Lalaporo
Well-Known Member
Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. Gather around your computer monitor to enjoy the dark and eerie stories from the darkest locations on earth. All of these stories are true and unedited. Turn out your lights, get out your bong, your in for a fright!
- ZOZZABY -
The creepy ghostly clown
At a certain house in Liverpool, the mother of two boys - Thomas and Aaron - telephoned me with a very strange and unsettling story about an unusual apparition which had been seen in her home. One night in December 2002, Thomas, aged 13, and his younger 10-year-old brother Aaron, were sleeping soundly in their bedroom. Thomas was on the top bunk, and Aaron was on the bottom one, and around 3 am, they were awakened by the sounds of someone laughing. Thomas described the laughter as 'echoing'.
The boys sleepily glanced over to the source of the laughter, and got the shock of their lives. A partly transparent figure was standing in the corner, near the door to the bedroom, and he wore a cone-shaped hat and a white ruffled collar with a maroon-coloured one-piece suit. It looked like the ghost of a clown, and he was holding his belly with one hand, and pointing to the boys with he other hand as he rocked back and forth roaring with laughter. His face looked very sinister and grotesque because it was not only plastered with too much make-up, the red painted nose was very long and crooked, and the eyes looked like the round black eye sockets of a skull. Surrounding the ghost was a faint green glow that lit up the room.
The boys trembled as they looked at the weird specter, and they suddenly became aware of a very sweet, sickly aroma which was drifting through the bedroom. Young Aaron started crying and hid his face under the blankets, and Thomas shouted for his mother and father. No one came to his rescue. The laughing clown made a beckoning gesture, and the boys decided to make a run for it. They risked running past the terrifying phantom to get to the door, and as they brushed past him he screamed out laughing even louder. The boys barged into their parent's room in a state of terror and told them about the supernatural intruder in their bedroom. The father and mother went to investigate but found nothing amiss in the room. However, they both detected the stifling sweet aroma that their children had mentioned. The scent gradually faded. The boys were so affected by the experience, they refused to sleep in their bedroom for weeks. At the end of January, a 4-year-old cousin of the boys named Adam stayed at the house. He had not been told about the clown for obvious reasons.
When he arrived at the house, Thomas and Aaron were staying at their grandmother's house, and were not even aware that little Adam was staying at their parent's home. One morning, Adam told his auntie - the mother of Thomas and Aaron - that he had been talking to a 'funny man named Mr Zozzaby'. Adam loved to draw, and he even sketched the man who had allegedly appeared in the bedroom - the same bedroom where Thomas and Aaron had had their terrifying encounter. Adam drew a clown with a big nose. The mystery then deepened, because a man who had lived at the house in the 1950s related a story that reads like a carbon copy of the story told by Thomas and Aaron. He had been sleeping in the bedroom, and his bed was next to his brothers. Both of them had been awakened in the dead of night by a strange echoing laughter, and both brothers had seen a grotesque looking clown in the corner who tried to prevent them from leaving the room.
I looked through the old electoral registers and scanned many old documents in an attempt to throw some light on the mystery, and discovered that in the early 1900s at the very house where the laughing clown puts in a supernatural appearance, there lived a Czechoslovakian circus entertainer named Freddy Zozzaby. The name Zozzaby is derived from the Czech word 'zozabe' - meaning big nose. Fred Zozzaby's trademark as a clown was his naturally overlarge nose.
What did the sweet sickly aroma that invaded the bedroom signify? The person who saw the clown in the 1950s later visited an undertakers when his father died. His father was embalmed and put in an open coffin, and the body smelled exactly the same as that sickly aroma he had smelt a few years before. It was embalming fluid.
-The Girl Who Hated Mirrors-
In May 1999, a 13-year-old girl named Phoebe was sent to see a psychiatrist because of a self-image neurosis. The teenager was evidently developing an aversion to mirrors because she thought she looked ugly. Phoebe would periodically break down in tears in her room because she saw herself as fat and spotty. Her best friend Rachel had tried on numerous occasions to tell her that there was nothing ugly about her and that her figure was stick-like, but Phoebe thought her friend was just trying to make her feel better. Phoebe's mother, Sue, had lost count of the number of times she had found the large ornate-bordered hall mirror with its oval looking glass covered with one of Phoebe's tee shirts. The girl had even taken the heavy mirror down once and put it outside for the garbage men to collect.
Now things had come to a head, so Hiram Davies, a soft-spoken psychologist attempted to assess Phoebe to see why she hated mirrors. Across his desk he posed the question to her. What the girl told him in reply fascinated Davies.
'I don't hate every mirror,' Phoebe said, 'but I used to once when I thought I looked fat. But the mirror in the hall, it hates me.'
'The mirror hates you?' Davies asked.
'Yeah, I bet you think I've lost the plot, but it's true. The mirror has something in it, something real evil.' Phoebe replied, sombre-voiced.
'Why do you think that?' the psychiatrist inquired, scribbling a short note in his pad.
