In the 1970s, a group of seven Liverpool University students lodged together at a house on Liverpool's Edge Lane. One evening, one of the students was mooching about up in the attic, when he found an old Edwardian ouija board, and it wasn't long before he and his friends were experimenting with the upturned glass on the board. Their seven index fingers rested on the inverted wine-glass, and, unlike most people who dabble with the ouija board for amusement, the students took what they were doing very seriously. The time was eleven o'clock at night, and a single candle lit the room.
After a few moments, the glass started to move steadily, and the students noted that it was sliding towards the letter 'C'. Then it moved to the letter 'H'. Within thirty seconds the name 'Charlie' had been spelled out. One of the students looked uneasily around the darkened room, and in a sombre voice said, "Hello Charlie". The glass seemed to jolt, as if the force moving it was excited. One of the students, a young man who was rather frightened by the proceedings, got up and walked over to the light switch. He clicked the switch - but the light wouldn't go on. He clicked it again and again, but the light bulb still refused to shine, so the youth had no choice but to rejoin his friends, feeling rather uneasy. There was just one finger remaining on the glass, and as it slid about the board, the other students noted the garbled message it spelt out. It was a person's name, followed by the two words, 'murdered me'. Then came three more words, 'I was hanged'. The students assumed that they were conversing with a spirit from the age of capital punishment, which they knew had ended in the 1960s.
Moments later, another spirit came through, and this spirit was very mischievous, because it initially claimed that it was the deceased uncle of one of the female students, and it even seemed to know all the details about her uncle's life. However, the presence started spelling out obscene words and even claimed the girl would 'die nasty' when she was thirty. The students ended up fleeing from the flat, and as they did so, a shadowy hand appeared in mid-air and pinched the candle's wick, plunging the room into darkness. When they later returned to the room with torches, they found the impressions of tooth-marks in the candle.
When the landlord heard about the ouija's information regarding the spirit, Charlie, and the message about being hanged, he cast his mind back to a mysterious murder that had taken place just a few doors away, at Number 62 Edge Lane, in 1946.
At around ten o'clock on the Saturday night of 2 February 1946, fourteen-year-old Ernest Johnson from Number 13 Watford Road, in Anfield, decided to call upon his cousin Charles Greeney, the eleven-year-old son of Mrs Greeney, a money-lender, and Charles, a plasterer. When Ernest Johnson arrived at Number 62, he found that the front door was open, and all the lights were on in the large, eleven-room house. The place had been ransacked and it was obvious that there had been a break-in.
When Ernest looked in the kitchenette, he found the schoolboy, Charlie Greeney, hanging by his neck from the clothes rack, and he seemed to be dead. Ernest ran out of the house and informed the neighbours next door about the murder. He then rushed just two-hundred yards to a hotel where the dead boy's parents were having their usual Saturday evening drink. The parents returned to the house and the father took Charlie down from the rack and tried to give him a drink to resuscitate him, but it was no use. He was dead.
The value of property that had been taken from the house was valued at six hundred pounds. Expensive clocks, a huge fawn Wilton carpet, brand new suits, fur coats and various other expensive items had been stolen, but the safe in the office where Mrs Greeney carried out her money-lending business was untouched. The family's seven-month-old bull terrier pup was in the yard outside the kitchen where the hanging had taken place, and although the pup barked whenever strangers called, the neighbours said he had not made a sound that night. The only clue to the burglary and murder was a plain Albion van that had been seen parked on Dorothy Street, just around the corner from the house. Chief Superintendent Fothergill wondered if the burglars had been recognised by Charlie, and they had killed him to ensure he remained silent. Or, as another detective suggested, had the burglars broken into the house and found the boy hanging as they were ransacking the place?
Five men were soon arrested for the burglary and four of them were also held on suspicion of murder. A sixth man was arrested in Gibraltar. All four swore they had not killed Charlie Greeney. Two of the men said that when they broke into the house, they saw Charlie apparently standing on a chair in front of a fireplace with his back towards them. He was not moving, and they at first assumed he was deaf, so they proceeded to burgle the other rooms. The inquest proved that Charlie could not have hanged himself and hoisted his own body up on to the clothes rack, but the investigation eventually ground to a frustrating halt.
The four accused men were found not guilty of murder. The judge summed up the strange case by saying, "Although we are not certain that it was an accident, we are not certain that it was not." The hanging of Charles Greeney is therefore still an unsolved mystery.
The seven students who communicated with the spirit of Charlie - who said he had died by being hanged - were from Wiltshire, Leeds and Hull, and they knew nothing of the Greeney murder case of 1946. Was it all coincidence and hysteria, or did the spirit of the deceased schoolboy try to contact the living to identify his murderer?