Welcome to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world famous psychic researcher Tom Slemen, for the Globe.

In this latest tale, Tom explores two encounters with the Grim Reaper...

One of the most fascinating figures of the supernatural is the Grim Reaper – an entity most people would dismiss as a mere personification of the inevitable death that awaits us all.

For many years I have received reports of this eerie character from people of all walks of life, and if only a fraction of these reports are true, then in some instances, death really does pay a visit, and some even believe they have escaped him – for a while at least.

A sizeable percentage of the Reaper reports have allegedly taken place in Wirral, and here are just two of these reports.

The first purported incident took place at Irby on April 26, 1954.

That Monday morning, many people in Irby saw a strange abnormally tall figure resembling a hooded monk in a long black habit slowly walking along Thingwall Road and Mill Hill Road.

A milkman on his pre-dawn rounds approached the figure out of curiosity, and was shocked to see it vanish into the early ground mist, but the figure was later seen by a postman, a policeman as well as several residents from nearby Manor Road, but not one of these witnesses would approach the eerie wandering figure as they sensed it was something unearthly.

Later that day, a strange double tragedy took place on the road where the black hooded entity had been prowling.

Eileen McDonagh, aged 27, and her fiancé David Mitchell, both of whom had only recently moved to Irby from the remote village of Roundstone on the shores of Galway Bay to find work, were killed as they jumped off a moving bus.

The bus was decelerating as it approached the stop at Irby and was travelling at less than 10 mph and yet Eileen and David were killed as they both fell over as their feet touched the floor.

The couple were not even holding hands, so one did not pull the other down, and yet they both fell in a strange way, according to witnesses, and their heads smashed into the pavement.

David was heard to cry out “Nellie! My God!” before he fell.

Nellie was Eileen’s affectionate nickname.

They were taken to Birkenhead General Hospital but there was nothing that could be done to save the couple and they were officially pronounced dead.

It was later claimed by those who knew Eileen that she had been having nightmares about a tall hooded figure in black following her onto buses, and she had told her friends she was being stalked by death.

In June 1974, a 45-year-old Birkenhead man named Ian Lloyd-Williams went to look after his ill sister Ann, a widowed woman living at her semi on Hillcrest Drive, Little Sutton.

Ian was, by his own admission, a veritable nosy parker, and as he nursed Ann back to health as she recovered from a hysterectomy, he started looking over the hedges of the back garden to see what the neighbour’s gardens were like, and he told his sister the old couple next door were almost naked as they sunbathed.

Ann told him to stop this prying behaviour, but Ian couldn’t stop snooping.

Ann told her busybody brother to trim the top of the tall hedge in the back garden and when Ian did, he noticed something odd – the top of a black hood.

Ian leaned forward to see more, and saw that the hood was being worn by someone in a long black robe, and this person had to be well over six feet in height.

He went inside and told Ann what he’d seen.

“It can’t be Mr Aspin,” Ann said, “he’s not that tall; and who’d be wearing something like that on a scorching day like this?”

“Well I know what I saw, Ann,” Ian told her, “and it gave me the creeps.”

That afternoon, an old neighbour named Mrs Sydney saw Ian looking over the fence and asked him if she could use his water to sprinkle the back garden as her water had been turned off because of a leak.

Ian nodded and the old woman gave him the end of the hose with the tap connector, and Ian pushed the connector onto the cold water tap in the kitchen and then, as he was pushing back the excess length of hose, it looped around his neck – and tightened, choking him.

The old woman had absent-mindedly put the other end of the hose down the bumper of her daughter’s car, and that car was being driven from the driveway.

As Ian realised he was being slowly strangled, he saw that hooded figure in black come through the fence towards him – as if it was a ghost.

Inside the hood of the apparition was blackness, and what looked like two large eyes.

Ian almost lost consciousness as the tap connector came off, and he fell down and collapsed.

His sister found him and called an ambulance.

Ian had sustained injuries to his trachea but recovered.

He recalled that sinister figure and wondered if it was the Grim Reaper, ready to take him, but a surgeon assured Ian it had been a hallucination brought on by oxygen starvation.

Ann recalled that her brother had mentioned the figure before the accident, so she believed it had indeed been death calling to collect Ian.

I do hope you won’t receive a visit from this harbinger of death...

Tom's latest book Haunted Liverpool 29 is available now on Amazon