'I just know. I mean, I saw it once. I told my mom but she thought I was nuts.' Phoebe's serious and sharp blue eyes skewered Davies. She looked as if she was reliving the uncanny incident she was describing.
'What did you see?' Davies asked, and he thought it sad that a girl as beautiful and intelligent as Phoebe should have this disorder.
'The glass in the mirror sort of quivered when I touched it. It felt like, like - ' Phoebe contorted her lips in disgust as she searched in desperation for an adequately gross word in her vocabulary. Finally, she said: 'Like a slimy membrane.'
After a pause, Hiram Davies said, 'So you think the mirror is sort of possessed?'
Phoebe glared at him, 'I know this sounds like some far-fetched X Files crap but I swear before God - that mirror is evil.'
'Okay Phoebe, let's think about this.' The psychiatrist tried to calm the girl down, and nodded reassuringly.
'Look, my mom had a breakdown after we got that mirror.' Phoebe said.
'Yes?' the psychiatrist was waiting to see how Phoebe could link the mirror to her mother's breakdown.
'She said she was getting real bad crow's feet and wrinkles all over her face. She started losing her confidence after we got that mirror. Now, in Dad's shaving mirror her face looked okay, but in the hall mirror she looked like a dog.' Phoebe scowled and pointed her index fingers at her eyes, 'Her eyes looked all puffy and red.
'I see,' Davies tapped the top of his pen against his lip. 'Well maybe I should see this mirror,' he suggested.
'Please do,' Phoebe said enthusiastically. She then told Davies how the mirror had eroded the confidence of the other family members: 'Dad started using a hair dye because he thought he was going grey - after looking in the hall mirror. Then he said his hairline was receding. He started wearing a baseball cap, and Dad looked a moron. Then my older brother Jake, he said his ears were growing outwards. Oh yes, and he also started shaving his eyebrows because he thought they were joining in the middle. But he looks okay, it's the mirror. Perhaps I should just smash it.'
'No, don't do that Phobe.' Davies smirked, then flipped through his personal diary. 'I will call over to your place on Friday, at let me see - four o'clock.'
Mr Davies had a word with Phoebe's mother after the assessment interview and told her about the 'evil mirror'. Phoebe's mom was naturally concerned, but Davies assured her that girls and boys in their early teens often developed outlandish fixations and paranoid suspicions, but these psychological anomalies often vanished further on in adolescence. Davies added that he would look call at the house on Friday to look at the accursed mirror, just to make Phoebe face reality. It was worth a try.
Friday afternoon came and Mr Davies called. Phoebe answered, but her parents were not yet home from work. Her brother Jake was upstairs surfing the net.
'This is the mirror.' Phoebe pointed to the ovoid of mercurial silver on the darker side of the hall.
Davies said nothing. He simply walked over and pretended to inspect the looking glass. And he noticed something which unnerved him in the reflection. According to the reflected image, Davies had a lazy eye. His left eye was slightly pointing away at a noticeable angle.
'What's wrong?' Phoebe asked the psychiatrist after noting his concerned expression.
Mr Davies said, 'Nothing.' He rolled his eyes about, closed them, then looked again. Yes, his left eye was not looking straight at the mirror, it was definitely out of synchronization with the other eyeball.
'Touch it.' Phoebe challenged the psychiatrist. 'It feels slimy.'
Davies was surprised to feel a little reluctance in his arm as he slowly reached out to touch the crystal clear surface of the mirror. His fingers touched it, but it just felt like glass; cool and smooth.
'Does it feel slimy?' Phoebe asked, and waited tensely for an answer.
'No.' Davies intoned in a low serious voice, and continued to gaze at the mirror. He saw how obvious his wig looked. He realized how people must have laughed at him because of the toupe. It just looked like the hair of a young man placed on the head of a fifty-year-old. He was obviously fooling no one. Davies was left empty and small by the truthful mirror.
'Don't look Mr Davies!' Phoebe warned the psychiatrist.
'Huh?' Hiram Davies swung his head sideways at the young round worried face.
'It's affected you now hasn't it?' Phoebe said perceptively.
'It's strange. Not exactly flattering - ' Davies stammered.
'I told you. It's evil.' Phoebe said, and she suddenly took a deep breath, then ran upstairs. She returned with a baseball bat.
'Hey, don't - ' Mr Davies realized what the girl had in mind. He would have intervened but didn't want to risk being hit by the bat.
Phoebe slammed the baseball bat into the mirror repeatedly, swing after swing. Silver shards flew everywhere like dangerous confetti, but luckily, neither Phoebe nor the psychiatrist were cut by the flying pieces. The last swing of the bat sent the frame of the looking glass crashing to the carpeted floor.
Jake came running down the stairs after hearing the racket. He stopped halfway down the last flight and saw his sister wielding the bat. He looked at the psychiatrist and in a quite earnest voice he asked, 'Has she gone postal?'
'What's that?' Mr Davies gazed at the wooden backing of the mirror. On the wooden oval-shaped board that the silvered glass had been laid upon was a face. The face of a woman with a sinister smile. The face looked more photographic than a painted portrait, and as Phoebe and Mr Davies watched in frightened disbelief, the face rapidly faded. The psychiatrist picked up the smashed and splintered frame and took a close look. There was just a wood-grain pattern, and not a trace of the mysterious image.
