The Ghosts of Walton Jail
by Tom Slemen
Such a place of corporal and capital punishment is bound to have its fair share of ghosts, and what follows is just a small selection of the ghosts and paranormal entities that haunt the eight wings of the prison. In 1979, a 39-year-old prisoner named Mike was suffering from depression, and one night, long after the lights of his cell had been switched out, he lay in his bunk, thinking back over his life and turning over all the events that had led to him taking up a life of crime. He remembered searching the pockets of his own father’s coat as it hung up in the lobby of his home – a tenement flat in the south of Liverpool, and he recalled how, on one occasion, he and a friend had even considered robbing the lead from the roof of a church; they had only been put off the job because of a torrential downpour that lasted for hours. Mike recalled the first time he had forged a cheque and how, when his mother was dying of cancer, he would forge her signature in her pension book and claim her allowance from the post office. Mike’s dark reminiscences ended with him almost in tears as he lay in his bed in his prison cell, with his cellmate fast asleep in the bunk below, in the early hours of the morning. He decided to pray to God – something he hadn’t done since he was an altar boy of twelve. In his mind, Mike said: ‘Lord, I am so sorry for all of the bad things I’ve done over the years. It’s all down to laziness really. I should have found a job and worked for the money I needed instead of taking it from other people. Out of the depths of this horrible darkness and hopelessness I beg you to help me, please Lord.’
And Mike meant what he said, and his throat was choked up with sorrow. He thought of a librarian who had taken a shine to him many years ago; her name was Sally, and she had tried to get him to go straight. She had wanted him to settle down, marry her and become a father, but Mike had stayed out all night, drinking and robbing. The tears came flowing out of the prisoner’s eyes. Now he had three long years to serve, and he just wanted out so he could make a brand new start in life – going straight this time. All of a sudden, a light shone on Mike’s closed eyes, filling his inner visual field with a soft orange radiance – the type of colour you might perceive through closed eyelids when sunbathing on a summer’s day. Mike naturally opened his eyes, startled, and beheld a glare above him, like the blaze of light from a MagLite torch. The light dimmed somewhat, and the prisoner could now see what he could only make out as a translucent globe, about 24 inches in diameter. floating down with the buoyancy of a soap bubble – only this bubble was obviously under the control of some unseen intelligence, for it halted stock still about five feet from the floor, in front of the cell door. Its luminosity died so that the globe looked as if it was a perfectly spherical orange balloon with a light inside of it. At first, Mike felt afraid of the object, but less than a minute after setting eyes on it, he was overcome with a strange warmth and began to feel calm, almost to the point of drowsiness. Then all of a sudden, the faint face of a woman appeared in the ball of orange light. The face smiled at Mike, and in his mind, he heard the voice of this kind-faced stranger say, ‘Don’t be scared Mike.’
Mike can’t remember much more, except that he had the strangest dream when he fell asleep soon after this intriguing encounter. In the dream he was in some sort of library with the woman whose face had appeared in the amber globe, and she was showing him various people’s lives in the form of books which she would take off shelves. She assured Mike that the three years he had to serve would fly over because she’d be with him, at his side, and she would protect him and enlighten him – if that was what he wanted. ‘That’s definitely what I want, it’d be lovely,’ Mike had replied.
When Mike awoke, he had the name Eliesha on his lips. His cellmate Brian asked him what he was talking about, and Mike told him about the dream, expecting Brian to be sceptical, but his cellmate was intrigued. ‘Maybe she’s some sort of angel,’ he said to Mike. Brian had an old Bible which his auntie had given to him, and he had not even bothered to read it, but he opened it at random and handed it to Mike, saying, ‘See if she’s mentioned in there.’
Mike couldn’t find any reference to a female angel named Eliesha – there were prophets named Elijah and Elisha - both males, and certainly not angels. Elisha, incidentally, is a Hebrew name, and means ‘God is salvation’. Mike even knew exactly how to spell the name of the ‘angel’ – and has never found her name in any book – religious or otherwise. The page Brian had opened the Bible at when he handed it to Mike, was the Book of Acts, 12:7 – and it was very fitting indeed, for when Mike read the first words of this book, he got goosepimples. The verse atop of the page said:
And, behold, the Angel of the Lord came upon him, and a light shined into the prison: and he smote Peter on the side, and raised him up, saying “Arise up quickly!” And his chains fell off from his hands…
All of this was a turning point in Mike’s life; it really was a road-to-Damascus event, and as Eliesha promised, the three years sentence sailed by, virtually without any trouble in a prison of over twelve hundred men – many of them violent. The globe was seen a few more times, and on one occasion, Brian, Mike’s cellmate, also saw the apparition. As soon as Mike had completed his sentence, he turned over a new leaf in his life beyond the prison walls. He collected for charities and threw himself into voluntary work. For almost a year he searched for Sally, the librarian who had loved him and had tried so hard to make him see the error of his ways. Mike found her in the end, and they later married.
