The Three Women
Just one tale from
In the early summer of 1960, a freelance news photographer named Jason St Michael happened to be at the scene of a fatal car crash near London Road, and, being professional, Jason carried his camera at all times, because he knew opportunity seldom knocks twice. On this day he took several photographs of the crash and sold prints to several newspapers, including the Daily Post and Liverpool Echo. When he was in the darkroom of his apartment on Falkner Street, he noticed something that intrigued him. Among the crowd of people gazing at the crashed car with its dead driver, there were three women, all aged about forty-something, and each of them wore black head-scarves – the ones which were tied in a knot under the chin. All three women looked foreign, sullen-skinned, with prominent aquiline noses. Jason estimated their heights to roughly the same – about six feet tall, which was tall for a woman in those days. Jason looked at another photograph he had taken at an accident at New Brighton fairground the year before, when a girl of twelve fell off a Ferris wheel and was almost killed. There, in that photograph, amongst the crowd of morbid onlookers and sensation-seekers, were the three women in black headscarves.
Intrigued by this coincidence, Jason obtained permission to browse through the photographic archives of the local newspapers, and straight away, he saw the three mysterious women in a picture of an horrendous accident down by the docks, too graphic to be printed in the newspapers, of man crushed to death by stone blocks that had fallen from a wagon. There was a gaggle of bystanders staring at the ghastly scene, and a woman with her young son was amongst them, and this woman had turned her son's face away from the extremely gruesome scene, but standing next to them, clear as day, was those three women in the black headscarves and knee-length light coloured mackintoshes on. Their faces seemed to have slight grins on them, and in this clearer picture, Jason thought they were perhaps sisters, because they did have strong facial similarities to one another.
Jason told a news editor of the local paper about the three women, and the editor said there was nothing mysterious about them. People always gathered round the scene of accidents, and a lot of women wore these so-called Babushka scarves – so what? They weren't the same three women in every photograph – how could they be? The editor asked, and Jason sensed that the editor was superstitious, and was in fact a bit frightened by the pictures of the three women. About a fortnight later, Jason St Michael was taking pictures of tramps at the back of St Luke's Church one sunny afternoon, and was hoping to sell the pictures to a London pictorial magazine that was doing a series on street life of Liverpool, when suddenly, he overheard women passing by talking about a 'big fire on Church Street'. Jason went to Church Street, and as he was hurrying down Bold Street, he saw a towering column of black smoke reaching into the blue sky. From this, he could obviously tell that this fire was a major blaze. Upon reaching Hanover Street, he could see flames and smoke coming from the upper floors of Hendersons, and the fire engines in the street amidst a tangle of red hosepipes. At this point in time, the police hadn't yet cordoned off the street, but as Jason started taking photographs, the police arrived, and started pushing the crowds back away from the scene of the blaze. Jason photographed everything, including the dreadful spectacle of a young woman falling to her death because she was too scared to leap forward to grab the fireman on his ladder. In the middle of all this drama, Jason saw them. Those three women in the black head-scarves, gazing up at the people on the ledge of the burning building. Jason had to get to them to find out just who these three ghouls were. He squeezed through the crowds and eventually reached them. He stood behind the tall eerie-looking women, and as he considered the best angle to photograph them from, all three suddenly turned around to face him at the same time. Close up, their faces looked absolutely weird. They looked like the faces of men covered in heavy layers of make up, and their eyes were bulging, and the colour of these eyes was jet black. The three faces wore expressions of hatred, and Jason got the distinct impression that the trio knew he had cottoned on to them. Jason also sensed that these three women were literally angels of death, and so he backed away into the crowd, fearing for his life. Everyone else was engrossed in the unfolding tragedy of the Hendersons fire, so no one was even aware of the three odd-looking women in their midst. Jason headed towards Paradise Street, and didn't feel safe until he was in the doorway of Coopers.
