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 mystery behind the Whitehouse Lane ghost...

On the Thursday evening of 13 August 1992, 27-year-old research chemist Chris Jones was travelling down Heswall’s Whitehouse Lane (which is little more than a narrow country lane in some parts) on his way home to Port Sunlight.

He’d just dropped his girlfriend Tracy off at her house in Heswall, and as Chris cruised down the lane, he saw the full moon hanging in the sky.

Being a keen astronomer, he recognised the starlike point to the right of the lunar disc as Saturn.

Chris was a very scientifically-minded man and was not a believer in the supernatural; he certainly did not have anything remotely paranormal on his mind on this fine warm August evening. Seeing that the road ahead was clear for some distance, Chris accelerated the motorcycle, and when he reached the right-hand bend on Whitehouse Lane, someone jumped out on him from a hedge on the right.

In the split second he saw the figure, Chris noticed it was a woman in some white gown with shoulder-length dark hair, and her face was glowing brightly.

He reflexively braked and tried to take evasive action, but in doing so at such a high speed, he lost control of the bike and was thrown clean over the handlebars. Chris experienced what many people involved in crashes on the road often report: a slowing down of subjective time.

As he flew through the air with almost balletic grace, he saw the Honda below him up-end and smash through the hedgerow, it’s headlamp swinging a beam like a lighthouse, and a heartbeat later Chris had impacted into the field and was rolling alongside his machine.

He tumbled to a halt, and then lay there, stunned. The full moon was peeping over the hedge at him – and then he saw the female who had caused the crash as she came through the hedgerow as if it was made of cobwebs. She was obviously a ghost. She had no face, just a glowing white oval, and she looked as if she was wearing a nightie.

She walked silently towards Chris, and he felt numb as he sat up. She stood about twelve feet away, and seemed to be surveying the aftermath of the accident she had caused, and now there was a light shining from within the ghost which made her look translucent.

Chris could see the faint outline of what looked like an upside-down unborn baby in the glowing abdominal area of the apparition, and then the ghost vanished. Chris picked himself up, and to his utter relief he discovered he had sustained only a minor injury to his left shoulder.

The bike had only a bent wing mirror and branches wedged under its front mudguard – but it was still working. Chris slowly drove home and decided against telephoning his girlfriend Tracy until morning as he knew she’d be worried sick about him. Many years later Chris was in a pub in Heswall when he overheard the barman talking about the ‘Brimstage ghost’ – a lady in white who seemed hell-bent on causing crashes on the roads in the Brimstage area.

One of the drinkers mentioned an encounter he’d had with the ghost on Whitehouse Lane in 1986 and said the figure had jumped out of a hedge as he drove down the lane in his Ford Escort. He had swerved to avoid the woman and crashed through a hedge, ending up on farmland. Another local at the pub named Rob said he had been driving his scooter down Whitehouse Lane in 1989 one moonlit night when a figure “wearing something white” had jumped out of a hedge into the path of his scooter.

Rob said he had swerved to avoid the jaywalker and had crashed, sustaining a sprained wrist. When he got up, ready to give the person who had caused the accident a piece of his mind, he saw that the road was clear and no one was about in the fields.

Suspecting he’d almost run down a ghost, Rob got back on his scooter and quickly drove off.

I mentioned the Whitehouse Lane ghost on a local radio programme one evening and was inundated by listeners who had also encountered her or had heard about the apparition.

Several people referred to the semitransparent baby in the faceless spectral figure, even though I had not mentioned that aspect of the ghost, and curiously, a few older listeners said the ghost was in some way connected with the ancestors of a family that resided at Brimstage Hall, just under a mile away from the haunting grounds of the lady in white.

Parts of the Hall date back to 1175, but as of yet, no one has discovered the identity of the menacing ghost and its alleged connection with Brimstage Hall is also unproven.

The most recent encounter with what is probably the same ghost was in 2018.

One icy evening in December of that year at around 10 o’clock, a woman in her twenties named Kelly was driving her brand new Nissan Qashqai from her home in Eastham Rake to her Aunt’s home on Barnston Road, and part of the itinerary went through Whitehouse Lane, where Kelly saw what looked like a girl in a long white dress standing in the road.

Unable to drive around the girl because of the narrowness of the lane, Kelly flashed the car headlights, and the girl slowly vanished before her eyes.

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