HAUNTED WIRRAL: The shadow people

In this latest tale, Harry's terrifying rude awakening.

I'VE changed a few names in the following eerie account for reasons of confidentiality. The story begins in January, 1986.

A rather cantankerous 75-year-old Rock Ferry man named Harry Postgate went to live with daughter Paula in The Woodlands, Upton, after his 65-year-old wife Lynn walked out on him, citing irreconcilable differences.

Harry said the house in Rock Ferry was too big and held too many painful memories, hence the move to the semi where his daughter Paula and her husband Redvers lived, and just days after Harry's arrival, he started to indulge in his old habit of interfering in Paula's life.

Paula and Redvers were planning to decorate their home and Harry started telling the couple to wallpaper rather than paint the walls, and also started criticising his daughter's cooking, saying he preferred good old fish and chips and bangers and mash rather than the 'foreign rubbish' she was serving him.

Things came to a head after a week of Harry's carrying on when Paula told him that new sheltered homes had been built on Upton Manor Court, and that he should apply now for a flat in the development, as it was opening soon.

Harry was insulted by the suggestion and went to sulk in the spare room.

Paula later popped her head round the door and said she was sorry, and Harry replied with an incomprehensible sound and then he covered his head with the blankets.

Paula said goodnight and her dad didn't reply. He switched on the little transistor radio he'd had for years and listened to Radio 2 with an earphone as he lay there.

Harry dozed off around one in the morning, but he was rudely awakened around four in the morning by someone trying to push him out the bed.

A bleary-eyed Harry imagined it was his son-in-law, Redvers, for some reason, and swore at the figure jostling him out the bed, and next thing the pensioner knew, the little transistor radio was striking him against the forehead.

Paula rushed into the room and helped her father up off the floor, and he told her Redvers had pushed him out the bed and thrown the radio at him.

"Dad - Redvers is in bed," said a perplexed Paula, "and why would he attack you? You must have had a nightmare".

"If I was twenty years younger, I'd give your fellah a right pasting," Harry rambled.

Paula once again told him that her husband was in bed and had not left the bedroom.

Harry eventually calmed down and wondered if he had indeed dreamed the attacker.

On the following evening, at around 8pm, Harry was sitting on the bed, eating the chocolates his daughter had bought him as he read a paperback, when he saw something moving out the corner of his right eye.

He turned to see what it was but the thing vanished.

Harry continued to read the book and once again saw something in his peripheral vision. This time he pretended he hadn't noticed it and the thing emerged from a dark corner of the bedroom.

Harry slowly turned his eyes towards the thing – and was shocked to see a ghostly silhouette of a person – a shadow – standing near the bedside cabinet.

As Harry wondered what course of action to take, he was struck with a little jar of Vick's vapour rub he’d put on the bedside cabinet; that thing had picked the jar up and slung it at him.

As Harry got up off the bed, the shadow entity flitted sideways into the wall and the pensioner ran from the room and into the lounge, where Paula and Redvers were kissing on a sofa in front of the TV.

Harry stuttered out an incoherent account of the ghostly shadow and Paula looked at her husband with an expression of concern.

The couple went into the spare room where Harry was staying and saw nothing amiss – just the jar of vapour rub on the floor. Harry was that scared when he went to bed that night, he took a poker to his bedroom and slept with it under the pillow.

Nothing happened that night – no ghost appeared – and the next morning, Paula angered her father by suggesting that he should go and see his doctor.

"There's nowt wrong with me!" protested Harry, "You think I'm losing my marbles, but I'm telling you, this house is haunted!"

"Dad, Redvers and I have lived here for two years and we've never seen anything spooky in this house," asserted Paula.

"Are you trying to make out I'm imagining it all?" asked her father.

"You mightn't be well," said Paula, "and tomorrow I'm taking you the doctor's, even if I have to drag you there."

That night, Harry was awakened in the wee small hours by something shaking the bed.

He rubbed his eyes and looked at the clock on the bedside cabinet and saw it was exactly four o'clock.

Then he saw not one, but two ghostly silhouettes come out of the bedroom wall, and this time they had some type of faint luminous aura about them.

Harry saw one of the shadow people in profile for a moment, and could plainly see that the entity was laughing at him.

Harry grabbed the poker under his pillow and swung it at the apparition that was nearest to him, but the poker went through the shadowy being and it smashed the glass cover of the alarm clock.

Harry then felt hands round his throat as the ghost behind him tried to throttle him.

The bedroom door burst open and in came Paula and Redvers, and they saw the shadow people with their own eyes.

"Now do you believe me?" Harry asked in a raspy voice as the spectral hands squeezed his throat, and the ghosts escaped by flitting into the walls.

Paula dragged her wheezing father out of the room and Redvers closed the bedroom door behind him as they all left.

A priest was asked to bless the house but refused to come out, saying ghosts didn’t exist.

Harry's wife returned to him not long afterwards and they moved back into their home on Rock Ferry.

It was noted that the shadowy intruders - whatever they were - only put in an appearance when Harry stayed over, and so he stopped visiting.

Reports of ghostly silhouettes - known as Shadow People - have been reported across the world in recent times and encounters with these baffling beings seem to be on the increase ...

• All Tom Slemen's books and audiobooks are on Amazon.