Phoebe's father, Robert, later told Mr Davies and members of a paranormal research group how he had brought the mirror into the house in September 1998. His brother - an interior decorator - had found the mirror in the attic of a house that was being renovated. He gave the mirror to Robert, because he knew his brother liked antiques. The owners of the renovated house knew nothing of the people who had lived there before them, and so, no light was ever thrown upon the mystery of the spooky mirror and the creepy face concealed behind it's looking glass.
The creepy ghostly clown
At a certain house in Liverpool, the mother of two boys - Thomas and Aaron - telephoned me with a very strange and unsettling story about an unusual apparition which had been seen in her home. One night in December 2002, Thomas, aged 13, and his younger 10-year-old brother Aaron, were sleeping soundly in their bedroom. Thomas was on the top bunk, and Aaron was on the bottom one, and around 3 am, they were awakened by the sounds of someone laughing. Thomas described the laughter as 'echoing'.
The boys sleepily glanced over to the source of the laughter, and got the shock of their lives. A partly transparent figure was standing in the corner, near the door to the bedroom, and he wore a cone-shaped hat and a white ruffled collar with a maroon-coloured one-piece suit. It looked like the ghost of a clown, and he was holding his belly with one hand, and pointing to the boys with he other hand as he rocked back and forth roaring with laughter. His face looked very sinister and grotesque because it was not only plastered with too much make-up, the red painted nose was very long and crooked, and the eyes looked like the round black eye sockets of a skull. Surrounding the ghost was a faint green glow that lit up the room.
The boys trembled as they looked at the weird specter, and they suddenly became aware of a very sweet, sickly aroma which was drifting through the bedroom. Young Aaron started crying and hid his face under the blankets, and Thomas shouted for his mother and father. No one came to his rescue. The laughing clown made a beckoning gesture, and the boys decided to make a run for it. They risked running past the terrifying phantom to get to the door, and as they brushed past him he screamed out laughing even louder. The boys barged into their parent's room in a state of terror and told them about the supernatural intruder in their bedroom. The father and mother went to investigate but found nothing amiss in the room. However, they both detected the stifling sweet aroma that their children had mentioned. The scent gradually faded. The boys were so affected by the experience, they refused to sleep in their bedroom for weeks. At the end of January, a 4-year-old cousin of the boys named Adam stayed at the house. He had not been told about the clown for obvious reasons.
When he arrived at the house, Thomas and Aaron were staying at their grandmother's house, and were not even aware that little Adam was staying at their parent's home. One morning, Adam told his auntie - the mother of Thomas and Aaron - that he had been talking to a 'funny man named Mr Zozzaby'. Adam loved to draw, and he even sketched the man who had allegedly appeared in the bedroom - the same bedroom where Thomas and Aaron had had their terrifying encounter. Adam drew a clown with a big nose. The mystery then deepened, because a man who had lived at the house in the 1950s related a story that reads like a carbon copy of the story told by Thomas and Aaron. He had been sleeping in the bedroom, and his bed was next to his brothers. Both of them had been awakened in the dead of night by a strange echoing laughter, and both brothers had seen a grotesque looking clown in the corner who tried to prevent them from leaving the room.
I looked through the old electoral registers and scanned many old documents in an attempt to throw some light on the mystery, and discovered that in the early 1900s at the very house where the laughing clown puts in a supernatural appearance, there lived a Czechoslovakian circus entertainer named Freddy Zozzaby. The name Zozzaby is derived from the Czech word 'zozabe' - meaning big nose. Fred Zozzaby's trademark as a clown was his naturally overlarge nose.
What did the sweet sickly aroma that invaded the bedroom signify? The person who saw the clown in the 1950s later visited an undertakers when his father died. His father was embalmed and put in an open coffin, and the body smelled exactly the same as that sickly aroma he had smelt a few years before. It was embalming fluid.
-The Girl Who Hated Mirrors-
In May 1999, a 13-year-old girl named Phoebe was sent to see a psychiatrist because of a self-image neurosis. The teenager was evidently developing an aversion to mirrors because she thought she looked ugly. Phoebe would periodically break down in tears in her room because she saw herself as fat and spotty. Her best friend Rachel had tried on numerous occasions to tell her that there was nothing ugly about her and that her figure was stick-like, but Phoebe thought her friend was just trying to make her feel better. Phoebe's mother, Sue, had lost count of the number of times she had found the large ornate-bordered hall mirror with its oval looking glass covered with one of Phoebe's tee shirts. The girl had even taken the heavy mirror down once and put it outside for the garbage men to collect.
Now things had come to a head, so Hiram Davies, a soft-spoken psychologist attempted to assess Phoebe to see why she hated mirrors. Across his desk he posed the question to her. What the girl told him in reply fascinated Davies.
'I don't hate every mirror,' Phoebe said, 'but I used to once when I thought I looked fat. But the mirror in the hall, it hates me.'
