HAUNTED WIRRAL: Tranmere's terrifying woman in black

In this latest tale, Tom explores the strange case of Tranmere's terrifying woman in black...

At dusk, Tranmere’s Agnes Road is a sleepy little row of two-dozen houses, terraced, detached and semi-detached, nestling among a row of young horse chestnut trees adjoining Mersey Park.

However, behind the respectable facade of this pleasant suburban road, a supernatural terror lurks in one of the houses, and it is a haunting which has left an unfathomable mystery in its wake that remains unsolved to this day.

The house in question was, like most of the terraced houses on Agnes Road, built in 1945, and in the early 1970s a couple in their twenties – we’ll call them Keith and Heidi – moved into the house.

Keith was a taxi driver and Heidi had just started as a secretary in a local school.

It was summer when the couple moved into the house, and Keith called on a friend named Roger to get the back garden into shape, as the grass was overgrown and there was a rampant growth of weeds that needed to be tackled.

Roger arrived at the house in his old Morris Minor on Saturday morning with shears, a machete and a petrol driven lawnmower, and Heidi continually supplied him with ice-cold cordial and sandwiches as he worked, stripped to the waist under a blistering sun.

At one point, as Heidi was watching an inane Abbot and Costello film on the television, Roger ran into the lounge and declared that he had just seen a ghost.

"Hurry up! Before she goes!" he told Heidi, and then he ran through the kitchen and into the garden, but when Heidi got out there, Roger said, "She’s gone.

"She was dressed all in black, and she had a sort of sticky-out dress on.

"Her face looked white as chalk, and her hair was jet black and done up in a bun."

"Oh great, that’s all we need in a new home – a ghost," said Heidi, with a little icy shudder down her back on such a hot August day.

"I’m serious Heidi," said Roger, staring at the spot at the end of the garden where he’d seen the ghost appear, "I’m not pulling you leg or anything."

"I know, Roger, I believe you," said Heidi, "and your arms have gone all goosepimply," she observed.

"She was bending down, as if she was picking something up or searching for something near that tree stump," Roger recalled, and he walked off, wading through the long grass till he reached the spot.

He bent down and almost vanished into the jungle of weeds and grass, and then Heidi saw him throwing grass sods he’d uprooted in every direction.

Roger then lifted something up – it looked like a box.

He brought it over to Heidi.

It was a small coffin.

Heidi felt faint when she saw it.

"It looks like a baby’s coffin!" she said, drawing back from the coffin, which was about two feet in length.

"Who’d bury a child in a garden?" Roger wondered, and he tried to wipe the encrusted soil from the small rusted plaque on the coffin, but instead he lost his grip on the box and it slipped from his hand and landed on the path.

Upon impact the lid came off and something fell out as Heidi screamed.

A strange-looking wooden doll in tattered grey clothes tumbled across the path to Heidi’s sandals.

She was relieved it wasn’t a corpse, but it was still a gruesome find.

Roger crouched down and said, "Look at that – what in God’s name?"

The doll’s head, carved out of a dark wood, had what looked like five little daggers inserted into it; one in each ear, one in each eye and one in the mouth.

Heidi told Roger to rebury the coffin and doll but he took it to his car and put it in the boot.

He intended to take the weird doll to an antiques expert to see if it was worthy anything.

Roger mowed the back garden and Heidi’s husband Keith returned home on a break from the cabs.

Before Heidi could mention the ghost and the doll in the coffin, Keith said, "You’re not going to believe this; as I was pulling up outside, I saw a woman in black – all old fashioned clothes and that – and she was looking into Roger’s car."

"What?" gasped Heidi.

Keith said this figure had vanished as he got out the car.

Heidi told him that the same ghost had been seen in the back garden and she also told him about the doll with the daggers in its head that had been found in a coffin interred in their back garden.

Keith was glad Roger was taking the doll, as he felt the thing had something to do with witchcraft.

However, as Roger drove home that day, he got the fright of his life when he saw the pale-faced woman in black hovering alongside the car.

She screeched at Roger and her head and arms somehow came into the car and grabbed at him.

Roger drove back to the house on Agnes Road and he reburied the coffin and its wooden ‘corpse’.

Keith protested at him reburying the coffin but Roger swore at him and drove off.

Every evening the couple saw the woman in black kneeling at the site of the buried coffin, and in the end they left the house.

Just what that doll with the five daggers in its head represents, I do not know.

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