Haunted Wirral: Driving into the past

This week, another timeslip tale ...

IN July 2010, a 24-year-old leisure and tourism student named Layla was coming out of Threshers (now Welsh's Pharmacy) on Grange Road in West Kirby, when she noticed that all of the traffic passing by looked old-fashioned.

Layla is not very au fait with classic British motor cars but recognised a Ford Anglia because she had seen a photograph of her grandfather's car in his photo album.

Another woman who happened to be walking along the pavement that day was 46-year-old Alison, who lived on Darmond’s Green, just around the corner from Grange Road.

She not only saw the old fashioned vehicles on the road, she also noticed that some of the men walking past had on trilbies and belted raincoats or sported teddy boy style quiffs and colourful jackets and drainpipe trousers. The women wore their hair up in beehives or in bobs with curls on each side of their cheeks and most wore dresses or pencil skirts.

Alison looked at the quaint old cars and backdated people and with an uneasy smile, remarked to Alison: "What's all this?" 

Across the road, people were queuing under a sign that said Crosville.

Moments later, the vehicles were gone and a passing old double-decker bus had vanished and 2010's people and cars had returned in an instant.

Alison and Layla looked at one another, flabbergasted.

Alison said she had felt her ears pop as she came out of the Cosmic News newsagents, and then had started to notice the eerie change in fashion and the vintage cars.

Both women came to the conclusion they had experienced a timeslip.

Grange Road in West Kirby has had quite a few of these slippages in time over the years, if the fascinating accounts supplied to me by Wirral Globe readers are anything to go by.

I have studied the Grange Road timeslips using a battery of synchronized chronometers (built by an electronic hobbyist and software engineer) that can measure intervals of a millionth of a second.

By placing these chronometers in different parts of Grange Road and triggering them simultaneously, I can see from the different readouts that time does not always flow evenly in that area.

Something – which has so far eluded me – seems to be causing time to deviate and its locus appears to be near or even in the Dee Hotel pub.

One of the most fascinating accounts of a timeslip on this road took place in 2011.

George and Gillian – couple in their fifties living on West Kirby's Bridge Road – were constantly having rows. Each threatened the other that they were going to leave. One day the couple sat down and addressed the reasons behind the matrimonial discord.

Gillian told George that he never took her anywhere.

He came home from work, talked about his work, watched TV then went to bed.

Whenever Gillian asked him to take her out, George would say he was tired or come up with some excuse – but now enough was enough.

Gillian assured her husband that unless he changed his ways, she was leaving.

Around this time, George, who worked in the antiques trade, was asked to look at a job lot at a house in Hoylake.

The antiques had all been left behind by an old man who had recently passed away, and in the garage of the deceased man there were two vintage cars in pristine condition: a Humber Super Snipe - which dated from around 1960 - and a 1957 Frazer Nash Continental sports car.

George expressed an interest in the Humber and the widow of the deceased man was so elated at George's evaluation of the antiques (which would net the lady almost £250,000) she gave him the car.

George had the vehicle expertly restored and it was already as good as new. He started to take Gillian out in the vehicle.

The days out in the vintage car saved their marriage.

One day, as the couple were travelling down Grange Road, Gilliam noted that the funeral director’s premises on the corner of Westbourne Road had changed; the sign now read: HJ Whelan – Cabinet Maker and Upholsterer. George also noticed that there was a post office pillar box outside the unknown shop – and he had never seen that pillar box there before.

George pulled over on Westbourne Road, and he and Gillian went to look at the cabinet maker’s shop – but it was Quinns Funeral Directors again.

That post office pillar box had also vanished. "This is bizarre," said George, "the two of us can’t be seeing things."

"It's as if time had gone back;" said Gillian, "maybe there used to be a cabinet maker there." 

What Gillian didn’t know was that there had indeed been such a shop there many years back.

A week later, the couple were returning from a day out and again, as they came down Grange Road, something very strange took place.

Gillian said she just felt like making creamy salmon, leek and potato traybake for dinner, and George said: "There's a fishmonger over there – " and nodded to where T. S. Hughes the fishmonger should have been – but instead there was a shop with the name Frank Watson emblazoned on a sign above the window.

Gillian said it looked like a cake shop. Then the couple saw that the funeral directors was gone again, and in its place was that cabinet maker’s shop.

The pillar box had also returned, and this time, George pulled over on Grange Road. He wound the window down and a schoolboy, wearing a dated uniform and cap, gazed suspiciously at him. "George, drive away," said Gillian, and she seemed very nervous at the way everything around them had changed.

"It looks like the 1950s or 1960s," gasped George, and he went to open the door, but Gillian grabbed his arm and urged him not to go.

Where Nancie Henry the designer clothing store should have been, there was a bank, and as George reluctantly started the car – everything around the vehicle reverted to 2011, and George discovered that the car was parked on the pavement, as modern Grange Road had been narrowed.

George later sold the car, believing it was triggering the slips in time.

•Tom Slemen’s Haunted Liverpool 35 is out now on Amazon.