Haunted Wirral: Visions of swastikas

In this latest story, Tom tells the eerie tale of the visions of swastikas...

Things aren’t always what they seem.

The world looks flat, but we are living on a sphere, and the stars at night seem to twinkle, but they don’t, it’s just the earth’s turbulent atmosphere causing the effect.

To a child, time appears to be the same everywhere; if its 4pm in Birkenhead then logically it must be 4pm everywhere else, but time zones mean that when it’s 4pm in Birkenhead it’s 5pm in Paris.

We assume time is uniform and runs at the same rate for everyone, but for humans, it runs slower in the mind of a child because so much new information is being processed by the brain; that’s why car journeys seem so boring to kids – they seem to take longer for them and that’s also why the summers of childhood seem to have lasted much longer than they really did.

The human neural timekeeping mechanism in adults is 60 Hertz (cycles per second), but the brain of the housefly operates at 250 Hertz, and to the fly, we appear to move in slow motion; that’s why flies have amazing evasive reflexes when we try to swat them.

Psychological time then, passes at different rates for humans, cats, dogs, insects and so on, and this brings me to another thing we assume about time: that the future hasn’t happened yet.

Quantum Physics indicates that the future – countless possible futures – are already out there, further along the time dimension, waiting for us to arrive.

We are like a person on a train travelling south from Birkenhead Central who refuses to believe Port Sunlight exists until it arrives.

It would seem from my research over the years that certain people can sometimes obtain glimpses of future events, and they are usually mocked, regarded as prophets, branded as frauds, or deemed to be mentally disturbed.

A case in point is a Bebington night-watchman named Charles Wilson. In the summer of 1969 he was shopping in Birkenhead when he witnessed a horrific crash involving a camper van. Wilson saw the van explode in a fireball and a man ran from the blazing vehicle with his clothes on fire ran towards the night watchman, yelling that his wife and children were still in the camper.

The man then collapsed.

Charles Wilson ran to a public telephone box and dialled 999, but when he returned to the crash scene there was no sign of the burning van. Fire engines turned up and Wilson had a lot of explaining to do.

A fireman told him to go and see his doctor because he was obviously seeing things.

Exactly a year later in August 1970, Wilson heard there had been a crash on the very Birkenhead Road involving a camper van.

He read the newspapers and saw that the crash had happened exactly as he had seen it last year, and the man had even run from the van in flames, telling horrified bystanders his wife and children were still in the van before he slumped to the pavement unconscious.

Why had Wilson received a sneak-preview of such a nightmarish crash?

He pondered this question – but he had more ‘visions’ – and some of them were very disturbing.

He was drinking with a few friends in the Blue Bell pub on Freeman Street one evening when he happened to find himself unable to move.

Whilst in a state of paralysis, Wilson saw the pub around him melt away into clouds, and in these clouds there appeared two flags – a Union Jack with its cross bent into the shape of a swastika, and a red flag with a white disc which featured a smaller royal blue disc with a ring of yellow stars within it.

A lightning bolt zigzagged through this disc and it reminded Wilson of the old flag of the British Union of Fascists he’d seen in the 1930s, back in the days of Sir Oswald Mosley.

Wilson could hear his friends in the pub asking him if he was alright but he couldn’t see them.

He saw armies of men and some women marching the streets of Birkenhead dressed very similarly to the Schutzstaffel – the SS paramilitary organization of Nazi Germany.

The swastika-styled union jacks were being carried by some of the marchers and the buildings and the motor cars in the disturbing vision looked quite futuristic.

Britain had not yet even joined the European Economic Community (EEC) yet someone in Wilson’s vision was telling him that when Britain left the European Union, a right-wing dictator would come to power.

In the disturbing vision, Wilson saw firing squads in parks, executions, and large-scale riots involving the army. Throughout the vision, Wilson felt as if the sombre voice describing the events was warning him.

Before he snapped out of the open-eye dream, the voice told him concentration camps would be created in Wales to deal with “traitors to the state”.

Wilson fainted when he regained the ability to move, and when he later described his vision, people said he’d just had a funny turn.

It’s tempting to muse on the possibility that Wilson had foreseen the political aftermath of Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union – Brexit – but surely we are not headed for a dictatorship - are we?

All of Tom Slemen's book are available from Amazon.