HAUNTED WIRRAL: Birkenhead's unknown ghostly soldier

In this latest story, Tom tries to unravel the mystery behind Birkenhead’s unknown ghostly soldier...

In the summer of 1938, weary Wirral-bound workers of all classes stood huddled together on the platform of James Street Station, all of their faces turned to the mouth of the tunnel like flowers tracking the sun.

They could all hear what sounded like distant rolls of thunder in the depths of the tunnel which led to Birkenhead.

To some of the older commuters who had seen military action in Northern France and Belgium twenty years before, those thunderous booms and rumbles sounded just like the big guns of the Great War – the babies of Krupps – the monsters like Big Bertha and the Paris Gun sprung to the minds of some of the veterans – but what on earth was going on in Hamilton Square a mile and a quarter away if the sounds from explosions were being heard at James Street Station?

Was it some civil disturbance?

An IRA outrage?

There had been rumours that fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley had been planning a huge rally at Birkenhead Park.

He’d tried to address the people of Liverpool months back at Mossley Hill but someone had split his head open with a stone.

As the tired huddled masses of commuters speculated on the origins of the worrying reverberating bangs, there also came startling whistling and screaming sounds – like banshee artillery shells descending on a cratered battlefield.

And then he appeared, and a ripple of oohs and sharp intakes of breath coursed through the crowds on the platform.

A man in a military uniform walked out of the tunnel, and to those who had served time in the army, he was immediately identifiable as a Captain.

He walked perfectly upright along the tracks, as if he had a plank up his back, and he held a swagger stick under his right arm.

His presence seemed to indicate that something serious was unfolding in the Mersey Railway Tunnel if the army were there – but what?

The Captain climbed onto the platform and made a rambling speech to the confused commuters about a war that was coming, and we have differing accounts as to the exact wording, but the Captain seemed very anti-war and stated at one point: “War is sweet to them that know it not!”

A middle-aged man in the crowd then claimed that he knew the Captain, and claimed that he had served under him at the Battle of Mons in ‘the last lot’.

And then this man claimed that the captain standing before him was a ghost, for he had been killed in action, but the train arrived and as the scrambling crowds boarded it, the “Captain” went back into the tunnel.

The conversation between most of the passengers on the Wirral-bound train was about the eccentric man in the military uniform, but only a few were aware of him being a ghost.

A guard on the train was told of the military man in the tunnel and he turned pale and said he was an apparition who had been seen a few times before in the tunnel and even on the train to Liverpool.

He’d also been seen lingering around the War Cenotaph in Hamilton Square.

“He was solid – no ghost,” a passenger told the guard, “and bloody eccentric.”

Of course, a war did come, as the ghost predicted, in the following year, when Hitler invaded Poland.

The same ghostly soldier was seen getting on the train to Liverpool at Birkenhead on many further occasions, and sometimes he looked two-dimensional, like a cardboard cut-out, while at other times he looked so real he was taken as a flesh and blood person.

In January 1950 he warned of another impending conflict – possibly a reference to the Korean War, which began in the June of that year, and six years later the mysterious Captain was seen again on the eve of the Suez Crisis, and I have reports of him being very active in early March 1982, weeks before the outbreak of the Falklands War.

It might be just a group of coincidences but the ghost always seemed to be active before conflicts such as the Gulf War (1991), the Iraq War (2003-2009) as well as the September 11 Attacks of 2001.

I did a whole programme on this mystifying military personage on the Billy Butler Show once and interviewed people like James Davidson, a well-known lollipop man on Penny Lane who stood within a few feet of the ghost on the train from Hamilton Square in the 1990s, and we even had a nun who was asked by the ghost to say a prayer for him.

The nun said she felt that the ghost was a tortured soul trapped in its own past and earthbound as a result.

Two female students who saw the Captain get on the train at Birkenhead said his face became grotesquely skeletal at one point in the journey, and he was seen to cry.

The Captain, whoever he is, is one of the most widely reported ghosts I’ve ever looked into, and I guarantee that if you mention him to someone who’s a frequent traveller on the trains to and from James Street Station, they’ll either tell you they’ve seen the ghost or they’ll know of someone who has.

His identity remains a mystery.

nHaunted Liverpool 29 is out now on Amazon.

Over the forthcoming weeks Tom will tell you more tales of the mysterious and the uncanny in the Globe.