man swung around to look at them – and they saw he had a terrifying face; it looked like a mask of some sort with black holes for the eyes and mouth, and seemed to be made of something rough – burlap perhaps that had been daubed with paint.

He also had red curls sprouting out of the sides of the anorak hood.

‘A curse on the three of you! A death in each of your families!’ the weird man shrieked.

In record time the three boys flew out the Arno into Storeton Road, and instead of splitting up and going to their respective homes, the children all went to Chris’s house on Woodchurch Lane, and they were convinced that the creepy masked man had followed them through the gathering gloom.

Chris told his parents what had happened and his mum said, ‘Let that be a warning to you! Shouting at strangers! And keep away from that quarry!’

‘He said he’d cursed us, mum,’ Chris babbled, looking very troubled, as did his two friends, ‘and he said a death in your families.

Can people curse people mum?’ ‘Get in there!’ Chris’s father yanked him by the arm and threw him down the hallway, and to Pete and Derek he said, ‘Go on, get home before that fellah gets you!’

The boys backed away from the front door, eyes and mouths wide in shock at the adult’s warning.

‘Don’t say that to them,’ Chris’s mother told her husband, and she said to the trembling boys, ‘he’s only joking. Go straight home now.’

That week, all three boys lost someone in their family.

Chris’s older brother died in a car crash in Kent, Pete’s uncle – living in Germany with his new wife - was electrocuted when a pylon cable fell on his car, and Derek’s grandmother died in her sleep from ‘natural causes’.

An old woman visited the parents of Chris and told them she had heard the strange stories about the weird masked man in the Arno who allegedly cursed the three families.

She said that this man was a ghost, and had been seen for about ten years.

He asked people visiting the Arno to leave a child’s doll near the gate of the park, or they’d lose a loved one.

The superstitious would often be seen leaving dolls at the gate, and the ghost would later be seen collecting them and stuffing them into his coat.

No one knew why the entity did this, or who he had been while he was alive.

He was last seen in a fog at the Arno by a boy returning from a game of football, and so far, he has not returned to the realm of the living...