Three months later, Jason went into Lewis's and got into the elevator with a large group of shoppers, and the elevator attendant said there were too many passengers in the lift, and asked for three people to leave. At this point, Jason received the shock of his life, because there, in the corner, stood those three creepy women in the black scarves with prominent staring black eyes. Jason hurried out the lift immediately, and all of a sudden, the attendant asked two of these women if they would mind vacating the elevator because most of the other passengers were older. Two of the women in the black scarves reluctantly left the elevator, and then the third one left as well, even though the elevator attendant said she didn't have to. Jason felt as if he had prevented those three unlucky women from causing some disaster at Lewis's, and he quickly left the store as they gazed at him with expressions of pure hatred. They followed the photographer along Ranelagh Street, as far as the top of Bold Street, where he lost them in the crowds, but this was not to be the last time Jason saw the sinister women.
In 1962, he was driving along Western Avenue in Speke when he was involved in a head-on collision with a Ford Zodiac. The steering wheel was almost embedded in Jason's chest after the impact, and he crawled from the smashed car as a crowd gathered around. The last thing he saw before he passed out was those three women with the black head-scarves on, gazing down at him as they stood in the crowd of onlookers. When Jason woke up in hospital, a surgeon told him he'd probably imagined the women because he was suffering from severe shock, and thankfully, Jason never saw those three weird-looking women again. Who they were, and why they always seemed to be the first on the scene of any tragedy remains a mystery.
After I had talked about this strange case on the radio one afternoon, the receptionist at the station came into the studio after the broadcast and told me there was a woman on the phone who wanted to talk to me about the three women I had just talked of on air. I took the call immediately and spoke to an elderly woman named Margaret, who now lives in Knotty Ash. Margaret said that many years ago, in the 1970s, she had been walking down a certain street in Liverpool, when she saw something fall in front of her and hit the ground with an explosive sound. It was a human body, and blood and body tissue sprayed her and several vehicles parked nearby. Margaret realised a man had jumped off the nearby block of flats, and had hit the ground with such impact, he was – to use Margaret’s ghastly description – like ‘a huge puddle of ketchup with clothes on top’. Margaret felt faint at seeing the violent death (which turned out to be a suicide), and she staggered towards a parked car which he leaned against. She heard voices to her right, and looked to see three women standing close by, gazing at the splattered corpse on the pavement. They each wore those Babushka scarves, of the type that Sophia Loren was famed for wearing, and they all wore dark funereal type of clothes. But what struck Margaret as noticeably odd, even though she was quite nauseous, were the large protuberant eyes of three women. They seemed to bulge, and all of the eyes were ringed with what looked like heavy eyeliner. Furthermore, the women seemed to be grinning at the gruesome remains of the unfortunate man. A hackney cab pulled up, and the cabby rushed to Margaret’s aid. He ushered her into the back of his cab, then called the police. The same cabby took off his coat and placed it over the corpse, and as he did he too noticed the three women standing nearby, and he thought it strange how they were grinning at the tragic outcome of the suicide. People began to congregate around the smashed and broken body, and when one of these bystanders asked one of the three eerie-looking women what had happened, she said, with an inane grin on her face, ‘He just burst when he hit the ground.’
‘They usually die when their lungs collapse when they fall from that height,’ said another of the morbid trio, craning back her head to look at the uppermost storeys of the block of flats.
‘Or sometimes their spines crack and they die instantly,’ said another one of the morose three, adding: ‘but we saw one girl get up and the back of her head was hanging off, and all the hair was stuck to it, and her brains slid out.’
The bystander who had asked the question and the taxi driver looked at one another disgusted at the grisly descriptions of the three women.
When an ambulance turned up at the scene, just in case the suicide had still been alive, the paramedics seemed to know the weird trio of women, and one of the ambulance men told them to go away.
I also received an email from a man who worked at Lime Street station who had heard my broadcast. He said that in the 1980s a girl had jumped in front of a train at Lime Street and had been dragged some distance to her death, which was almost instantaneous, and three women had approached him on the platform to say they had seen the dead girl’s shoes further down the track. These three women all wore scarves of the type described in the other encounters detailed here – and the railway employee also related to me how these three women had bulging dark-ringed eyes which looked ‘positively menacing’.