HAUNTED WIRRAL: The tale of Wallasey's haunted mirror

In this latest tale, Tom explores the tale of Wallasey’s haunted mirror...

Mark and Sarah were always spoiled rotten when they visited their Nan each Sunday at her terraced home on Belvidere Road, Wallasey, and this Sunday, which fell on 11 April 1982, was extra-special because it was Easter Sunday.

In addition to the clutch of oversized chocolate eggs filled with Smarties and Chocolate Buttons, Mark and Sarah, aged six and nine respectively, would also be given their favourite treat – a big glass sundae dish of vanilla ice cream over which Nan would pour a topping made by Birds known as Ice Magic – a chocolate sauce that hardened over the ice cream, forming a thick crackable shell.

On this day, Nan also poured a little Cointreau over the heavenly serving and then the children spooned away.

Afterwards, Nan usually chatted with her daughter and while mum and Nan got deep into conversation, the children usually went ‘on the mooch’ around the house, and sometimes they played in the garden.

Not on this day, because mum said they’d ruin their Easter Sunday clothes.

Mark and Sarah went upstairs, and decided to play hide and seek in the three rooms. Then they ventured into a spare bedroom (which was usually locked) where they saw old perfume bottles laid out on a dresser.

Sarah was fascinated by the blue, pink, white and yellow vintage bottles which included such scents of yesteryear as Evening in Paris, Aqua Manda, and White Linen.

She even sprayed one of the bottles at her brother and he retaliated by picking up a tin of talc and squeezing it in Sarah’s face but it was empty.

Then Sarah looked at the mirror of the dresser, and her eyes ran to the top of its mahogany frame, where she noticed something strange – a carving of an open eye.

“Mark, that eye’s looking at you!” she exclaimed, all tongue in cheek, pointing at the bulging wooden eyeball, and Mark looked at it with his mouth open.

He was very gullible, even for a six-year-old, and he said, “Let’s go, Sarah.”

“I was only joking, cowardy custard,” Sarah wheezed with laughter, and she reached up to the wooden eye and stroked it with her index finger.

“Sarah, look!” Mark cried out, and he gripped his sister’s forearm with both hands.

The mirror darkened, as if someone was spraying it with black paint, and as the reflections of the startled children rapidly faded, a wheel appeared; it looked to Sarah’s eyes like the wheels she had seen on wagons in the westerns on the telly.

The cartwheel came nearer out of the void of darkness in that mirror, turning faster and faster, and Sarah saw its spokes become a blur.

The eerie turning wheel filled the mirror, which was about two feet in height, and stopped dead, and the children could see a wide, mad-looking eye in the inner hub, and this really frightened Mark.

He cried out and ran out the room, followed by Sarah.

“Aye-aye!” the mother of the brother and sister shouted out from downstairs, “Pack that in!”

Mark went to run down the stairs but Sarah stopped him by grabbing the collar of his shirt, and she smiled and asked: “Let’s see if it’s still there”

“No, I want my mum!” Mark told her in a cracked voice.

“You scaredy cat, Mark,” said Sarah, refusing to let go of his collar, “I’m a girl and I’m not scared.”

Mark paused, and looked down the stairs.

He could hear his mum and his Nan back in conversation.

“Come on, yellow belly, get behind me,” said Sarah, and she turned and went back into the room.

The mirror had returned to normal, but Mark remained in the doorway.

“Come here Mark, you big sissy!” Sarah beckoned him with a frenetic curling of her hand, and the boy reluctantly walked to her side.

Once again Sarah rubbed the wooden eye on the dresser, the mirror turned inky black, and that wheel came spinning out of the murky depths of the looking glass.

This time, when the wheel filled the mirror, four people appeared in it.

A red-haired woman with twins, and a bald man with mad staring eyes and a missing front tooth.

He swore at Mark, and came out with bad language the children had never heard before.

They fell over one another getting out of the room, and their mother was furious when they came downstairs in tears.

Their account was dismissed as overactive imagination.

A few years later, Sarah’s Nan got shut of that mirror, and never said why.

Sarah – a redhead – grew up and had twins, and Mark became a heroin addict in his twenties.

He had his front tooth punched out by a man he tried to rob to finance his addiction in 2002.

He was in Walton jail one night when he realised what he and his sister had seen in that weird mirror: The kids had seen their future selves but how or why I do not know.