HAUNTED WIRRAL: Inrod, the Bebington Demon

WHEN I have mentioned dangers of the Ouija board in my books, on radio programmes and in newspaper columns, most people take heed and they will not dabble with the upturned glass.

Understandably, some people are bound to disagree with me and some have foolishly asked me how a simple glass can harm anyone.

Well, yes, it does seem far-fetched; a mere glass unleashing demonic forces which wreck people's lives or even kill - but the glass in itself is harmless; it's what people do with that glass, of course.

I saw a bar fight once where a glass was smashed and driven into someone’s face, and a glass filled with vodka or whiskey which is gulped down by a surgeon before he is due to operate, or knocked back by a pilot before he takes an airliner across the Atlantic, could result in death and disaster.

The most seemingly far-fetched things can be the most frightening.

If we went back in time and told a Greek philosopher that an entire city could be destroyed with 4 kilograms of metal, he’d think you were crazy, and yet thermonuclear weapons can use just under that amount of plutonium to lay waste any metropolis.

Four kilograms is the weight of an average male cat.

How does the Ouija board work?

Some believe the planchette or upturned glass is moved by spirits possessing the sitters around the table.

These spirits would use exceedingly small amounts of energy to make the sitter move the glass via the cerebellums (the part of the brain that activates muscles to produce movement).

Curiously, the output of messages from the Ouija has produces odd names that have been reported regularly down the centuries by dabblers across the world.

One is Zozo (sometimes dictated as Zuzu), as well as a certain name I would not even dare to put into print here because to even see it is said to be highly unlucky.

Another regular name that comes through is Inrod (sometimes known as Inrog), and this is the name of an entity which came through when two 13-year-old girls played around with the Ouija at a house in Bebington in 1977.

Just before the Ouija session, Emma, the girl who lived at the house, began to hear the raspy voice of a woman as she lay in bed at night.

The woman sounded angry, and her faint voice said the same thing over and over. Emma wrote it down as it sounded, and the phonetic phrase was read by the girl’s mother, Rachel, who was fluent in French.

"Tu m'as fait boire de l'eau," said Rachel, "that is French for "You made me drink water" – how odd." 

Emma had no knowledge of the French language, but she began to have dreams in which the people around her were speaking in French – and somehow she understood them.

The people were indulging in orgies and carrying out all sorts of macabre acts.

The men wore powdered wigs and old-fashioned colourful silk and satin costumes that looked like the clothes the men wore in the 18th Century.

In the middle of the dreams, Emma would always see a woman in elegant, expensive-looking clothes gazing at her with intense hatred.

This aristocratic lady would scream something and charge at Emma, and then she would wake up with a pounding heart.

The recurring nightmares eventually stopped, and then in October 1977, Emma invited her friend Juliet to a sleepover.

The girls talked of boys and did one another’s make up and they ate sweets and drank lemonade and then, around midnight, Juliet suggested dabbling with an Ouija board.

Emma wasn't keen on the idea, but Juliet told her she had used an Ouija in the past to discover who was in love with her.

This possibility captured Emma’s imagination, so the girls cut out lots of little square pieces of paper upon which they scrawled each letter of the alphabet and the numerals 0 to 9.

A candle and wine glass were smuggled up to the room and the candle was lit and placed on a dresser, and the little squares of paper were arranged in a wonky circle about the candle.

The girls messed about at first, shoving the upturned glass about – but Juliet told her friend not to push the glass, and she whispered: "Spirits – we invite you to into this room to talk to us. Thank you." 

A sleepy atmosphere descended as the teens gazed at the swaying candle as they rested their forefingers on the base of the upturned wine glass.

Emma yawned. Then the girls heard a moaning sound which echoed strangely across the bedroom. "Tue-la, Inrod!" came a female voice, and somehow, Emma knew the words were: "Kill her, Inrod" in French.

Juliet seemed really afraid, and she took her index finger off the glass.

The glass threw itself into Juliet’s face with so much force, it broke, and a thin red line on her cheek started to blossom with blood.

Juliet screamed as she saw the blood drip on her hands, and she ran out of the bedroom. The door slammed behind her – and the doorknob was yanked off and thrown through the bedroom window.

Emma screamed as a towering, terrifying entity appeared in an orange glow. Radiating from every part of his body were sharp spikes that looked rust-coloured - and in his hand he held a giant metal syringe.

"Inrod, suck the blood from her!" screamed a woman’s voice.

The spike-covered being tried to thrust the foot-long needle of the syringe into Emma, but the girl took evasive action.

She screamed and realising she could not open the door because the doorknob had been removed, she ran to the window, opened it, and jumped into the garden.

She landed, breaking a leg, and passed out. She awoke in hospital screaming, and had to be sedated.

Years later when Emma was in her thirties, she saw a picture in a history book of the woman she had seen in her nightmares; it was Madame de Brinvilliers – a French aristocrat, occultist and mass murderer who poisoned over 30 people (including her own family) in the 17th Century.

Before she was executed, she was made to drink 16 pints of water to procure a confession.

That woman’s voice had whispered to young Emma, ‘You made me drink water’.

• Haunted Liverpool 34 and 36 audiobooks are out now on Amazon.