Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: Two timeslip tales

I have been looking into some fascinating timeslips across the North West in recent weeks, and here are two of them that took place on Wirral.

We start with Telegraph Road in Heswall. A pensioner named Kenneth told me how, in August 2009, he went into his local butcher’s shop, Derek Massey & Sons on Telegraph Road one afternoon while his wife Barbara went into the boutique next door – Gisele.

As Kenneth was buying some chops, his wife came behind him and said the boutique next door had gone, and in its place, there was a clinic called "Laser" something which did hair removal and rejuvenated skin.

'Gone?' asked a mildly interested Kenneth, 'it was there yesterday.'

A woman standing behind Barbara in the butcher’s said to her: 'Are you talking about the boutique?'

'Yeah, Gisele,' answered Barbara, and the woman said, 'No, it hasn’t gone. I’ve just been in there.'

Kenneth turned to his wife and said: 'I told you – it was there yesterday.'

Barbara went red with embarrassment as other people waiting to be served looked at her and she told her husband, 'Well come and see for yourself then.'

Kenneth paid for the chops and went next door with his wife, and there was Gisele Ladies Boutique. Barbara looked at Jeeps Sandwich Bar next to the boutique and said, ‘That had gone too – that laser beauty clinic place was there too.’

Kenneth gave a concerned look at his wife and asked if she felt okay.

'I didn’t imagine it,' said Barbara, 'it was here!' 

She pointed to the window of the boutique and said, ‘There was a young lady sitting in there at a counter.'

Barbara naturally worried about the strange experience and wondered if the whole thing had been some early symptom of a neurological condition. Kenneth just said the whole thing might have been caused by stress and the couple went home.

A year later Kenneth and Barbara went to live in Neston, but travelled back to Heswall to see their friends in 2019. During the trip, they went to Telegraph Road and there was the clinic Barbara had seen ten years before.

The place was called Revitalaser – a medical skin spa - and it was in the exact place where Gisele Ladies Boutique had been. Revitalaser also occupied the Jeeps Sandwich Bar, as Barbara had described back in 2009. ‘And you had me down as losing my marbles,’ Barbara told her husband.

'It's as if you saw into the future, Barb,' said Kenneth, to which Barbara replied, 'I didn’t just see into the future – I went into the future. I went in this place before it was even here.'

Kenneth read about the timeslip incidents in Wirral via my column and got in touch with me, and I also interviewed Barbara.

The case shows how slippages in time can just occur out of the blue. Barbara had never experienced anything like that timeslip before and she has experienced nothing remotely like it since.

We next move to the location of a much more spectacular timeslip, and we don’t have to move far in space, just a little over three miles north, to a beautiful cottage which is located off Caldy Road, not far from Oxton Hockey Club.

In 1973, the cottage was the home of a successful Wirral businessman named Richard, his schoolteacher wife Jennifer, and their two children, Penny, aged nine, and Robert aged 12.

In September 1973, while Richard and Jennifer were entertaining guests (a couple from Chester), Richard’s young son Robert came bounding down the steps of his home in a very excited state and told his mother and father: 'Something has taken Penny!'

The boy said he had been playing Scrabble in the library upstairs with his sister when they had heard the sound of a wind howling through the room and voices, and then Penny had vanished into thin air.

Richard, his wife Jennifer and the couple from Chester went up to the library and saw books scattered everywhere. On a table, they saw five scrabble tiles that spelled out the word WITCH – and then they all heard Penny shouting “Help!’

‘Penny! Where are you?’ her father shouted as he walked around the library, but he could not see his daughter and his wife held her hands over her face as she slowly realised the bizarre horror of it all.

The couple from Chester walked back and forth as they also tried to get a fix on the location of the missing child. 'Help!' Penny cried again, and it seemed as if the girl could not hear her mother and father’s frantic questions as they asked where she was.

The doorbell downstairs chimed, and Jennifer asked the couple she and her husband had been entertaining to answer it.

They went downstairs and admitted a man named Alastair who said he was an old friend of Richard and Jennifer.

He said he had called on the off chance, hoping to see them, and had a bottle of wine and some flowers for Jennifer. He went upstairs to the library and Richard told him what had happened.

Alastair was known as an eccentric man who had a longstanding interest in the occult, and as Penny's mother said she was calling the police, Alastair said, 'Can everyone just remain quiet? I’ll get a fix on her.'

Jennifer went downstairs with her son Robert to call 999 and Alastair listened to the invisible girl’s cries and moved slowly towards a corner with his hands held out – and he vanished before everyone’s eyes.

Richard heard his daughter cry, 'Uncle Alastair! They won’t let me go!'

The three people in the library then heard babbling voices and someone shouted 'She’s a witch!'

Richard heard his friend shout, 'Release that child! She is not a witch! Release her at once!'

Alastair then appeared on the other side of the library, and holding his hand was Penny, who burst into tears and ran to her father. He took the girl downstairs and sat her on the sofa.

The girl's mother came running across the lounge to her and asked what had happened. Penny was too upset to answer, but Alastair said: 'Three men and an old woman had her; it looked like Tudor times. Something in that library has caused our time to overlap with theirs.'

Richard seemed lost for words and Alastair asked him, 'Where did you get the wood panelling for that library? It isn’t new.'

'They took it from an old hall that was being renovated, why?' Richard told him, hugging Penny.

'Lock the door to that library, Richard,' said Alastair, 'keep it out of bounds, and get rid of that panelling, or this could happen again.'

Until the old oak panelling was removed from the library, strange groans and weird pulsating sounds were heard in the middle of the night, and for years, Penny had nightmares about the incident.

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