Tom Slemen’s Haunted Wirral column – ‘Zone of the unknown’

THERE are regions and spots on this earth where strange things have a habit of happening. In medieval times they were known as black spots, a term still used to describe a stretch of road that is notorious for traffic accidents, and across the world there are vast areas called vile vortices that are alleged to be the sites of unexplained disappearances and other mysterious phenomena, the most well known ones being the Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean and the Devil's Sea, an area of the Pacific where an unusually high number of ships and planes have vanished without a trace. Some say there are zones of high strangeness in various parts of the 62 square miles that make up the peninsula of Wirral.

One of these zones of the unknown seems to exist to the south-east of Clatterbridge Hospital and takes the form of an isosceles triangle with the M53 motorway running from its base to its vertex. This stretch of the motorway has two phantom hitch-hikers, is occasionally the origin of an annoying low-frequency hum, as well as being the scene of many timeslips and a UFO hotspot. One September evening in 1980, scores of motorists travelling north along the M53 saw a glowing bluish disc-shaped UFO with a wide, circular base and a domed top, giving it the typical appearance often associated with flying saucers.

The craft was hovering about 150 feet above the motorway. Some motorists and their passengers who got a good look at the strange craft told me that they could see concentric rings of bright greenish-white lights around the base of the craft, and a focused beam of light was shining downward from the centre of the UFO, illuminating the road below. Some found this sight hypnotic.

A few nights before this, many people travelling down the M53 saw a light zig-zagging about in the starry sky over the motorway, and as chance would have it, one of the witnesses was Gerry Marsden, the famous singer-songwriter and musician. A month after this, an October fog rolled over that stretch of the M53 one night, and the female driver of an old Ford Cortina which passed under the Thornton Road flyover found herself seven miles away in Moreton. The woman's car had apparently been teleported across those seven miles in the twinkling of an eye.

I interviewed the woman on the Billy Butler Show and the discussion about her extraordinary experience was seemingly backed up when listeners called in to say they had also had paranormal experiences on the M53, including unaccountable time loss. Another strange phenomenon seen in that area of the M53 are the giant black dogs seen along the motorway - huge dark hounds much bigger than a Great Dane with luminous eyes - and there are also some Big Cats seen there too. A woman in her forties named Patricia had car trouble one night in 2007 and had to pull over on the hard shoulder where the M53 crosses over Brimstage Lane.

She was waiting for her mobile to get a signal when something behind her sniffed her right hand, and for a moment she thought it was a dog's cold wet nose. Patricia turned around and found herself face to face with an animal resembling an enormous black panther. Its ears were flat against its head and the animal was bearing its teeth as if it was ready to pounce.

Patricia was so terrified, she momentarily considered jumping off the bridge onto the embankment of Brimstage Lane to escape, but an approaching car scared the animal away and it ran around Patricia's car, and when the other motorist pulled up because of Patricia's frantic arm waving, the thing had slunk away into the night. These big cats have been seen across Wirral for decades and police even have numerous reports of them on file and take them quite seriously - but the oversized felines are remarkably difficult to capture. For decades, the Surrey Puma was almost regarded as a folkloric joke, but it would seem our country has specific areas where these unexplained beasts roam, and a few of these areas fall within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral.

Another 'zone of the unknown' is to be found in an area that seems to enclosed by a diamond shape which takes in most of Heswall and it has its vertices at Thurstaston Hill, the junction of Barnston Road and Whitehouse Lane, the crossroads of Chester High Road and Raby Park Road, and Heswall Beach. This diamond-shaped area seems to be aligned with sightings of strange coloured lights that have been seen regularly over the years, and some have tried to explain them away as so-called "earthlight" - globes of electrically-charged gas that are energised by the subtle tremors which put pressure on the region's sandstone bedrock, created by the resulting piezoelectricity. The only trouble with this theory is that the effect would be repeatable as a laboratory experiment - and it isn't - and, when some of these coloured lights are seen close up, they are not balls of energy but often solid nuts and bolt craft which some have assumed to be extra-terrestrial in origin.

In 1975, a police car followed one of these lights, which appeared as a blue glowing sphere, along the Chester High Road, and the driver and front seat passenger saw that the light was an ovoid in shape, with a translucent metal which became more solid as the light of the UFO dimmed. After pursuing the craft for just under a mile it made an astonishing right-angled turn and went down The Runnel. The police car could not get near the speeding object, which was flying at treetop level, and it suddenly slanted upwards at a phenomenal velocity until it was a starlike point in the night sky.

A week after this, the same patrol car encountered the same object which carried out the very same manoeuvre and the two policemen decided not to report the incident. Within the Heswall Diamond zone we also have highly annoying very low frequency humming sounds that drive people to distraction and plague some with an acute form of insomnia. I mentioned a Heswall hum on the radio many years ago and a dowser called in and said the maddening sound was some ancient transmitter emanating from special types of stone which dated from the Devonian age found in Scotland.

This claim was ridiculed at the time but it was recently discovered that the recumbent central megalith known as the Altar Stone of Stonehenge was not, as previously thought, from Wales, but from north-east Scotland. This stone, which weighs six metric tons, was somehow transported 465 miles from Scotland to Salisbury Plain over four thousand years ago by a people most assumed to be primitive compared to today's standards. The dowser who claimed the hum being heard in west Wirral was emanating from long-forgotten stones said he and other dowsers had detected 'telluric currents' of energy that were so concentrated, people on one side of a room could detect them as a defined low-pitched sound and people just a few away heard nothing.

This phenomenon ties in well with accounts of couples lying in bed, where one of them hears the hum while the other hears nothing. This happened at a cottage in Heswall in 2017. The husband was told by his wife that he had tinnitus and so he told her to swap places in the bed, and as soon as this was done, the wife heard the persistent humming sound.

The bed was moved two feet towards the wall and only then could the couple sleep in relative silence.

When "The Hum", as the Press called it, was unusually loud across the country in 1977, a Member of Parliament asked the Government to investigate and the head of acoustics at one of our local universities even applied to the Science Research Council for a grant to look into the irritating sound, all to no avail.

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