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

In this latest story, Tom unravels the mystery behind the vampiress of Cavendish Road...

FOR legal reasons I have had to change several names in this story but everything else described herein is, to the best of my knowledge, true.

There are a dozen Victorian mansions lining Cavendish Road on the verdant fringes of Birkenhead Park, all of them built in the early 1850s.

In 1858 something sinister took place at one of the mansion houses on Birkenhead’s Cavendish Road which generated a wave of gossip in the neighbourhood and beyond.

What is whispered in one ear is often heard a hundred miles away thanks to the grapevine of the rumourmonger, and in the autumn of 1858 some very strange rumours concerning one of the palatial residences on Cavendish Road are known to have circulated as far as the capital, where the weird story concerning a vampire was discussed in hushed tones within the panelled rooms of many a gentleman’s club.

The rumour had it that the wealthy Gallienne family of Cavendish Road had been visited by an actual real-life vampire one night, and the fiend had bitten a sleeping daughter of Charles Gallienne before making its escape from the mansion.

The daughter, Pandora Gallienne, aged nineteen, had since been transformed into a vampiress, and despite several exorcisms by Jesuits, the girl continued to hunger for blood.

Charles Gallienne, unable to have his daughter ritually killed by having a stake driven through her heart, had entombed Pandora alive in a specially-constructed vault in the cellar of the mansion bound in chains with crosses cemented into the door of the tomb.

Miss Gallienne had been suspiciously absent at her church for over a month, and her father had maintained that his beloved daughter was gravely ill with consumption.

Months went by and Charles Gallienne claimed his darling daughter had died from her accursed illness – but people on Cavendish Road had heard a girl’s screams emanating from the Gallienne house in the dead of night.

Over a century passed and in the 1960s the mansion once owned by Charles Gallienne was purchased by one Arthur Moss, and he hired a gang of workmen to renovate the house in October 1962.

There was a lot of water in the cellar, so much so that the iron lintels down there were badly rusted, as were the water pipes.

When Jim Griffiths, the boss of the workmen inspected the waterlogged cellar, he noticed that an archway in the cellar wall had been bricked up and there was a huge rusted cross mounted on the bricks of this filled-in archway.

The cross fell off the wall when Jim gently pulled at it.

Water dripping from a leaky gutter had seeped through the floor in the backyard and into the cellar, so the gutter was mended and then the workmen set about installing vents and an extraction fan in the cellar – but then some strange things began to happen. Davy O’Sullivan, an Irish plasterer, said he had heard a woman singing Star of County Down – and old Irish folk song – in the cellar.

"And why would a ghost be singing that song?" asked a bemused Jim Griffiths, and he accused O’Sullivan of drinking on the job.

A few days later, however, Davy O’Sullivan, Jim Griffiths and a plumber named Harry Lewis were in the cellar when they distinctly heard a woman’s eerie-sounding voice singing, and the plumber said, "That’s an old ballad my grandmother used to sing. It’s called The Unquiet Grave."

"You’re wrong it’s an Irish song called Star of County Down," O’Sullivan insisted, and the plumber shook his head and said, "No, The Unquiet Grave has the same melody as that song, but it’s much older."

All of a sudden the cellar wall appeared to dissolve into swirling vapour and standing three feet beyond the disintegrating walls stood a beautiful smiling young lady in an old-fashioned white dress, bound in chains.

O’Sullivan fled from the cellar but Griffiths and Lewis remained rooted to the spot, hypnotised by the luminous green eyes of the weird woman.

She broke the chains leading to a metal collar and lunged at the plumber Lewis, but a single chain attached to a band around her waist prevented her from reaching him, and she hissed and her face underwent a demonic transformation.

The owner of the house, Arthur Moss, alerted to the terrifying incident by O’Sullivan, entered the cellar and exclaimed, "Jesus Christ!"

The female entity shrunk back at these words and spat blood at Moss, and the two mesmerised men suddenly snapped out of the spell exerted by the fiend and recoiled in horror, stumbling backwards.

Moss instinctively picked up the rusted cross that had been attached to the wall and bravely thrust it at the ghastly-looking entity as Griffiths and Lewis ran out of the cellar.

In an instant the wall of the tomb reappeared and Moss had the cross reattached to that wall. Priests were brought in to bless the cellar but the sounds of a demented woman singing and shrieking were heard night after night so Moss sold the residence.

I researched the history of the ‘vampiric woman’ and discovered why she sings that song, The Unquiet Grave; it’s a song about a woman who loved her husband so much, she brought him back after he died, and upon kissing him she in turn became a corpse – only in Pandora’s case, her lover was a vampire, but he abandoned her after she became one of the undead.

Haunted Liverpool 30 is out now on Amazon.