'The mirror hates you?' Davies asked.
'Yeah, I bet you think I've lost the plot, but it's true. The mirror has something in it, something real evil.' Phoebe replied, sombre-voiced.
'Why do you think that?' the psychiatrist inquired, scribbling a short note in his pad.
'I just know. I mean, I saw it once. I told my mom but she thought I was nuts.' Phoebe's serious and sharp blue eyes skewered Davies. She looked as if she was reliving the uncanny incident she was describing.
'The glass in the mirror sort of quivered when I touched it. It felt like, like - ' Phoebe contorted her lips in disgust as she searched in desperation for an adequately gross word in her vocabulary. Finally, she said: 'Like a slimy membrane.'
After a pause, Hiram Davies said, 'So you think the mirror is sort of possessed?'
Phoebe glared at him, 'I know this sounds like some far-fetched X Files crap but I swear before God - that mirror is evil.'
'Okay Phoebe, let's think about this.' The psychiatrist tried to calm the girl down, and nodded reassuringly.
'Look, my mom had a breakdown after we got that mirror.' Phoebe said.
'Yes?' the psychiatrist was waiting to see how Phoebe could link the mirror to her mother's breakdown.
'She said she was getting real bad crow's feet and wrinkles all over her face. She started losing her confidence after we got that mirror. Now, in Dad's shaving mirror her face looked okay, but in the hall mirror she looked like a dog.' Phoebe scowled and pointed her index fingers at her eyes, 'Her eyes looked all puffy and red.
'I see,' Davies tapped the top of his pen against his lip. 'Well maybe I should see this mirror,' he suggested.
'Please do,' Phoebe said enthusiastically. She then told Davies how the mirror had eroded the confidence of the other family members: 'Dad started using a hair dye because he thought he was going grey - after looking in the hall mirror. Then he said his hairline was receding. He started wearing a baseball cap, and Dad looked a moron. Then my older brother Jake, he said his ears were growing outwards. Oh yes, and he also started shaving his eyebrows because he thought they were joining in the middle. But he looks okay, it's the mirror. Perhaps I should just smash it.'
'No, don't do that Phobe.' Davies smirked, then flipped through his personal diary. 'I will call over to your place on Friday, at let me see - four o'clock.'
Mr Davies had a word with Phoebe's mother after the assessment interview and told her about the 'evil mirror'. Phoebe's mom was naturally concerned, but Davies assured her that girls and boys in their early teens often developed outlandish fixations and paranoid suspicions, but these psychological anomalies often vanished further on in adolescence. Davies added that he would look call at the house on Friday to look at the accursed mirror, just to make Phoebe face reality. It was worth a try.
Friday afternoon came and Mr Davies called. Phoebe answered, but her parents were not yet home from work. Her brother Jake was upstairs surfing the net.
'This is the mirror.' Phoebe pointed to the ovoid of mercurial silver on the darker side of the hall.
Davies said nothing. He simply walked over and pretended to inspect the looking glass. And he noticed something which unnerved him in the reflection. According to the reflected image, Davies had a lazy eye. His left eye was slightly pointing away at a noticeable angle.
'What's wrong?' Phoebe asked the psychiatrist after noting his concerned expression.
Mr Davies said, 'Nothing.' He rolled his eyes about, closed them, then looked again. Yes, his left eye was not looking straight at the mirror, it was definitely out of synchronization with the other eyeball.
'Touch it.' Phoebe challenged the psychiatrist. 'It feels slimy.'
Davies was surprised to feel a little reluctance in his arm as he slowly reached out to touch the crystal clear surface of the mirror. His fingers touched it, but it just felt like glass; cool and smooth.
'Does it feel slimy?' Phoebe asked, and waited tensely for an answer.
'No.' Davies intoned in a low serious voice, and continued to gaze at the mirror. He saw how obvious his wig looked. He realized how people must have laughed at him because of the toupe. It just looked like the hair of a young man placed on the head of a fifty-year-old. He was obviously fooling no one. Davies was left empty and small by the truthful mirror.
'Don't look Mr Davies!' Phoebe warned the psychiatrist.
'Huh?' Hiram Davies swung his head sideways at the young round worried face.
'It's affected you now hasn't it?' Phoebe said perceptively.
'It's strange. Not exactly flattering - ' Davies stammered.
'I told you. It's evil.' Phoebe said, and she suddenly took a deep breath, then ran upstairs. She returned with a baseball bat.
'Hey, don't - ' Mr Davies realized what the girl had in mind. He would have intervened but didn't want to risk being hit by the bat.
Phoebe slammed the baseball bat into the mirror repeatedly, swing after swing. Silver shards flew everywhere like dangerous confetti, but luckily, neither Phoebe nor the psychiatrist were cut by the flying pieces. The last swing of the bat sent the frame of the looking glass crashing to the carpeted floor.
Jake came running down the stairs after hearing the racket. He stopped halfway down the last flight and saw his sister wielding the bat. He looked at the psychiatrist and in a quite earnest voice he asked, 'Has she gone postal?'
