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

This week, tales of the mysterious 'Hat Man' ... 

HE appeared one morning in December 2022 at 2:20am in the bedroom of nine-year-old girl at her home on Leominster Road in Wallasey.

He was well over six feet in height, wore a strange hat (not unlike a cowboy hat) that was turned up at the sides and had red glowing eyes and glistening metallic teeth similar to dental braces.

As soon as the child saw him at her bedside, leaning over her and smiling with those chromium gnashers as his crimson eyes flashed, she screamed and threw herself out of the bed and managed to escape from the bedroom.

She burst into the bedroom of her parents in a terrible state, and after her mother calmed her down, she told them of the tall man in the hat with the glowing eyes and metal teeth.

'You've just had a nightmare love,' the girl’s mother told her, and to prove it, her father went into the bedroom and told her there was no one in there.

The girl flatly refused to return to her room and had to sleep between her mum and dad.

Just after Christmas, the creepy bedroom invader returned around 1am. This time the little girl was still awake, having slyly watched Netflix on her phone.

This time as the door opened and the shadow of the nocturnal creep was thrown onto the wall, the girl hid behind the door, frozen with fear. This was no nightmare – this was real.

'Hellooo,' the abomination said in a low voice, almost singing the word. This time the girl took a sharp intake of breath, and then she let out the best scream she could manage – and the dark figure tried to reach around the door with a hand of unusually long fingers, attempting to grab the child.

The girl's father came out to see what was going on. This time, he saw the tall shadowy figure sprint from the bedroom of the girl and run straight through a solid wall on the landing.

Now the girl was believed.

The girl’s mother called in an Anglican priest to bless the house, suspecting the entity of being some ghost or evil spirit, but thankfully, the night-time menace has not yet returned. What the family on Leominster Road did not know was that the entity visiting their daughter had been seen all over the north-west in recent months, including Liverpool and parts of Cheshire.

In September 2022, a woman reading a book in her bed at her house on St Alban's Road, Prenton, thought she heard a noise outside her bedroom door. It was near midnight and she was alone in the house because her husband was working nights.

The door slowly opened, and there stood a strange-looking man, completely in silhouette because of the unusually strong light behind him.

The woman noticed the faint sounds of people laughing and shouting behind the alarming silhouette, as if some party was being held outside on the landing.

The figure wore a slouch hat – similar to an Australian bush hat – with the brim turned up on either side. Just like the figure that would visit the little girl in Leominster Road, the terrifying visitor had glowing reddish-orange eyes and prominent metallic teeth and was about six foot five or taller.

The woman found she could not move, and she gazed in horror as the shady intruder walked towards the foot of her bed.

He stooped and pulled the duvet off the king sized bed, then started to laugh.

The woman suddenly regained the power to move, and reached out to grab an old alarm clock and threw it at the figure. At that moment he vanished and all of the sounds of the people outside the bedroom came to an abrupt halt.

The woman got up, went downstairs and called her best friend in Moreton. Her friend assured her she had merely had a 'hypnagogic nightmare' – a realistic bad dream caused by a form of sleep paralysis sometimes experienced by a person as they start to nod off.

The woman assured her friend it had not been a nightmare and was only too glad when her husband returned from his late shift. After that night, the woman slept downstairs in an armchair.

There is a group of beings known as the Shadow People in the sphere of the paranormal, and they are being seen across the world at the moment.

They usually appear in the bedroom, often when the 'victim' is dozing off or already asleep (in which case they wake the person, usually by touching them or calling their name).

One particular shadow person that is being seen in increasing numbers is the "Hat Man" – he matches the description of the entities that seem to be currently haunting Wirral’s bedroom.

At a semi on Heswall's Milner Road in November 2022, a couple in their sixties came down with the flu. Both went to bed early – about 8.30pm – and around 10.30pm the couple were startled from their sleep by the bedroom door opening with a bang, as if it had been kicked in.

There was a blaze of blinding light outside on the landing and piping music which reminded the couple of "an old carnival steam organ" (a calliope). As the couple sat bolt upright in bed, scared and confused, they saw a tall figure in a hat come into the room, and he started to wave a sword about.

'We've got no money!' shouted the man, and his wife reached for her mobile phone to call the police, thinking a violent burglar had broken in.

The woman was so scared she dropped the phone, and she looked for the only object she could throw at the weird sword-wielding intruder – a large Yankee Candle her daughter had bought her.

Seeing that his wife was about to throw the object at the trespasser, the husband said, 'No!' fearing she’d merely aggravate him, but his wife launched the candle – and it passed straight through the man in the hat. Seconds afterwards, he seemed to fade away, and all of the music outside on the landing stopped immediately and the light out there dimmed.

The couple told their doctor about the 'ghost' and he assured them it was all a realistic hallucination probably caused by the acrivastine tablets the couple had been taking for their sneezing, but they hadn’t taken the pills that night. And how would two people hallucinate the exact same thing?

I have a feeling we are going to hear more of the mysterious Hat Man...

• All Tom Slemen’s books and audio books are on Amazon.