WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world-famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

Wirral, being a peninsula with three sides to the sea, is bound to have its fair share of baffling briny maritime mysteries ...

The nautical conundrums range from the so-called Leasowe Mermaid supposedly encountered by a sailor named John Robinson in the 18th Century, to the bizarre case of the "ship in the sky" which sailed through clouds as it crossed the skies of Wirral in 1733, bound for Snowden.

The impossible gravity-defying ship was then seen by several farmers and many other witnesses in Peibio, a small town near Holyhead, Anglesey.

Witnesses swore they had not seen a mirage, but a solid, inexplicable ship with sails, and awestruck people could even see the keel of the airborne ship, and what’s more, flocks of flying gulls avoided the vessel as it floated by.

Explanations ranging from UFOs to freak weather conditions have since been proposed to rationalise the ship in the clouds.

Then we come to some strange creatures that have been in the waters around Wirral, ranging from sea serpents to a giant octopus.

In September 1933, a ten-inch-long baby octopus was found at the Marine Lake in New Brighton.

It had been washed up by the high tide and later died before it could be thrown back into the sea – but there have been much bigger octopuses reported on Wirral’s shoreline over the years, and some accounts initially seem to be greatly exaggerated or far-fetched, until we delve a little deeper into them.

A case in point is the strange incident which allegedly occurred on Hoylake’s Stanley Road in 2009.

In August of that year, several early risers walking along the sand dunes and reed beds to the west of Hoylake saw a strange creature ‘ambling about’ on three consecutive mornings.

The creature resembled an octopus but it had a large bird-like beak and moved with a peculiar gait.

It seemed to come from the direction of Hilbre Island, and one birdwatcher observed the unearthly-looking cephalopod with his binoculars and tried to get a picture of it but the creature seemed to burrow into the sands.

It was seen on the Red Rocks on the following morning just before sunrise, and I received many reports of the octopus at BBC Radio Merseyside, and some reports claimed the unknown animal was around 18 feet in height.

I mentioned the reports on the Billy Butler Show, expecting someone knowledgeable about the River Dee's aquatic life to throw some light on the sightings, but instead we got a plethora of calls, emails and letters from Wirral folk who had stories about the oversized octopus going back decades.

The most dramatic call we received on air was from a 39-year-old woman named Laura.

On the Friday morning of August 7, 2009 at 8:30am, Laura was taking her Yorkshire terrier Suki for a walk.

Laura took the dog down Stanley Road, Hoylake and walked along the beach for a quarter of an hour. Suki did not seem her usual self, and kept whining and looking at something which Laura couldn’t see.

Laura decided to leave the beach earlier than usual, as she was worried her dog might be ill from the way it was behaving.

The dog ran back towards the beach as Laura reached the end of Stanley Road, and the animal managed to yank the leash out of Laura’s hand.

When Laura turned, intending to run after the Yorkshire terrier, she came face to face with a living nightmare which left the woman with a nervous tic.

Standing just beyond the barrier at the end of the road was a terrifying 18-foot-tall creature standing on six legs – all straightened tentacles, and it was waving two writhing tentacles and hissing through an enormous and deadly-looking sharp beak that was lined with sharp teeth.

The skin of the gigantic octopus looked greenish, and its enormous pale domed eyes were fixed on little Suki, who was barking and snapping at the unknown creature.

Laura’s natural instinct was to run for her life, but her love for Suki conflicted with that instinct and she ran towards the little dog, scooped it up – and heard the snapping of the eight-limbed monstrosity’s beak close behind her.

Laura ran all the way to her home on Valentia Road, off King’s Gap, and upon seeing her sister outside of her house, broke down and sobbed.

Her sister feared for Laura’s mental health when she heard the story about the "giant octopus", but a neighbour of Laura later said he had also seen something which looked like a "Martian" peeping at him over the sandstone wall of a garden adjoining Stanley Road.

Laura never walked her dog anywhere near Hoylake beach after that morning, and she still wonders just what the thing was that she encountered.

It's probably useless to speculate, but the creature might belong to the Late Cambrian period, over 500 million years ago, when oversized prehistoric octopuses were roaming our shores, but of course, this theory would have to involve timeslips and time travel – the creature Laura and her dog encountered could equally be a surviving creature from prehistoric times (and perhaps that is what the Loch Ness “Monster” is) – or perhaps the bizarre life form is something extraterrestrial.

One man who called me on air when I talked about the uncanny creature was a keen birdwatcher named Ben.

He said he saw a very strange octopus-like animal walking out towards Hilbre Island one morning just before sunrise, and he and a friend went after the thing armed with nothing but flashlights.

Something detached from the silhouetted creature as it fled for the sea, and when Ben reached it he saw it was an old rusted anchor. A maritime expert said the anchor was of the "Rodgers" variety – an anchor that was used in the late 1840s.

Had the creature playfully picked the antique anchor up from the seabed, or had the anchor been embedded in the animal for quite some time?

Like so much surrounding the giant octopus reports, we’ll probably never know.

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