'What's that?' Mr Davies gazed at the wooden backing of the mirror. On the wooden oval-shaped board that the silvered glass had been laid upon was a face. The face of a woman with a sinister smile. The face looked more photographic than a painted portrait, and as Phoebe and Mr Davies watched in frightened disbelief, the face rapidly faded. The psychiatrist picked up the smashed and splintered frame and took a close look. There was just a wood-grain pattern, and not a trace of the mysterious image.
Phoebe's father, Robert, later told Mr Davies and members of a paranormal research group how he had brought the mirror into the house in September 1998. His brother - an interior decorator - had found the mirror in the attic of a house that was being renovated. He gave the mirror to Robert, because he knew his brother liked antiques. The owners of the renovated house knew nothing of the people who had lived there before them, and so, no light was ever thrown upon the mystery of the spooky mirror and the creepy face concealed behind it's looking glass.
- THE DEAD LETTER -
The house was empty, now that the mourners had left, and so Anthony and Moira sat before the blazing coals of a fire in the drawing room, each sipping a sherry as they reflected on the life and personality of the deceased woman. Moira told Anthony that if it hadn't been for her mother's constant interfering, she'd still be married to Douglas, and would have had children around her now to comfort her in her hour of need. Alas, Mrs Heath had put such a strain on her daughter's relationship with Douglas, he had divorced her fifteen years ago. Now she was left on the shelf, condemned to live alone for the rest of her life.
Moira was wallowing in self-pity when Anthony suddenly said, 'Look, Moira, that's all water under the bridge now dear. You have to get on with what's left of your life and make an effort to build a future.'
'How can I with so many awful memories? Mother has ruined my life!' Moira started to sniffle.
'Look, I know this might sound a little bizarre, but, I was reading a book on psychology the other day, and the author mentioned this very interesting case -' Anthony was saying, when he was interrupted.
'Not now Anthony,' interposed Moira.
'Wait, please hear me out,' Anthony went on. 'A man blamed his mother for giving him some psychological complex which blighted his life. I think she dressed him in girl's clothes when he was a lad. Anyhow, the psychiatrist told the man to write a letter to his mother asking him why she had given him a complex with her bizarre antics - even though the man's mother was dead.'
Moira seemed puzzled.
'You see, just the act of writing the letter had some sort of therapeutic value to the man, and his complex gradually disappeared.' Anthony explained.
'So, you are suggesting that I should write a letter to my mother?' Moira asked her friend.
Anthony took some time to persuade his bereaved friend to write the letter, but in the end she succumbed, and that evening, she sat at her late mother's Davenport writing desk, pouring her heart out onto the paper. Anthony sealed the letter and 'posted' it inside the Davenport's drawer. He advised Moira to now forget about the letter and to accompany him on a winter break to Scotland. Moira took up the offer. At Guthrie Castle, a week later, Anthony produced a ring and on his bended knee, shocked Moira by proposing. He admitted he had loved her for so many years, and Moira accepted the proposal.
The newly-engaged couple arrived back at the house on Nevill Street, and sometime later, Moira noticed an envelope on the Davenport writing desk in her mother's room. Inscribed upon it in a familiar script, were the words: 'To Moira'.
Moira opened the letter, and almost fainted as she scanned the words. It was a reply to the letter she had written to her late mother. The handwriting was that of her mother's, and so was the acidic, scathing prose. The author of the letter said that Moira was a trollop, and that Anthony had taken advantage of her during a time of crisis so he could marry into her wealth. 'But not over my dead grave!' the letter ended. Then a faint chuckling sound was heard nearby.
Moira ran screaming downstairs and fled to Anthony's house. At first, Moira's fiancé thought the letter from beyond the grave was a joke, but soon saw how deadly serious his fiancée was about the matter. Whenever Anthony visited the house on Nevill Street, supernatural incidents would occur. A glass was hurled at him by something invisible, and on one occasion, when he fell asleep embracing Moira on a sofa, he was awakened by ice-cold hands throttling him. Moira also saw fleeting glimpses of a woman in a long black dress at night in her bedroom, and could even detect the distinct perfume her mother was accustomed to wear. Shattered nerves got the better of Moira and Anthony, and they ended up moving to Birkdale. When the wedding finally took place, not only did a substitute ring had to be used because the wedding band vanished from the best man's pocket, but the interfering ghost of Mrs Heath even put in an appearance. This happened as the priest intoned part of the marriage service that asks: 'If any of you can show just cause why the couple may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else forever hold your peace.'
A loud shriek that seemed to originate in the transept echoed throughout the church. Some of those gathered later said they briefly saw a woman in black, shaking her fist at the couple, seemingly in protest. Fearing repercussions from the interfering ghost, Moira and Anthony subsequently moved to Ormskirk, and were troubled no more.
