Tom Slemen's Haunted Wirral: The Landican Lane timewarp

SMARTPHONES, genetic engineering, taser stun guns, self-driving cars, robots and space travel were things that were once only found in science fiction books, but today are commonplace.

Since 2015, when time-distorting gravity waves were first directly observed, timewarps have also transitioned from the realm of speculative fiction to an area of serious scientific inquiry, with researchers exploring the theoretical foundations and potential applications of manipulating space-time.

Huge laser interferometers are now regularly used to measure massive ripples in the space-time fabric of our world caused by gravity waves that are 'just passing through'.

These waves would have shocked the physicists of just 25 years ago because they show that time and space can be stretched and contracted, and if scientists can modulate those waves and control them in the same way they now control radio waves, they could possibly send messages backwards into time and ultimately they might be able to create physical passageways to other times.

Nature is often already doing the things scientists are striving for; the wings of birds inspired the aerodynamics of planes, burdock burrs gave an inventor the idea for Velcro and Japanese scientists even designed a bullet train based on the shape of the Kingfisher Bird’s beak.

The list goes on, and it seems that nature may also, under certain meteorological conditions, be able to create ‘holes’ in time.

In Liverpool, the capital of time slips is Bold Street and in Birkenhead I have noted an intriguing concentration of slippages in time in the Grange Road area.

Another area of the earth’s surface where time seems liable to change at any given moment is quite close to the bridle path on Landican Lane, just around the corner from Little Storeton Lane.

In the summer of 1951, a newly-wed Prenton schoolteacher named Leonard took his wife for a spin in their new car and whilst driving along Landican Lane, the couple noticed something quite odd; about 800 feet to the west there was a huge bridge which had not been there earlier.

Leonard pulled the car over and he and his wife left the vehicle on this blazing June day and walked along the public footpath until they reached the mysterious concrete bridge over a vast motorway – the M53 motorway that would not be built for almost another twenty years.

As the couple looked down at the motorway - at the futuristic-looking cars hurtling past - they both heard an echoing, low frequency rhythmic sound that became louder, making the bodies of the teacher and his wife vibrate.

Sensing something bad was going to happen, the couple left the bridge in a hurry and went back across the field via the footpath.

They drove home to Prenton and asked everyone they knew about the bridge and the massive road but no one knew what they were talking about. Leonard drove back to Landican Lane with his wife, who brought along her old Kodak Brownie camera – but alas, the concrete bridge and the motorway had evaporated into thin air without leaving a trace.

The couple regarded the incident as a supernatural occurrence but I think it is highly likely that the whole thing was a timeslip, and there have been so many in that area.

In August 1978 a 50-year-old man named Norman left his home in Higher Bebington and drove down his cousin Jimmy’s home near Red Hill Road.

Jimmy was out, so Norman, mindful of his doctor’s recent advice to do more walking, left his car parked outside his cousin’s home and went for a ramble on such a lovely day.

The paranormal was the furthest thing from Norman’s mind as he strolled some five hundred yards up Landican Lane, but the Higher Bebington man suddenly noticed how everything went deadly quiet as he reached the signpost of the bridle path on the lane.

The birds stopped singing and the low rumble of a passenger jet somewhere in the blue sky stopped abruptly. Norman then heard a pulsing low frequency sound that seemed to be coming from the field to his left. He turned in the direction of the sound and walked a few feet forward and received quite a shock because he walked into a soft, invisible barrier. Norman could feet the unseen wall – it felt like foam rubber and he walked sideways, feeling the invisible obstruction with his palms.

He then heard what sounded like a jumble of distressed voices crying and shouting but he could not understand the language he was hearing. Some of the words sounded Welsh.

Then Norman saw an object appear about twenty feet away in the field beyond the public footpath signpost; it looked like a bubble, about 15 feet in diameter, and inside of it was a crowd of about twenty-five to thirty people all crushed together.

These people were wearing what Norman perceived as medieval-looking attire and were the source of the desperate shouts – possibly for help – that Norman had heard less than a minute before.

As Norman looked on, the bubble containing the people contracted, squeezing them, and then a second, much larger semi-transparent bubble became visible, only it was more ovoid in shape, and this surrounded the one where the people were apparently being squeezed.

Norman felt helpless; he could not even get near to the two bubbles because of the invisible barrier. He wanted to help whoever those outdated-looking people were but it was impossible to get near them.

Norman heard a car coming down Landican Lane and he turned and waved at the driver, who happened to be a woman in her thirties. She pulled over and she was already looking at the weird spectacle.

'Something very strange is happening here!' Norman said, unable to put into words what was happening but the lady, with a look of utter astonishment on her face, got out of her car and said, 'Yes, I can see that.'

She then threw her hands to her face in horrified shock as the bubble with the people in steadily became smaller and Norman heard dreadful screams that came to a sudden halt.

The bubble contracted to around the size of a football, turned blood red, and then vanished.

Norman went back to the spot where he had felt the invisible barrier and tried to feel for the strange partition with his palms but it had gone. Without turning, he said, 'There was like an invisible wall here which I couldn’t get past.'

There was a thud behind Norman.

The lady was back in her car. She started the vehicle and sped off, perhaps spooked by the bizarre incident.

In 2010, I had numerous reports of a Spitfire flying low over that field adjacent to Landican Lane, and many witnesses saw the plane vanish and reappear in the sky and so most believed the Spitfire to be a ‘ghost plane’ – but I think there is something wrong with time in that part of Wirral – some weakness in the very fabric of time-space in that field in the vicinity of the public footpath. If you visit the area, please be very careful; you may find yourself stepping into another era.

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