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

In this latest tale, Tom explores the strange tale of Flaybrick Cemetery's shapeshifter...

On 16 December 1980 a football-sized chunk of ice of unknown origin fell out of the sky over West Kirby and smashed through the roof of 90-year-old Mary Nickson’s home, showering the elderly lady with fragments of glass-hard ice and plaster.

Minutes later, five miles away, an ice block of similar size smashed to earth on Birkenhead’s Upper Flaybrick Road in front of two 13-year-old girls, Valerie and Rose.

The bang was deafening as the cryometeor struck the wall of Flaybrick Cemetery, and Rose screamed in pain because a particle of ice stung her cheek.

Valerie laughed at the strange incident, and told her friend the skin on her face was just a bit red. On the floor among the white fragments of the smashed chunk of ice were two weird creatures, about three inches in length and they resembled a dark green smooth newts, only the head of the creatures seemed to have humanlike faces.

One of the creatures was wriggling about with its tale encased in the ice, but the other one looked as if it was dead. It lay there inert as the girls crouched to see what these creatures were.

"Eww, what is it?" Valerie picked the dead-looking slimy skinned 'amphibian' up by its tail and tried to look at it close up – when it suddenly seized her middle finger and bit it hard. Valerie screamed and threw the thing over the cemetery wall.

"Valerie, look!" Rose pointed to the other creature on the floor. It had freed its tail from the ice and now it was changing to a pinkish colour. It quickly turned into a tiny man which reminded Rose of 'Morph”' – the little plasticine character featured on Tony Hart’s Take Hart show.

Rose backed away, scared of the sudden metamorphosis. The little pink man said, "Hello," in a barely audible voice, and Valerie stood up and kicked the tiny humanoid from the road into the kerbstone, where it seemed stunned. "Val! Why did you do that?" asked a shocked Rose.

"They bite, that’s why!" Valerie replied, and she looked about and picked up a stone. She tried to hit the little figure with it, but missed. "Leave him alone!" cried Rose, and crouched to look at the miniature pink figure. It had its hands together, as if praying, and its tiny two black shiny eyes were staring up at Valerie.

Rose thought she heard it say, "Don’t hurt me," seconds before the thick sole of Valerie’s shoe stomped down on it. Black and green fluid squirted from the tiny squished body, and Rose swore at Valerie and ran in tears to her home on Upton Road. Valerie kicked the flattened corpse of the unknown creature down a grid.

Rose didn’t talk to Valerie for a week, and then when they became friends again, the girls went to look for the creepy creature Valerie had thrown over the wall of Flaybrick Cemetery after it had bitten her finger but they could not find the thing.

The years went by and eventually the memory of the strange creatures faded. Rose was married when she was nineteen and moved to Liverpool with her husband, but Valerie took a wrong turning in life and resorted to crime and drugs.

In 1993, she was 26, and already had a criminal record for theft and possession of drugs.

On the evening of 30 April 1993, at around 11pm, Valerie was walking aimlessly along Boundary Road because she had just had a blazing row with her parents. As she passed the gates of Flaybrick Cemetery’s Memorial Gardens, she saw a man’s face peering through the railings. He shouted, "Hey, do you want to make a quick fifty quid?"

Valerie halted. The man had obviously assumed she was a prostitute, and Valerie needed the money because she was broke. Her plan was to demand the money up front from the man then run off.

She walked over to the cemetery and had to climb the railings because - for once - the gates were locked. The man was peeping over a bush at her and by the light of the full moon she saw he was only young, nervous looking and of small stature.

When she walked around the bush, the youth changed before the girl’s eyes into something grotesque and snakelike. It shot forward and before Valerie could scream it coiled its enormous long icy body around her. The thing was like an anaconda with two legs and two arms, and the head was broad, but tapered to a point like the outline of a birch leaf.

"Help!" Valerie screamed but a bony, scaly hand was clamped down on her mouth and she felt a slithering forked tongue stroke her face. The thing slowly tightened its coiled body until Valerie was ready to pass out from the pain and her inability to breathe.

"Val! Why did you do that?" said the unearthly creature, mimicking what Rose had said that wintry day in 1980. "They bite, that’s why!" the shapeshifting being said, impersonating Valerie perfectly.

She realised what the thing was now, some relation of that little creature she had crushed under her shoe.

This was payback. "I’m sorry," Valerie gasped, and fainted. They found her face down in the cemetery at 8am, suffering from exposure and loss of blood – a Class II Haemorrhage.

They said she had hallucinated the shapeshifter through some overdose, but Valerie still refuses to go anywhere near Flaybrick Cemetery.

Haunted Liverpool 31 is available from Amazon.