- THE HELL HOUSE -
In 1900, the master of the house , A Dr Edward Meade, died and left the house to his wayward 18-year-old nephew named Oliver Milton, who was known far and wide as a bounder and a hell raiser. Although he was still a teenager, Oliver had four illegitimate children in Liverpool, Preston, Chester and Northwich. It is recorded that in 1898, when Oliver was just sixteen, he acted as referee to a duel between two farmers at a field outside Cuddington, and was accused of putting a blank in the pistol of the farmer who died. It transpired that Oliver had received a substantial payment to tamper with the pistol, but by then he had returned to his hometown. Then, in 1899, Oliver decided to make a pact with the devil with a group of like-minded friends on Bidston Hill on the Wirral. Upon a sandstone outcrop by Bidston Observatory, Oliver and his companions summoned up Lucifer with a chant they had learned from an old man in Wales who had professed to be a black magician. The sandstone rock on Bidston was said to have been a traditional place for magical rites for over a thousand years, and there are still strange carvings on the rock of a cat-headed Moon goddess and a horse.
According to Oliver, the Devil materialised just after midnight as a man in black with a charming voice. He said that if the young men swore allegiance to him they would all have great careers, and he asked them to show allegiance by raising their arms to salute him with their open palms. This sounds like the black magic sign that Hitler adopted many years later as the Nazi salute.
The man in black then smiled and faded away.
Oliver said weird things then began to happen to him and his friends. They had tremendous runs of luck when gambling, and also became very popular with girls, but there were always reminders of their pact with Satan. One Welsh girl bore one of the boys an illegitimate girl, and when the midwife examined her, the baby had a birthmark on her back which looked exactly like a three-pronged fork. Another of the boys later left the gang and tried to settle down to marry a girl in Wrexham, but when he entered the church for the wedding ceremony, he became violently ill. The girl and the villagers became suspicious, and the priest pushed the teenager into the church and barred his way out, and the boy took a fit and rolled across the floor of the aisle, frothing at the mouth. He then got to his feet and pushed three strong men aside and fled from the church and left Wrexham and the broken-hearted girl who had been his bride-to-be.
Oliver had no intentions to marry, and finally settled in the house left to him by his Uncle Edward. The servants were kept on and Oliver begrudgingly paid them a meagre wage from the fortune his uncle had left him. The teenager gave specific instructions to the staff saying that no one must go into the cellar when he was down there or they would be instantly dismissed. Everyone agreed to this bizarre stipulation except a young maid named Polly, who was a renowned nosey parker. Her curiosity got the better of her one stormy night when Oliver took a lantern down to the cellar and locked himself in. Hearing a strange chant, Polly left her kitchen duties and sneaked down into the cellar and spied on Oliver through a slit in the cellar door. What she saw made her speechless with fear. Oliver was kneeling on the floor and chanting in a weird voice. Then suddenly a tall man in black with a pale childlike face appeared. The figure's eyes seemed to burn with a golden light. Oliver said to the apparition, "I've had it with you. I want no more from you. I reject you Lucifer! Your promises are always hollow and full of snags."
The man in black's face smiled and he said, "You swore allegiance and you're mine forever, mind body and soul."
"No!" shouted Oliver, and he got up off his knees and took a swipe at the man, but his arm went through him. This gave Polly the creeps, and she started to shake.
The stranger in the cellar suddenly said, "I've had enough of your turncoat ways. I'm taking you away tonight!" and the figure vanished, leaving a terrible stench behind. Polly stood on a creaking step as she tried to run up the stairs in the dark. Oliver heard her and unlocked the door. He chased after her and seized the frightened girl on the stairs.
He said, "Polly, did you see what went on down there?"
The girl nodded, and started to sob.
"Please help me Polly. He said he'll take me tonight." said Oliver.
"I can't." said Polly, and she ran upstairs and told the other servants. They were so afraid, they all resigned and left the house in a hurry. The local clergyman was told about Oliver's secret meetings with Satan, and he visited the house on the following morning with two other priests, intending to perform an exorcism. There was no answer at the house, so they got a policeman to gain entry by breaking the door open. Up in the bedroom, everyone could smell something burning. Then the policeman lifted the bedclothes, and there were the charred remains of Oliver Milton. The blackened remains were so small, they looked like a piece of burnt toast. The policeman noted that there was a black powder on the bed sheets and a single blackened foot at the bottom of the mattress, and yet the bedclothes or bed were not even singed. The pathologist surmised that Oliver Milton had been a victim of what is known as spontaneous human combustion, where the body heat of a person rises to such intensity, it is consumed by an intense fire. But Polly knew that wasn't the explanation; she told the police that Lucifer had paid a visit to one of his disciples and taken him from his bed, but the police just sneered at her story.
It is said that within the house where Oliver practised his black arts, terrible screams are still heard and sulphuric smells occasionally rise from the cellar. As recently as 1996, workmen at the house saw the word 'Mammon' being chalked on a wall in the house by an invisible hand. Mammon is mentioned in the Bible as the god of money and greed. One resident who lived in the house of horror with his family said that the foundations of the dwelling seemed to vibrate and give off a groaning sound whenever the bells of the local church rang out on Sundays. A couple from Manchester who lived at the Merseyside house in the late 1960s left the spooky dwelling because each morning when they awoke, they would find that their double bed had been rotated 180 degrees...
