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

In this latest story, Tom reveals the mystery of the bottomless room...

On the Friday night of 20 March 1987 at around 11.20pm, a 21-year-old student named Michelle Keel was dozing off in bed at the six bedroom house on Birkenhead’s Park Road East when she was rudely awakened by rainwater dripping through her ceiling onto her head.

She had been having a lucid dream in which she’d been lying stretched out on the pavement during a downpour, and now she knew why.

She telephoned her landlord Mr Graves to complain about the leak and he told her he’d have a roofer out first thing Saturday morning to fix the problem.

"And where am I going to sleep in the meantime?" Michelle asked, running her hand through her soaked red hair.

"Move the bed or sleep in a chair, just for tonight," Graves suggested, and Michelle said she wanted money docked from her rent for the trouble and Graves said the line was bad and hung up.

At that moment, Lucy Briggs, Michelle’s old friend from school came home and as she was walking along the communal hallway downstairs, Michelle ran out of her flat, leaned over the stair rail and shouted down to her: "Lucy, can I possibly stay with you tonight?"

"Why, what’s up?" Lucy shouted, shaking her umbrella.

"There’s rainwater leaking through the ceiling and it’s soaked my bed and it’s like a waterfall," said Michelle. "Only for tonight. The landlord said he’ll – "

"Yeah come one then," Lucy interrupted, and she did not look or sound too enthusiastic.

By one o’clock that morning, the girls were drinking cocoa and eating spaghetti hoops on toast as they sat cross-legged on the bed – a bed that felt luxuriously warm and dry to Michelle.

Lucy said she’d just come back from her boyfriend Craig in Liverpool and things weren’t looking too good.

She’d found Polaroid photographs of a girl who worked with Craig in his wardrobe – and she was topless on the snaps.

Craig said his mate Nick had planted them there as a bad joke.

Michelle talked at length about her lukewarm on-off relationship with a lad named Adam and then at 2:30 am, Lucy started yawning.

"I’ll sleep down the bottom end of the bed," said Michelle, grabbing a pillow, but Lucy smiled and told her: "Michelle, it’s okay, you’re not my type – we’re not kids sleeping top-tail. But if you start snoring you’re going back upstairs; I’ve got to get up at eight. I’m working in a newsagent’s shop."

Lucy fell asleep first, and then Michelle dozed off, and had a peculiar dream.

She dreamt someone was sucking her big toe – and when she awoke, she felt a cold mouth kissing her left foot, so she yelped and withdrew her foot, which had been hanging out the bed.

She heard echoing voices and ripples of reverberating laughter in the bedroom – and the noises seemed to be coming from the floor.

Michelle looked over the edge of the bed and saw that there was no floor, just empty black space.

She rubbed her eyes and looked again – yes – there was no solid floor, just an abyss of empty pitch-black space – and as she gazed in disbelief, Michelle saw laughing faces appear in the darkness.

The faces became more solid as they rose from the blackness.

Michelle shook Lucy awake and told her the floor was missing and that there were weird laughing faces on the floor, and Lucy sat up, and when she looked to her right, she saw that Michelle was right – there was no carpet – just blackness, and there were weird heads bobbing up and down in the impossible floor.

All of a sudden the room erupted with eerie jeering laughter and coarse comments from the entities on the floor.

A black silhouetted hand reached up from the floor and gripped the end of the bed, and Michelle screamed.

The girls held on to one another and surveyed the terrifying scene.

They were scared and confused, and Lucy kept thinking she was having a nightmare and pinched her arm, imagining she’d wake up, but this was real – and inexplicable.

The bed started to rock and tilt, and the girls clung on to the bed’s headpost and at the top of her voice, Michelle cried out: "Help! Help us!"

The laughter increased as Michelle screamed for help, and the girls heard very offensive swearing from the black void where the floor had been hours ago.

Lucy had her left hand on the headpost and her right hand made the sign of the cross because she thought devils were attacking her.

She looked down and now there were even more twisted grinning faces looking up from the blackness, and the laughter was deafening.

The door to the room burst open and a 23-year-old student named Mark, who lodged in the room next door, looked in at the girls. His eyes bulged in shock as he saw the sea of jabbering and laughing faces on the floor.

"Mark! Wait there! Don’t go!" Lucy shouted to the student, but he backed away in fear from the doorway. "Come on!"

Lucy shouted to Michelle, grabbing her hand and pulling her to her feet.

"We can jump," said Lucy.

Michelle let go of her hand, and she ran diagonally across the bed and leaped five feet through the air and flew through the doorway.

Then Lucy took a running jump, and as she did, the bed fell into the blackness.

The laughter ceased, the floor reappeared, and the room then returned to normal.

Both girls moved out the house the next day, and just what happened that morning remains unexplained.

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