Supernatural storyteller Tom Slemen brings you three spooky Hallowe’en tales
OVER half a century has passed now, but Violet Lessing can still clearly recall the terrifying Hallowe’en night of 1960 when she had an encounter of the spine-chilling kind on Bidston Hill.
No one believed her story at the time, but my research suggests that Violet was not lying about her ordeal, and she had not been the victim of a sick hoaxer.
As today, Hallowe’en fell on a Monday in October 1960, and for weeks before, 17-year-old Violet had been looking forward to the ball to be held at a friend’s house in Bidston. She left her home in Upton and foolishly decided to take a short-cut across Bidston Hill on her way to the dance, which was being held in Harding Avenue, just a stone’s throw from the hill.
Around this time, a boy that Violet liked, named Tommy Ray, often frequented the hill with his gang, and Violet hoped she might bump into him as she was dressed to the nines in a tight black top and a long, pink silk dress.
She had taken extra care applying her make-up and lipstick, false eyelashes and had even had her hair styled.
Tommy and his gang were nowhere to be seen as Violet walked along at nearly 8pm. But she then saw something which alarmed her. Cut into the exposed rock of Bidston Hill are a series of holes, dating from the early 1760s which were used as bases for flagpoles when the hill was used as a signalling post to tell Liverpool ship-owners that their incoming vessels had been sighted in Liverpool Bay. By starlight Violet saw what looked like an old man struggling to get out of such a hole a few yards ahead and she shouted: “Are you okay? Did you fall down a hole?”
The girl hurried to the old man’s aid, but then she was hit in the face by a clod of wet earth as the man threw up soil and swore in a strange accent. Close up, Violet saw that the man wore a curly wig of the type to be found on the head of a courtroom judge and the clothes the stranger wore were very old fashioned. He wore a long, bluish coat, pale tights below his knees, and buckled shoes.
Realising that the stranger was possibly something supernatural, Violet’s legs went weak. The eerie, outdated man darted towards her as she screamed and dropped her records.
He embraced her and Violet immediately saw his ghastly face close up – decomposing flesh, and eyes that burned like embers of coal. The smell of decay from the zombie-like entity was overpowering, and made Violet feel nauseous. She fainted in his arms as she felt his ice cold mouth kissing her neck and shoulders.
When she came to, she saw Tommy Ray and his friends kneeling around her. She told them who had attacked her, and Tommy and a few gang members said they had seen the bizarrely-dressed man and chased him as far as Bidston windmill, where he seemed to vanish.
Violet was so distressed that she asked to be taken home, but Tommy persuaded her to go to the Hallowe’en dance ball with him and they dated for many years after that night.
Violet’s parents said she had merely been “spooked” by someone dressing up as a ghost on Hallowe’en, even though Violet said that she had seen the apparition climb out of some sort of grave.
Violet seems to have encountered the ghost of a 17th century rake, Satanist and suspected murderer named Richard Tilly who was so wicked that no church would bury him in the consecrated grounds of any cemetery when he died and so he was buried in the unhallowed earth of Bidston Hill.
His ghost has been seen many times on the hill and he seems to have a particular fondness for young ladies.
He was seen as recently as October 2009.
RETIRED Liverpudlian businessman Brian Knox is 67 now and lives in a luxurious villa in the rugged hills of Sierra de Cádiz in southern Spain, where crystal clear night skies allow him to indulge in his lifelong hobby of astronomy.
But it was in Kensington, Liverpool, back in October 1963 when Brian first turned a telescope towards the heavens and caught a glimpse of a mystery that has haunted him for years.
On Hallowe’en 1963, at about 5pm, as Brian’s mother cooked the tea in their home on Saxony Road, her teenage son aimed his telescope at the newly-risen moon.
As he focused on the face of the moon he saw a distinctive black solid figure that sent him running downstairs for his family: the silhouette of what looked like a witch on a broomstick.
Brian’s bemused father refused to budge from his armchair, where he was watching TV, and Mrs Knox refused to leave the kitchen, but Brian’s two younger sisters, Carol and Annie, rushed to the telescope upstairs, and saw that there was indeed a witch hovering over Kensington.
“I’m going to get a better look!” Annie said, then ran downstairs and got on her bike, and with her sister running after her, she pedalled off in the direction of the witch.
