WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.
In this latest tale, Tom explores Wirral's weird cultists...
In the eighty thousand square miles of our island kingdom, many strange cults have arisen over the course of our history – most of them hostile to outsiders bringing new religions to our shores.
Britain was a peninsula of Europe until that cataclysmic day, 8,000 years ago, when a tsunami - triggered by Biblical landslides in Norway – struck this land and turned low-lying planes into the North Sea before flooding marshlands to the south – creating the English Channel.
After the 33-feet-high waves (which had moved with such a velocity they had dismembered humans and animals) had receded, the surviving 5,000 people of the new island, all hunter-gatherers, realised they were cut off from European mainland by new seas and formed beliefs, cults, and ways of life that were different to the old religions and traditional systems of thought that were the norm on the Continent.
A particular type of British Druid evolved that was centred on the worship of the Earth Goddess – an eco cult that is ripe for a revival in these environmentally conscious days.
Something else happened in that hauntingly remote epoch; somehow without any knowledge of mathematics and engineering, the inhabitants of early Britain created gigantic burial mounds and erected enormous standing stones which aligned with other positioned stones miles away.
Some of these stones – such as the Rudston Monolith – weigh 26 tons – and we only have to look at Stonehenge to appreciate the skills of the mysterious megalith builders.
The stones were aligned with equinoxes and the paths of the sun and moon – they were part of a cult based around the agricultural calendar, and the secret skills regarding megalith erection and alignment – as well as other esoteric knowledge - was passed down through the generations.
Even after Christianity came to Britain in the 1st Century AD, the 'old ways' refused to die – and there are some very ancient cults still with us which have resisted all change.
In May 1974, more than 50 graves in Bebington’s Town Lane Cemetery were criminally damaged.
The mysterious and coordinated attacks had been on stone crosses, and at first, the authorities blamed teenagers, but a stonemason at the cemetery said, "Had it been just vandals, one would have expected them to destroy flowers and other things. As it is they have only concentrated on the crosses and nothing else."
The attack on the graveyard came a week after a similar vandalising spree over in Ford Cemetery, Litherland.
The attacks continued and some witnesses said they had seen weird hooded figures in robes reminiscent of those worn by the Ku Klux Klan, only the hoods had bizarre exaggerated noses made from cones of fabric stitched onto them.
The colour of the robes was always green.
Some witnesses I spoke to on a radio programme looking into local mysteries said that the hooded grave desecrators carried swords and huge sledgehammers which they used to knock down the stone crosses.
The hooded defilers also possessed incredible strength, being able to throw some of the granite crosses weighing over a thousand pounds in weight quite a distance.
This almost superhuman ability of the cultists, along with the colour of their costumes, leads me to believe that the 'Lily White Boys' – an ancient sect of druid-like warriors – were behind the desecrations at the cemeteries.
They were seen again eight years later in September 1982 in the burial ground at St Hilary’s Church, Wallasey, where the desecrators had caused that much damage to one grave, a 100-year-old coffin had been exposed.
They then moved on to Birkenhead’s Flaybrick Hill Cemetery, where a door leading to an underground sepulchre for the family of William Laird (founder of the world-famous Cammell Laird shipbuilders) had been forced.
Local councillor Roy Perkins increased security at the local cemeteries, and over in Bootle, twelve graves were again damaged, including the grave of Simon Mahon Senior, a Labour leader and former Lord Mayor of Bootle.
Two witnesses to the Flaybrick Cemetery desecration, a 19-year-old girl named Donna and her 20-year-old boyfriend Graham, were walking past the cemetery at 1am when they saw men in green robes with pointed hoods running along the road waving swords and laughing.
Donna let out a scream and the hooded men chased her and her boyfriend all the way to her home on Sumner Road.
The Rector of St Hilary’s Church, the Reverend Stanley Walker told the press at the time: "I have lost count of how many gravestones have been attacked. Some have been smashed beyond repair. At one time even vandals respected cemeteries. Now they spray swastikas on the graves with aerosol cans."
The swastika is an ancient sun symbol and the Lily White Boys wear the solar symbol on their outfits because they are a sun-worshipping cult.
They often scrawl the symbol at the scene of their attacks.
The Lily White Boys have been quiet in recent years but they are still thought to assemble on Bidston Hill and at Thurstaston Common near the Thor’s Stone landmark.
They have allegedly resorted to human sacrifice in the past and there are many occultists who believe that the Lily White Boys have been connected with cases where local people have gone missing without a trace...
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