The Letter from beyond the grave
In December 1923, the body of 67-year-old Mrs Heath lay in an open coffin in the front parlour of her home in Nevill Street, Southport. Wreaths of evergreens gemmed with roses lay in the hall, and upstairs in the bedroom, Moira, the forty-year-old daughter of the late Mrs Heath, was being comforted by her close lifelong friend Anthony. Moira was so beside herself with sorrow, she couldn't attend the funeral, so Anthony had told the mourners he would stay behind with the grief-stricken lady. When the hearse took the coffin away, Moira and Anthony stood at the bedroom window, watching it turn the corner, past the Coliseum Cinema, and into the depths of a fog, followed by the entourage of cars.
The house was empty, now that the mourners had left, and so Anthony and Moira sat before the blazing coals of a fire in the drawing room, each sipping a sherry as they reflected on the life and personality of the deceased woman. Moira told Anthony that if it hadn't been for her mother's constant interfering, she'd still be married to Douglas, and would have had children around her now to comfort her in her hour of need. Alas, Mrs Heath had put such a strain on her daughter's relationship with Douglas, he had divorced her fifteen years ago. Now she was left on the shelf, condemned to live alone for the rest of her life.
Moira was wallowing in self-pity when Anthony suddenly said, 'Look, Moira, that's all water under the bridge now dear. You have to get on with what's left of your life and make an effort to build a future.'
'How can I with so many awful memories? Mother has ruined my life!' Moira started to sniffle.
'Look, I know this might sound a little bizarre, but, I was reading a book on psychology the other day, and the author mentioned this very interesting case -' Anthony was saying, when he was interrupted.
'Not now Anthony,' interposed Moira.
'Wait, please hear me out,' Anthony went on. 'A man blamed his mother for giving him some psychological complex which blighted his life. I think she dressed him in girl's clothes when he was a lad. Anyhow, the psychiatrist told the man to write a letter to his mother asking him why she had given him a complex with her bizarre antics - even though the man's mother was dead.'
Moira seemed puzzled.
'You see, just the act of writing the letter had some sort of therapeutic value to the man, and his complex gradually disappeared.' Anthony explained.
'So, you are suggesting that I should write a letter to my mother?' Moira asked her friend.
Anthony took some time to persuade his bereaved friend to write the letter, but in the end she succumbed, and that evening, she sat at her late mother's Davenport writing desk, pouring her heart out onto the paper. Anthony sealed the letter and 'posted' it inside the Davenport's drawer. He advised Moira to now forget about the letter and to accompany him on a winter break to Scotland. Moira took up the offer. At Guthrie Castle, a week later, Anthony produced a ring and on his bended knee, shocked Moira by proposing. He admitted he had loved her for so many years, and Moira accepted the proposal.
The newly-engaged couple arrived back at the house on Nevill Street, and sometime later, Moira noticed an envelope on the Davenport writing desk in her mother's room. Inscribed upon it in a familiar script, were the words: 'To Moira'.
Moira opened the letter, and almost fainted as she scanned the words. It was a reply to the letter she had written to her late mother. The handwriting was that of her mother's, and so was the acidic, scathing prose. The author of the letter said that Moira was a trollop, and that Anthony had taken advantage of her during a time of crisis so he could marry into her wealth. 'But not over my dead grave!' the letter ended. Then a faint chuckling sound was heard nearby.
Moira ran screaming downstairs and fled to Anthony's house. At first, Moira's fiancé thought the letter from beyond the grave was a joke, but soon saw how deadly serious his fiancée was about the matter. Whenever Anthony visited the house on Nevill Street, supernatural incidents would occur. A glass was hurled at him by something invisible, and on one occasion, when he fell asleep embracing Moira on a sofa, he was awakened by ice-cold hands throttling him. Moira also saw fleeting glimpses of a woman in a long black dress at night in her bedroom, and could even detect the distinct perfume her mother was accustomed to wear. Shattered nerves got the better of Moira and Anthony, and they ended up moving to Birkdale. When the wedding finally took place, not only did a substitute ring had to be used because the wedding band vanished from the best man's pocket, but the interfering ghost of Mrs Heath even put in an appearance. This happened as the priest intoned part of the marriage service that asks: 'If any of you can show just cause why the couple may not lawfully be married, speak now; or else forever hold your peace.'
A loud shriek that seemed to originate in the transept echoed throughout the church. Some of those gathered later said they briefly saw a woman in black, shaking her fist at the couple, seemingly in protest. Fearing repercussions from the interfering ghost, Moira and Anthony subsequently moved to Ormskirk, and were troubled no more.