When they reached Jubilee Drive they saw a gaggle of people looking and pointing at the moon. Now the sinister silhouette of the witch looked clearer – and nearer. An on-duty policeman said it was obviously a kite cut out to look like a witch by hoaxers, yet there wasn’t a breath of wind that night.
A shopkeeper from Kensington High Street with a pair of binoculars said the figure was definitely that of a woman in an ankle-length dress, but it didn’t look like a broom she was holding on to but a vertical pole of some sort.
All of a sudden, as kids clawed at his overalls, begging to have a look through the binoculars, the silhouetted witch darted away from the moon’s disc, and a wave of “oohs” filled the air as the onlookers watched it move off towards Edge Lane, where it was lost to sight.
From his bedroom window, Brian Knox watched the spooky female outline vanish into the dusk, but his sister Annie was racing after the witch on her bike, and she and several other people claimed that they later saw the figure circle the whitewashed tower of Littlewoods near the Botanic Gardens in Wavertree Park before she vanished for good.
Was it all mere hysteria that night in 1963, or did a bona fide broom-riding witch fly over Liverpool?
Strangely enough, the area of the city where the witch was seen was later the scene of the Kensington Leprechaun mania (which was first documented in the ECHO) – but that, as they say, is another story.
A MOURNING October wind whined through the trees at the gates of the Bluecoat Chambers on School Lane that Hallowe’en afternoon in 1979. The gates and railings were adorned with paintings and prints. Among the gallery of pictures an elderly man in a long, dark, Pomona-green raincoat stood beside five paintings in gold-leaf frames, and he looked every inch the artist with his snow-white van Dyke beard and black beret.
The oil paintings were all priced much higher than the other works on display, and the subject matter of each was some dreary-looking man or woman. One of these portraits was priced at £350 and featured nothing but a dishevelled-looking man in his late 40s or early 50s, set against a funereal black background.
Kathy, a woman in her 30s, dressed in the height of fashion, with diamond earrings and gold necklace, said to her young brother John: “I’ll have that. He looks like me old Uncle Ronnie. Oh, he’s the spit of him, Johnno.”
John produced a bulging wallet, and counted out £350 in crisp new 20s and 10s, but the artist shook his head, and said, “That picture is not for sale, sorry. I forgot to put a ‘sold’ label on it; so sorry.”
Kathy swore, and told the old man she was having it anyway. John snatched the beret off the old man’s head, stuffed the £350 in it and took the picture.
It was put in the living room of their palatial home in Aigburth and Kathy wiped away a tear that night as she surveyed the man’s portrait.
That night the first of the grinding dreams of poverty started. Kathy dreamed she was in Liverpool in what looked like the 1930s. Trams were running in the city, everything looked grey and drab and the poverty was crushing to Kathy’s spirit. She begged for bread and slept on park benches in bitterly cold weather. When she awoke she was glad to find herself in her warm and toasty double bed.
But each night, Kathy would find herself once again as a tramp on the streets of Liverpool in a dream that would last eight hours.
One morning at 3am, Kathy awoke in a sweat and got up to get a glass of water. As she walked across the hallway to the kitchen she looked through the open doorway of the living room and saw a vaguely familiar scruffy-looking man standing next to the painting she had picked up outside the Bluecoat. She realised it was the man in the picture and when she glanced at the framed canvas she saw just a grey silhouette where the subject should have been.
The stranger smiled, then vanished. And then he reappeared in the painting in the wall.
Later that morning, Kathy and her brother returned to Bluecoat Chambers and there was the old man in the beret they had taken the painting from. When Kathy gave the painting back, the man said he’d give her the £350 back but she shook her head and asked who the man had been in that picture. The old artist said he had been a man who had lost everything in the Depression back in the Liverpool of the 1930s. He took his life shortly after finishing the painting.
Kathy had amassed her wealth by lending money and also from the proceeds of criminal activities.
The dreams of poverty ended as soon as she gave that painting back, but it was the start of a descent into poverty, because not long afterwards the country, and the world as a whole, went into recession and Kathy lost everything. She was convinced her downward spiral of bad luck was due to the influence of that accursed portrait.
The picture’s present whereabouts are unknown and Kathy never saw that old man in the beret again.
Try the Tom Slemen ghost walks – www.ghostwalks.org – all profits go to the Freshfield Animals Rescue Centre. Tom Slemen's books are now available for the Amazon Kindle.
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