Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral column: The scariest apparitions

IN the many years I have been delving into the ghosts of Wirral I have come across some very strange apparitions, and I will detail just three of them in this week’s column.

Let me start with an incident from the summer of 1971.

Terry and Sheila, a couple in their 40s from Upton, were travelling down Barnston Road on their way to a friend's house in Parkgate when Terry had to pull over to let an ambulance with its blue light flashing and twin horns wailing pass by.

As Terry and Sheila looked on, they both saw something very eerie; the ghostly pale forms of a woman in a flowing white dress and a boy flew out the back of the ambulance and floated upwards into the clear blue summer sky.

The woman was holding the hand of the boy and as Terry alternated his glances between Barnston Road and the unearthly spectacle, he saw the airborne figures descend again and fly back into the ambulance.

Sheila kept saying 'Oh my God', over and over, and when the ghostly woman and child seemed to go back into the ambulance, she urged Terry to drive after the emergency vehicle.

Curiosity had gotten the better of Sheila, and although Terry said it would be in bad taste to pursue the ambulance, he too shared some of that curiosity.

A few miles later the ambulance reached Clatterbridge Hospital and Terry and Sheila arrived at the hospital not long afterwards.

They discovered that a mother and her son had been brought into the hospital suffering from the effects of smoke inhalation after a fire had broken out in their home in Irby.

As chance would have it, the sister of the smoke-stricken mother had worked with Sheila several years ago and she told Sheila and Terry that her sister and nephew had actually both died in the ambulance at one point but had been resuscitated by the ambulance men.

Sheila then told her friend that she and Terry had seen the spirits of the woman and her son float out the speeding ambulance, and Sheila’s friend found it hard to believe but Terry assured her that Sheila was telling the truth, for he had seen them too. For thousands of years, occultists dating back to Ancient Egypt have maintained that every person has a “spirit body” stowed away in the flesh and blood body called the astral body which detaches from the tangible body at death or in times of serious illness.

I have a feeling Terry and Sheila saw the astral bodies of the mother and son that day when they both temporarily ‘died’ as their hearts stopped beating.

A very strange entity haunts a house that stands in the vicinity of St Hilary Brow, Wallasey. It seems to date from around 1976 when Hugh, a trainee vet was staying with his cousins at the house.

Hugh awakened one morning at 3am in the guest bedroom at the house and moonlight was streaming through the windows, and Hugh then noticed a mist at the bottom of the bed.

He did not smoke, but it just looked as if a smouldering cigarette had been left at the end of the duvet.

As Hugh sat up in the bed and rubbed his bleary eyes, he saw the smoke slowly condense into the form of a naked woman with a terrifying, demonic face – and this figure of vapour was lying chest down as she slowly crawled over the bed towards him.

At this point, Hugh discovered to his utter horror that he could not move, and the form of the sinister lady became more solid. She seemed to have silvery skin, a head of curly hair, and black eyeballs. She opened her grinning mouth to reveal four fangs. She then pushed herself up from the duvet and moved backwards and forwards with a rocking motion, and Hugh had the awful feeling that this otherworldly creature was getting ready to pounce on him.

Although Hugh was not at all religious, he pictured a cross in his mind and asked for divine help, and he was able to cry out. He threw himself off the bed and he heard the entity crash into the headboard and hiss.

Hugh ran out of the bedroom and on the landing he met his cousin, a man who was fifteen years his senior, and he told him what he had just seen, and Hugh had the impression his cousin knew about the supernatural creature. The cousins went into the bedroom and found a long tear in the pillow that could not be explained.

Hugh slept downstairs for the remainder of that morning in an armchair, holding a poker, just in case the thing returned. He never slept in that house again but many years later in 1987, he heard from another relative that a female guest who had slept in the same bedroom of that house on St Hilary Brow had also encountered a “slithering female figure” that crawled all over her and bit her shoulder after she had awakened in a paralysed state one night.

A fellow investigator of the paranormal tells me that the entity – which is possibly a succubus (a female demon who preys on men as they sleep and draws off their very life force), is still very active.

There is a terrifying and bizarre-looking supernatural entity which haunts a certain flat over a shop on Heswall’s Village Road, just a stone’s throw from the Black Horse pub, and it is very difficult to explain.

In July 2018, Richard and Sara, a couple from New Brighton, stayed over with the owner of the shop and they all went for a drink in the nearby Black Horse, where they watched England play Croatia, and afterwards Richard and Sara returned to the flat above the shop and the owner went to his home. At around 2am, the couple heard a sound outside the window, and thought someone on a ladder might be trying to break in.

The sound stopped and Richard looked out the window and saw nobody. He then opened the window slightly as it was a hot July night and went back to the bed.

He had just settled down in the bed some 5 minutes later when Sara let out scream that left a ringing sound in his ears. Richard jumped up and asked what the matter was, but then Sara didn’t have to tell him, because he saw something dark at the window, and it was a sight which made him think he was dreaming at first.

A large creature, resembling a giant spider, with an ovoid body which was about as big as a rugby ball, was climbing up the window.

It had six legs – two fewer than a spider – but they were about four feet in length.

Richard found himself switching on the bedside lamp and what that light revealed was even scarier: that black oval body was a head with two perfectly round glowing yellow eyes.

‘Close the window!’ Sara screamed, but Richard was too frightened to go near the six-legged abomination and instead he picked up his clothes and shoes and told Sara to do the same, and she did, and they fled from the room. They made a dash to their car and drove the twelve miles home to New Brighton.

Sara looked up at the window over the flat before the car tore off and could see the thing still outside the window. What that creature was remains a mystery.

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