Many years later, Mike wrote to me to tell me about the luminous globe, and he was very surprised and intrigued to learn that the globe had been seen in many other cells in the prison. None of the other inmates who saw the phosphorescent spheres underwent a change of character for the better (as far as I know), but regarded the spheres as something of a ghostly phenomenon. One inmate saw an orange globe about 3am one morning as he awoke, and he shouted to his cellmate, who awoke and also witnessed the eerie sight of the giant orb floating about in the cell. Seconds later, the globe vanished.
It’s difficult to say what these globes are. They seem non-threatening and beyond the anxiety they sometimes produce by their sudden materialisation, they seem harmless, but just what they are and why they are seen in the prison is unknown, but there are other paranormal entities doing the rounds in HM Prison Liverpool, and some of them are not as innocuous as the glowing orbs. In a particular cell in the late 1980s, two prisoners, Donald and Ray, began to be visited by the ghost of a figure that looked like a Victorian or Edwardian prison warder who would come through the locked door of their cell in the dead of night and pull the men from their bunks and even slap them. Donald was the first victim of this terrifying ghost. One night, just after 'lights out', he heard the click of a warder’s foot studs on the walkway outside the cell door. Donald thought the tap tap of the midnight walker was coming to an adjoining cell, then all of a sudden, he heard the studs walk heavily on the floor of his cell, and sat up in his bed. A man dressed as a prison warder with a huge black handlebar moustache stood there with a faint blue glow around his face and hands. He said nothing, and as Donald realised he was seeing a ghost, he decided he’d duck under the blankets, but an icy hand shot out to his throat and gripped hard, choking him. Donald tried to shout out but was unable to do as his larynx seemed to cave in. Donald’s hands pounded on the forearm leading from the strangling hand, but the grip of the terrifying phantom wouldn’t concede. Just as Donald thought he’d pass out, the figure vanished as it uttered a grunting sound, and Donald gasped for air and fell off his bed onto the floor. He woke up his cellmate Ray, who told him he had suffered a nightmare. But two days later, around 1.30 am, the ghostly warder was once more heard marching heavily down the walkway outside. Ray said he had heard the studs on the figure’s boots walking up the stairs from below earlier on, when Donald had been asleep. Now both men sat up in their beds with a look if dread as the footsteps came nearer and nearer – and then, he came through the secure cell door. This time, he immediately slapped Ray in the face, then pushed Donald to the floor. In the dark cell, the two prisoners tried to fight back, and caused such a disturbance – the living warders were soon in the cell, asking them what was going on. When Donald and Ray told them, the warders told them to get back to sleep.
A week later, the carnate, apparently solid ghost of the warder arrived in the cell again, and this time he was brandishing what looked like a huge riot baton, which he used to strike the walls and the beds of the cell. Donald stood his ground with Ray cowering behind him, and he said, ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, get out of here!’
The figure turned around and walked out the cell – marching through the solid locked door. His studs could be heard walking into the distance. On three more occasions, the sounds of the ghost could be heard walking past the cells and it is said that even the living warders heard the click-click of the antiquated prison warder from a bygone age.
A warder who worked at the prison in the 1940s and 1950s has told me how a shadow entity often darted about the various floors of the prison, and would hang around the so-called Death Cells – used to incarcerate the condemned in their final days, back in the era of capital punishment. This sinister black figure looked just like a three-dimensional shadow, and when the warder once observed the figure at close quarters, he saw that the silhouette seemed to be wearing a hammer-tailed coat and had a distinctive pointed nose and prominent chin. The figure never made a sound, and would sometimes do a strange dance when it knew it was being observed. Just whose ghost the shadow-being is, is currently unknown, but seems to date back to the Victorian era, when prison conditions were much harsher than today, and the mortality rate among prisoners was phenomenally high. Another shadow entity is sometimes seen in a certain row of cells in a particular wing of the prison – the hanging of a man who is seen to kick his legs about as the noose – which usually breaks the neck of the condemned – slowly strangles its victim. This gruesome shadow play may be the re-enactment of any of the sixty-two hangings that have taken place at the prison in the building’s grim history.
* This article is
from Tom Slemen's Haunted Liverpool 18, available from
Amazon.co.uk and
Amazon.com