Ghosts certainly make life interesting

Oct 31 2007 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

As the spooks come out for Halloween, Emma Pinch gets a tour of haunted Liverpool

IT WAS a day that Mary McNamara would never forget. Clip-clopping to church in a carriage with her father at her side, passers-by craned their necks to get a glimpse of the blushing bride.

The pair barely saw the brewer’s cart coming. In a smash of wild-eyed horses, tangled carriages and ripped flesh, Mary died, the name of her fiancé on her lips.

Years afterwards, passers-by still turn towards the rumble of a wedding carriage on its way to St Luke’s, only for it to vanish suddenly at the traffic lights on Duke Street.

If the love-lorn Mary McNamara refuses to lie down and play dead, she’s at least in good company.

In history-rich Liverpool, there are spooks to be found on almost every corner, according to experts on the subject.

Billy Roberts’s new book, Spooky Liverpool – The Capital of Haunting, chronicles the city’s most notorious ghostly sites and sightings.

“The whole of Liverpool being steeped in history, as a medium I’m always going to experience something,” says the paranormal investigator.

“But there are some parts of the city where a lot of different stories of paranormal events have happened.”

Billy, a self-proclaimed sceptic, has had first-hand experience with some of Liverpool’s most prominent apparitions.

His introduction to one of Liverpool’s most haunted districts, Rodney Street, came when he moved into offices at number 24.

There he saw furniture and ornaments regularly move around, and when he learned the history of some mysterious scratchings on the window, the ghostly goings-on made sense.

“A wealthy merchant lived there in the 1800s who had a couple of young daughters, one of them 17,” he explains.

“The merchant’s wife did a lot of charity work and one Christmas came home with one of the charity workers, a dashing young guy from London, who had been working with her. Immed- iately, the young daughter was smitten by him. They were engaged in a short space of time, against her parents’ wishes.”

But tragedy struck when he went on a trip to France and was killed in a freak accident.

“She had scratched a heart on the window with her diamond ring and put her name, Nellie, and that she loved him,” continues Billy. “She went into a decline fretting for him and six months later died of a broken heart.

“When her mother went into her room she saw another heart, with the guy’s name in it. She knew her daughter hadn’t done it and it hadn’t been there before she died.

“I was in the offices from 1982-83 and I saw both of them. A few people claim to have seen a young woman with flaxen hair, and I experienced her a few times. Once, when I was closing up, I heard music coming from an adjacent blue room. It was very cold and we saw shadowy figures moving round and a trio playing music.”

Billy says he grew up with a spirit guide, a native American Indian named Tall Pines, who helps him commune with the departed.

He claims there are several types of apparition. The first is a tormented spirit, one which refuses to accept the fact that they have died or they’ve died in tragic circumstances and remain in the location they are used to.

The second type is electromagnetic imprints in the atmosphere, forming images which are “like watching an old movie,” he explains.

He says an unaccountable dislike of a place or property is often down to the presence of unhappy spirits which are in limbo there.

“The happiness and sadness a house has seen makes the personality of a house.

“Women more than men will go into an old house and he might say I like this house, it’s nice and warm, and a woman would find it cold and unhappy. People create atmosphere.

“After a traumatically long illness, the misery and sadness at the end of a life goes out like a rocket and leaves a psychic image, and on the day he or she died you might see them walking through a wall.”

But hunting for ghosts, for example in arranged ghost tours, is unlikely to bring about a close encounter of the spirit kind, he says.

“You are more likely to see a ghost by yourself. There is a very low percentage of sightings by people in a group because you are not frightened. In a group, your mind is not equipped to see anything. Genuine sightings happen spontaneously and are across the corner of the eye, often when you are reading a book or watching a film. If you are looking for it, it doesn’t happen.”

He says ghosts often have a solid, tangible presence and it can be difficult to distinguish them as apparitions.

“Just because it seems bizarre to you, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen,” he says.

“You can walk through town on Saturday afternoon and in the sea of faces coming towards you, you don’t know who is real and who is not real. Ghosts can manifest themselves so they look real.

“For me, ghosts are quite solid and substantial. I’ve shaken hands with one of them. It was cold and clammy but quite solid. Then it just disintegrated in my hands. That was an unusual experience.”

Some ghosts can even be violent. Billy says he has been lifted up two inches in the air and thrown against the wall in 1990 at what was the Palace Hotel in Birkdale. A poltergeist – whose presence came with the smell of rotting cabbage – kept driving owners away.

But whether his spectral pals are scary or amiable Billy has resigned himself, in the words of Haley Joel Osment, to seeing dead people.

“I grew up with the fact of seeing them. I thought it was the same for all children. When I was nine or so I was sent to a child psychologist for assessment. She said I would grow out of it in time – I didn’t.

“It would be silly to say I’m not afraid, because I am,” he says. “But it certainly makes life interesting.”

SPOOKY Liverpool, by Billy Roberts, is published by Trinity Mirror North West & North Wales price £9.99. It is available in all good bookshops or online at www.merseyshop.com

YOU CAN also see Billy Roberts talking about Spooky Liverpool by visiting our website. Log on at www.billyroberts.merseyblogs.co.uk/)

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