HAUNTED WIRRAL: The Storeton 'Timeslip'

In this latest tale, Mike and Taylor make a terrifying discovery on a woodland walk ...

IF we don't reverse Global Warming and find a way to tackle climate change pretty pronto, this planet of ours could become inhospitable to life.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a chilling report not so long ago: we have twenty years and then there will be no turning back; we'll have superdroughts, devastating wildfires, unprecedented hurricanes and submerged cities.

Some think we have already passed the point of no return, and there are conspiracy theorists who believe that the governments of the world have recently stepped up the search for earth-type planets and increased the space-probing of the Moon and Mars for water to sustain a colony (and the search has been so intense, water was recently found on the Moon after we’d been told for decades that our natural satellite is an arid, airless world).

Elon Musk-types have already got the blueprints ready for interstellar ships that could take the chosen few from this dying world to another planet light years away, and this may be the only way for human life to continue; by fleeing into space.

But there is another possible route to survival, albeit a seemingly far-fetched one: escape into another time. It might prove easier than sending a ship across billions of miles to the near stars ...

A few years ago, a 75-year-old grandfather from Birkenhead named Mike and his 15-year-old granddaughter Taylor went for a walk in the tranquillity of Storeton Woods.

It was a cold but sunny Spring day, and Taylor wanted to take pictures on her smartphone for a school geography project.

Mike and Taylor passed an elderly woman walking her Alsatian in the woods, and then grandfather and granddaughter noticed something odd – an eerie silence descended on the woodland.

Birds had been singing in the trees one moment, and then it all ceased.

Mike hadn't been to the woods in years and he was surprised to see a circular pit in a clearing, and Taylor started to descend into this pit, carefully stepping on sandstone rocks.

Mike shouted to her: "Don't, Taylor! It doesn't look safe!"

But the girl reached a hole in the floor of the pit and said she could see light shining through a tunnel.

Mike had heard old stories about tunnels under the woods, and in a huff he went to try and stop Taylor exploring further but the girl descended into hole, which was about eight feet across, and she was right – there was a tunnel down there.

Despite her grandfather's cries for her to come back, the girl said: "Oh wow, look at this!"

The girl stooped and took pictures of huge toadstools in the tunnel, while Mike noted the harsh spring sunlight shining into the tunnel about fifty feet away.

He tried to grab Taylor's arm but she said: "No, hang on - let's see where this goes to!"

That tunnel led to a cave which looked onto a quarry of cream-coloured sandstone rocks, and there was a hole in one of the faces of the quarry - either natural or manmade.

As Mike stepped out of the cave and walked through huge ferns, he called to his granddaughter, but got no reply, so he turned and said: "Taylor, get a picture of this."

Taylor was standing stock still in the cave with bulging eyes that were fixed on a massive dark-brown spider about two feet in length.

At first, Mike thought the thing was branches, and then he saw it slowly crawl towards Taylor.

The girl screamed, shuffled sideways with her back to the cave wall and ran to Mike in a terrible state.

"I have never seen a spider that size in all my life," he said, as Taylor hid behind him.

They watched the giant arachnid dart into the cave and walk up the wall – where it joined another of its kind.

Taylor had a fear of spiders and looked as if she was going to faint.

A growling sound above startled Mike and Taylor, and they looked up to see the head of a huge wolf-like animal, peering at them over a ledge. Then things got worse.

To the right of Mike, he saw a green-skinned creature – a living dinosaur of some sort – creeping out of the thick ferns.

Taylor screamed and her grandfather yanked her by the hand and pulled her into the cave – where the spiders were.

There was then an almighty thump as the creature that had been watching from the ledge jumped down onto the floor of the quarry.

It was a bizarre-looking animal that sounds like a Chalicotherium (a long extinct herbivore from millions of years ago) with long forelimbs and short back legs.

The smaller green reptile – which was the size of a horse – attacked the possible Chalicotherium, and the latter ran off screaming. Mike and Taylor hurried away from the cave, through the tunnel, and scrambled up the rubble of the pit until they reached Storeton Woods.

When grandfather and granddaughter returned to the woods the next day, they could find no pit and were told by a dog walker that there had never been a pit in the woods.

That part of the woods had been built on the old quarry – where fossilized dinosaur tracks had been found many decades ago.

Mike realised that he and his granddaughter had somehow ventured millions of years into the past via some timeslip, and so many of these types of incidents have been reported to me and others over the years.

If we could discover the mechanism by which the time-slippage takes place, perhaps we would have a way of escaping the future hell of our dying ecosystem – by taking refuge in the past.

• Haunted Liverpool 33 is out now on Amazon.