A female ghost that appears on a certain stretch of road in a secluded part of Merseyside is causing quite a stir, because – if all the stories are true – those she waves to die within days. Now, I have checked out quite a few of the supposed victims of the unlucky apparition, and their deaths did take place rather suddenly and in uncannily similar situations. Coincidence can never be ruled out in these cases but I have many comparable cases of what we could term harbingers and Angels of Death in my files. I have mentioned them in the Merseymart in the past and published them in my books. For now I’ll refrain from giving out the location where the baneful ghostly woman is said to be sending passers-by to their graves with a wave.
One sunny May afternoon around 1960, a 26-year-old woman named Nancy Oram went to Mrs McKibbin’s hairdressers on Walton Hall Lane, Kirkdale. Nancy had a date for that evening and, wanting to make a great impression, decided she’d have her hair done. That day as the hairdresser was talking to a waiting customer, Nancy was sitting in the chair, idly gazing at her red locks in the mirror, when a vaguely familiar woman, dressed in a long dark purple robe of some sort, appeared as a reflection. The startling appearance of the woman in the mirror caused Nancy to turn in the chair, but when she looked behind her, all she saw was the hairdresser and the customer. They had seen no one. Nancy slowly recalled how she had seen that same woman when she was a child of nine in her home in West Derby, and on that occasion, the woman in purple had appeared at the foot of her bed at midnight. The next day Nancy’s favourite uncle had died suddenly, and the girl felt the supernatural visitant was an omen of death. Nancy was therefore left very uneasy as she sat in the hairdressers after the ‘vision’ in the mirror. That evening she waited for her date at the Abbey pub on Walton Lane, but he never arrived. On the following day Nancy learned that he had dropped dead from an unsuspected enlarged heart. He was only 28. Nancy immediately remembered the ominous appearance of the lady in purple.
In 1973, a group of children from Knotty Ash and Broadgreen wandered into Childwall one dusky autumn evening. Fuelled by the exploits of the popular Harlem Globetrotters cartoon characters on television, they decided to play basketball in All Saints Churchyard of all places. All of a sudden, there was a loud jumble of sounds from the overgrown field next door to the graveyard. That field, overrun with weeds, is known as “Bloody Acre” – where, according to folklore, something unspeakably terrible happened a long time ago. In 1937, the Council declared that nothing would ever be built on Bloody Acre. A cacophony of unearthly groans filled the air, and a huge silhouette of a winged figure arose from the untamed field. The children said the angel emanated evilness, and it gestured with an outstretched right hand, telling the youngsters to go away, and they were so afraid they rushed out of the churchyard, leaving the basketball behind. What was the apparition that arose from Bloody Acre? Perhaps it was an ancient winged sentry, guarding some long-forgotten secret that lies beneath that mysterious field – or maybe it was one of the fabled Angels of Death, cast down into the earth in antediluvian times. We may know more one day.