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 spine-chilling mystery that is the Halloween man...

In April 1971, a Mr Alfred Marshall of Eleanor Road, Bidston was mending fencing that encircled a private wood when he noticed a hole in the ground.

It was not a rabbit hole, but a clearly defined circular and apparently extremely deep hole – the type of hole that had been seen before in rural places where WW2 German bombs had impacted into terra firma without going off – leaving the local authorities a “UXB” – an unexploded bomb - to contend with.

The 'Bidston Hole' as the local press called the mysterious aperture – was duly investigated by Sergeant Major Norman Humphrys – one of the country’s top bomb experts.

He travelled up from Felixstowe with specialist electronic equipment and he dug more than 12 feet down but his hypersensitive metal detector remained silent, and the residents of Eleanor Road breathed a sigh of relief when Sergeant Humphrys informed them that the hole seemed to be an ancient one that had been uncovered by the recent heavy April showers which had eroded the limestone lining of the shaft.

A curious 13-year-old boy named Patrick later shone a torch down the shaft and saw something resembling a ball. Using a fishing line and a hook he eventually reeled the thing up with great difficulty as it was heavy.

The hook had caught a diamond-shaped opening in what turned out to be a stone sphere, which was as big as a lawn bowl and it was caked in mud. Patrick took it home and washed the globe, which seemed to be made from granite.

The globe had a lid which, when prised off, contained a dark red resin.

There were two diamond-shaped eyes cut into the stone, a triangular hole for a nose, and a zig-zagged mouth.

There were thirteen longitudinal grooves running from the crown of the weird stone ‘head’ to its base, and Patrick’s dad said the thing looked like a stone Halloween pumpkin.

This was 1971 when Halloween was still known as Duck Apple Night in England, and Patrick had never seen a carved pumpkin.

The only pumpkins he’d heard about were the ones in the Cinderella tale. Patrick’s personality seemed to change after he found that 'stone pumpkin', and one evening his mother found him in his bedroom squeezing blood out of a self-inflicted gash in his palm and draining it into the stone head.

Patrick swore at his mother and told her to leave his room.

He later apologised to her, but he then started to come home from the library with books on the Occult. He informed his mother that the thing he’d found was an ancient 'Celtic head' talisman.

The boy then started to hang around Bidston Hill after dark, and one night Patrick’s father followed his son – and saw him meet a weird tall figure on the hillside.

At one point Patrick’s dad saw this figure raise its arms vertically and slowly sink into what looked like a pothole.

He confronted his son and asked him what the thing was he’d been talking to and Patrick started speaking gibberish – but it later transpired that he was speaking in some ancient form of Gaelic.

Patrick told friends that the 'Halloween Man' was now his best friend, and he sometimes referred to him as the 'Samhain Man'.

When October 31st arrived, Patrick became very excited and painted spiral symbols on his face with blue ink and rushed to Bidston Hill as twilight was falling.

Three local girls – all aged thirteen - had a crush on Patrick, and knowing he was into witchcraft, they dressed as witches in home-made outfits made of black cardboard hats and dark curtains for capes.

They carried broomsticks up to the hill – and they joked to Patrick about putting spells on him to make him kiss them, but the excited boy kept saying, "The Halloween Man’s coming!"

The girl’s followed Patrick to a spot on the slopes of the hill. By the light of a waxing gibbous moon, the giggling girls stood there watching Patrick spout his supposed Gaelic ‘incantations’ – but then something very eerie took place which wiped the smiles off the faces of the girls.

A man in some sort of ghastly mask rose steadily out of the ground from a hole.

He carried a huge axe, and he walked towards Patrick, speaking in a raspy voice.

The girls screamed but Patrick told them: "Don’t be scared, he’s good. He’s the Halloween man. He’s a good spirit from the Lord of the Dead; he protects people with that axe."

The girls ran home and told their parents about the axeman and then a gang of older teens arrived on the hill, and they threatened Patrick – now known as the local oddball.

Then they saw the approach of the tall figure in black brandishing the axe, and his face, with its black eyes shaped like the diamonds on a playing card, and that jagged mouth.

They threw stones at him and ran, and the axe went sailing through the night air and narrowly missed one of the gang members.

Patrick’s father confiscated the stone head one day, and when he travelled to Liverpool to see his cousin, he tossed it out the window near Halewood.

His son slowly returned to normal, and the Halloween Man – whatever it was – was seen no more on Bidston Hill.

Haunted Liverpool 32 is out soon on Amazon.