In 1900, the master of the house , A Dr Edward Meade, died and left the house to his wayward 18-year-old nephew named Oliver Milton, who was known far and wide as a bounder and a hell raiser. Although he was still a teenager, Oliver had four illegitimate children in Liverpool, Preston, Chester and Northwich. It is recorded that in 1898, when Oliver was just sixteen, he acted as referee to a duel between two farmers at a field outside Cuddington, and was accused of putting a blank in the pistol of the farmer who died. It transpired that Oliver had received a substantial payment to tamper with the pistol, but by then he had returned to his hometown. Then, in 1899, Oliver decided to make a pact with the devil with a group of like-minded friends on Bidston Hill on the Wirral. Upon a sandstone outcrop by Bidston Observatory, Oliver and his companions summoned up Lucifer with a chant they had learned from an old man in Wales who had professed to be a black magician. The sandstone rock on Bidston was said to have been a traditional place for magical rites for over a thousand years, and there are still strange carvings on the rock of a cat-headed Moon goddess and a horse.
According to Oliver, the Devil materialised just after midnight as a man in black with a charming voice. He said that if the young men swore allegiance to him they would all have great careers, and he asked them to show allegiance by raising their arms to salute him with their open palms. This sounds like the black magic sign that Hitler adopted many years later as the Nazi salute.
The man in black then smiled and faded away.
Oliver said weird things then began to happen to him and his friends. They had tremendous runs of luck when gambling, and also became very popular with girls, but there were always reminders of their pact with Satan. One Welsh girl bore one of the boys an illegitimate girl, and when the midwife examined her, the baby had a birthmark on her back which looked exactly like a three-pronged fork. Another of the boys later left the gang and tried to settle down to marry a girl in Wrexham, but when he entered the church for the wedding ceremony, he became violently ill. The girl and the villagers became suspicious, and the priest pushed the teenager into the church and barred his way out, and the boy took a fit and rolled across the floor of the aisle, frothing at the mouth. He then got to his feet and pushed three strong men aside and fled from the church and left Wrexham and the broken-hearted girl who had been his bride-to-be.
Oliver had no intentions to marry, and finally settled in the house left to him by his Uncle Edward. The servants were kept on and Oliver begrudgingly paid them a meagre wage from the fortune his uncle had left him. The teenager gave specific instructions to the staff saying that no one must go into the cellar when he was down there or they would be instantly dismissed. Everyone agreed to this bizarre stipulation except a young maid named Polly, who was a renowned nosey parker. Her curiosity got the better of her one stormy night when Oliver took a lantern down to the cellar and locked himself in. Hearing a strange chant, Polly left her kitchen duties and sneaked down into the cellar and spied on Oliver through a slit in the cellar door. What she saw made her speechless with fear. Oliver was kneeling on the floor and chanting in a weird voice. Then suddenly a tall man in black with a pale childlike face appeared. The figure's eyes seemed to burn with a golden light. Oliver said to the apparition, "I've had it with you. I want no more from you. I reject you Lucifer! Your promises are always hollow and full of snags."
The man in black's face smiled and he said, "You swore allegiance and you're mine forever, mind body and soul."
"No!" shouted Oliver, and he got up off his knees and took a swipe at the man, but his arm went through him. This gave Polly the creeps, and she started to shake.
The stranger in the cellar suddenly said, "I've had enough of your turncoat ways. I'm taking you away tonight!" and the figure vanished, leaving a terrible stench behind. Polly stood on a creaking step as she tried to run up the stairs in the dark. Oliver heard her and unlocked the door. He chased after her and seized the frightened girl on the stairs.
He said, "Polly, did you see what went on down there?"
The girl nodded, and started to sob.
"Please help me Polly. He said he'll take me tonight." said Oliver.
"I can't." said Polly, and she ran upstairs and told the other servants. They were so afraid, they all resigned and left the house in a hurry. The local clergyman was told about Oliver's secret meetings with Satan, and he visited the house on the following morning with two other priests, intending to perform an exorcism. There was no answer at the house, so they got a policeman to gain entry by breaking the door open. Up in the bedroom, everyone could smell something burning. Then the policeman lifted the bedclothes, and there were the charred remains of Oliver Milton. The blackened remains were so small, they looked like a piece of burnt toast. The policeman noted that there was a black powder on the bed sheets and a single blackened foot at the bottom of the mattress, and yet the bedclothes or bed were not even singed. The pathologist surmised that Oliver Milton had been a victim of what is known as spontaneous human combustion, where the body heat of a person rises to such intensity, it is consumed by an intense fire. But Polly knew that wasn't the explanation; she told the police that Lucifer had paid a visit to one of his disciples and taken him from his bed, but the police just sneered at her story.
It is said that within the house where Oliver practised his black arts, terrible screams are still heard and sulphuric smells occasionally rise from the cellar. As recently as 1996, workmen at the house saw the word 'Mammon' being chalked on a wall in the house by an invisible hand. Mammon is mentioned in the Bible as the god of money and greed. One resident who lived in the house of horror with his family said that the foundations of the dwelling seemed to vibrate and give off a groaning sound whenever the bells of the local church rang out on Sundays. A couple from Manchester who lived at the Merseyside house in the late 1960s left the spooky dwelling because each morning when they awoke, they would find that their double bed had been rotated 180 degrees...
Sleep Well Tonight and Remember, Next Time You Here a Creak in The Night, It Might Be For You.