HAUNTED WIRRAL: A wife's revenge from beyond the grave

In this latest tale, Tom tells the tale of a wife's revenge from beyond the grave...

I’ve had to change a few names in this strange story for legal reasons.

On the evening of Friday 3 August 1973, 35-year-old John Lonsdale was supposed to be at the home of his seriously ill cousin Stephen in North Wales as his wife Gloria lay in a hospital bed in Clatterbridge, recovering from a major operation – but that night John was seen with a blonde girl at the Kingsland Restaurant on Borough Road, Birkenhead.

The person who saw the duplicitous John was Peter, a man John had gone to college with many years ago.

Peter had been at the restaurant with his wife, watching the comic Tom O’Connor when he had noticed John kissing the blonde at a table across the room.

She looked as if she was barely out of her teens.

Peter knew John’s wife was in hospital and wanted to go and punch him but his wife told him not to get involved. But she told a friend about the way Gloria Lonsdale’s husband was carrying on and it got back to Gloria.

She didn’t want to believe it but she had long suspected that John was a philanderer.

She’d detected various perfumes on his clothes over the years and too many of his stories and explanations just hadn’t added up, but she’d been afraid of losing him and so she never left him.

Gloria’s health deteriorated after the operation and her doctor told John to be there for his wife as much as possible, as Gloria had told him how she’d looked at John as her main reason for wanting to live. John cruelly told his wife on her sickbed: "The doctor has told me that your condition is much worse than he had thought and that the end might come sooner than he had imagined," and then he pretended to burst into tears.

Gloria told a nurse what her husband had said and when the doctor heard about the lies John had told he threatened to have him prosecuted. "I know your game, Mr Lonsdale," the doctor roared down the phone to John one day, "using a type of negative suggestion to finish your wife off!"

John slammed the phone down on the doctor. Then Gloria heard that John’s young blonde mistress was now pregnant, and already he was seeing someone else. Gloria’s sister Jenny arrived from Australia, and when Gloria told her about John’s evil and appalling behaviour, Jenny had it out with him and he threw her out of the house and refused to let her in.

Then Gloria suddenly died.

Hours after they took Gloria’s body to the mortuary, John Lonsdale invited his latest girlfriend – a 21-year-old redhead named Natasha - into his home and they slept in the bed he had shared with his late wife.

"Don’t you feel bad doing this on the day your wife passed away?" Natasha asked as she lay besides John. He smiled and coldly told her: "No, I’m what is known as a nihilist – I believe life is meaningless and I reject all religions and pathetic morals. Gloria’s death is just icing on the Nietzschean cake. We live, we die, and that’s it – we’re just recycled carbon. No afterlife and angels and harps – just nothingness."

"That’s horrible John," said Natasha, snuggling into his chest, "I don’t think death is the end."

"No one ever comes back from the grave, though, do they?" he asked, and Natasha let out a scream, startling him. She said she’d seen a woman looking at her from the wardrobe mirror. Then they both heard a woman outside shouting "John...John!"

"That’ll be Gloria’s sister Jenny!" John told Natasha, who was getting dressed. "What are you doing?" he asked. Natasha put on her boots and she left. That night as he tried to sleep, the bed started to tilt left and right until he rolled off the mattress.

Then the wardrobe toppled over. He heard plates being smashed in the kitchen. Now he knew it wasn’t Jenny trying to spook him. He heard Gloria’s demented laughter, and it scared him so much he went to stay in a friend’s house in Noctorum.

Then, on the day of Gloria’s funeral, John waited outside the church in his car, and he followed the cortege to Bebington Cemetery. After the mourners had gone, he sneaked over to the open grave as the two gravediggers looked on, tossed a wreath down the hole onto the coffin and shouted, "I’m sorry Gloria! Now leave me alone!"

Something hurled that funeral wreath out of the grave and it ended up around the neck of John Lonsdale. He fell back in shock, and the gravediggers were a witness to the strange spectacle. After that day, John’s constant attempts to approach any girl he fancied were always thwarted by very strange goings-on; poltergeist activity and weird phone calls to the girls in the dead of night from a woman with a raspy voice who warned them to stay away from John Lonsdale.

In 1975 John was found dead in a flat he’d just moved into one morning with his eyes bulging in terror at something. He’d suffered a massive heart attack in an armchair.

A postman who had passed the window of the flat that morning said he had seen a woman in a long white gown leaning over John – but the no one could have left the premises because the bolt was still on the front door.

Tom Slemen's Haunted Liverpool 32 is out soon on Amazon