In late November 2010, four girls – all of them in their early twenties - went out on the town one night and enjoyed the usual dancing and fending off the usual shallow-minded admirers (who always seemed to dance close behind the girls with suggestive body gestures as they held a bottle of Budweiser). The girls ended up in a club on Wood Street, and by 2.30am they decided it was time to go to their homes. The youngest member of the four ladies, 21-year-old Leah, spotted a hackney cab on Hanover Street with a welcoming yellow vacant light on its roof, and she waved and then put her middle fingers in her mouth and emitted an ear-splitting whistle. The cabby drove up to the shivering and giggling girls, and they all poured into the vehicle. Leah was the last in, and she closed the door of the cab behind her, but then someone knocked on the side window. Leah and the girls saw a little female fist rapping at the pane. A beautiful face of a petite blonde peered in with a sorrowful pair of eyes, and she placed the palms of her hands together in a praying gesture. Leah took pity on the girl, who looked as if she was only about seventeen or eighteen, and opened the taxi. ‘We’re going up Smithdown Road,’ Leah told the girl, and asked, ‘are you going that way?’

The young blonde teen nodded enthusiastically and stepped into the taxi with her platform shoe. She wore a scarlet halterneck top and a black miniskirt. Leah moved towards the door so the blonde could sit between her and Leah’s friend, Sophie. Leah closed the door, and the taxi driver said, ‘Where to?’

Screams ripped the air inside the cab. The blonde girl who had just got into the vehicle was changing – before four pairs of astonished and terrified eyes – into something that was not human. The blonde hair turned white and stringy, and what had been an angelic oval face was now a grey, scaly visage with huge black domed insect-like eyes...

The arms and legs of the girl were spindly and dark brown with rows of black bristly hairs, and the torso of the girl looked segmented like the thorax of some bug. The thing turned its grotesque face towards Leah and hissed, spraying her with some putrid, foul smelling droplets that felt icy when they struck her face and shoulders. Leah was so afraid, she wet herself and passed out, and when she came to, she found herself alone in the cab with the doors wide open and several young men looking in at her with curious expressions.

She staggered out the taxi and found her three friends crying together near the doorway to a pub called O’Neils. The taxi driver was trying to calm them down, and a gaggle of young men and women were standing around, some apparently bemused by the sobbing trio.

‘Leah!’ Sophie cried when she spotted her friend walking unsteadily towards her.

‘There! I Told you she’d be okay,’ said the nervous cabdriver, and he escorted Leah to her friends. The four of them walked towards Ranelagh Street, where they boarded another Hackney cab to take them home. They all gave their versions of the creepy incident which had just taken place. Sophie said that after the girl had changed into that ‘thing’, Leah had tried to open the door, but had suffered a fit. The sinister transformed creature then jumped out the cab and ran on all fours up Wood Street, where it somehow managed to crawl under a parked car, and there it remained hidden for a while. Sophie told two passing lads there was a horrible ‘creature’ under the car and the lads naturally assumed the girl was either messing about to attract their attention or had taken some hallucinogenic drug. One of the lads knelt down and looked under the car all the same, then stood up, swore, and said: ‘Hey, there is something under there,’ and he walked away with a stunned expression. He looked back at the car in question, then tried to attract the attention of two bouncers, but at that moment, the spindly entity darted from under the car and ran with a ghastly clicking sound up Wood Street. Sophie, the bouncers, and her two friends (who were now in tears after witnessing the petrifying metamorphosis of the blonde girl) went to look for the insect-like thing, and all saw it run off at an incredible speed into the shadows at the top of Wood Street, but not one of these witnesses could agree as to what they had seen. Some thought the thing was a dog, others said it looked like a large rodent. One separate report that later came my way puts this strange entity on Colquitt Street, which runs across Wood Street, only the two young men who saw it perceived the thing as a giant spider that ran under a parked car.

What’s even more incredible about this incident, is that something almost identical to it happened many years before, again on Hanover Street, and this took place around the 1990s. I am ashamed to say that I have mislaid the original reports. They were lost when I moved my office from 19 Rodney Street. I vaguely recall that the invited girl changed into something unearthly which darted out of the cab, but I don’t think it turned into anything resembling the type of ‘insectoid’ creature that was seen in the 2010 incident. I interviewed Leah and her friends, and they said that cab driver said he thought a dog had got into the cab with them, as he thought he saw something run out of the cab as all of his passengers were screaming. The driver did however, remember the blonde girl knocking on the door of the cab.

I have covered cases of these ‘shapeshifters’ (for better want of a definition) before. I once interviewed a famous comedian who saw a woman who was driving him home transform into a terrifying demonic entity before his eyes as he was travelling along the M62. That entity vanished without a trace when the car came to a halt on the hard shoulder. The full story is documented in one of the Haunted Liverpool books under the title ‘Terror on the M62’.