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

In this latest story, Tom tells the ghastly tale of the supernatural horror of the Highfield Road thing...

Many years ago a very strange story came my way.

I’d heard variations of it before and thought it sounded like a typical untraceable friend-of-a-friend tale – a mere urban legend, but in 2009 I happened to mention the story concerned on a local radio programme I appeared on each week, talking about North-West mysteries, and I received some very informative feedback – including a relative of one of the people involved in the story.

From the feedback I gleaned the following. In 1969, a group of nomadic young people, all in their twenties, squatted at a house on Highfield Road.

These 'hippies' (as they were then called), were four men and five women, mostly from London, and they had been drawn first to Liverpool on a pilgrimage to the hometown of The Beatles (most of the group being fans of the band), and after being evicted from a squat on Penny Lane, they came over to Birkenhead, where they made a derelict house their home on Highfield Road.

The leader of the group was said to have been a 25-year-old man named Vincent, and he was a self-proclaimed occultist who studied the works of Aleister Crowley, Carlos Castaneda and Éliphas Lévi, and he also read everything about the teachings, rites and ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn – a controversial sect founded in 1887 to study the occult with a view to practicing real magic.

Shortly after the hippies had moved into their squat, they were joined by a 17-year-old girl we shall name Lucy – not her real name, because this teenager was the runaway daughter of a well-known aristocrat.

Vincent had one of the rooms in the squat painted black, and even the windows of the room were painted over.

A fire was lit in the grate and cannabis joints were passed around as Vincent played records by The Doors, The Beatles and other contemporary artists backwards, listening for 'secret messages' from the Devil.

This madness and supernatural mumbo-jumbo culminated one night in an orgy which Vincent arranged as a ‘sex magic ceremony’ which he called the Amalantrah Working – a ritual from the books of Aleister Crowley to open up a 'rent in the fabric of space and time' – a portal in other words – through which liberating demons could enter.

Later that evening an old man called at the house and said he had something magical he wished to show to the leader of the group.

He was admitted to the house and he shook hands with a bemused Vincent then took a black cylindrical leather case out of a bag.

"This is a Victorian kaleidoscope I’ve had since I was a child, and there is an entity living within it named Lamma. Don’t look at her too often or you’ll become insane."

The old man then left, and the naked debauchees started dancing, singing, and drinking, and all the time Vincent, who had been smoking marijuana, kept looking into the vintage kaleidoscope, when he suddenly exclaimed, "What on earth is that?"

"What’s what? Let me see!" said one of Vincent’s friends, but he could not prise the tube from him, and after about thirty seconds, Vincent turned to his friend and his eyes were staring, mad-looking, and his irises seemed to have a faint blue glow to them.

A beam of concentrated light then shone from the tube of the kaleidoscope, projecting a terrifying face upon the wall.

The face was made up of what looked like scintillating coloured gemstones and the eyes were oval, neon-green with cog-shaped pupils, and they exerted a powerful hypnotic pull on everyone present.

The head was bulbous at the top and tapered to a pointed chin, and from a flat projection it suddenly became three-dimensional.

The face of this eldritch being seemed crystalline and as everyone looked on in horrified shock, the mouth of unearthly head opened to reveal a deep tunnel.

A booming feminine voice said, "I am Lamma," and it was so amplified it made the bones of those present vibrate.

Vincent was about to question the entity when it’s mouth formed an O shape and it sucked in four of the women standing nearby with a powerful vortex. The mouth then closed on the hysterical women.

Lucy ran naked out of the room and onto the streets. She told an old night watchman what had happened and he covered her with his coat before going into the squat.

He found four men dead on the floor of the black-roomed wall, and they all wore expressions of utter terror upon their faces.

The bulging eyes of the dead were all fixed on one point on the wall, but there was no sign of 'Lamma' – just an odour of tobacco and marijuana.

Lucy was reclaimed by her aristocratic family and the four dead men were explained away as tramps who had died from accidental overdoses of heroin – even though Lucy stated that they were only smoking cannabis.

There was no investigation into the fate of the four missing girls – regarded as nomadic nobodies by the authorities, and Lucy’s well-placed family allegedly had the entire strange case hushed up, but tales of the weird incident continued to circulate for years.

I often wonder just what lurked in that Victorian kaleidoscope...

and what became of those four young women?

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