Ninety-six percent of the Universe is missing. Ninety-six percent of anything is a large percentage; if 96 per cent of the earth’s surface was unknown; we would have nothing but an area slightly smaller than the North American continent; the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and many of the other oceans of the world would be unknown, as well as Africa, Europe, Russia, China, Asia, Australasia and both poles. Surely the Hubble telescope has expanded the cosmological maps? Well it has, but still, 96 percent of the Universe we have discovered through the eye of Hubble cannot be accounted for, and it’s all down to a mysterious substance known as Dark Matter. Scientists know it’s there, for all the equations that form the cornerstone of modern physics state that Dark Matter is there, but no one can find it. Of course, there are many more grand mysteries. This world is less than a speck in the universe, surrounded by the unknown on all sides in a sea of infinite space – and who knows what strange beings are adrift in that black unchartered sea? With this view of the Cosmos, let us consider the following strange story, related to me a few years ago.
In 1970, a 44-year-old woman named Liz left her Walton home on Breck Road after a blazing row with her husband over his constant drinking and gambling. Liz’s borrowed ‘a few bob’ from her mother in Everton so she could pay for lodgings at a rather grim Victorian house on Liverpool 13’s Moscow Drive that was run by an old and rather straight-laced lady named Mrs Creedy. Liz was given the top room in the house, and on the first day in the communal kitchen, Elsie, a woman in her fifties – a victim of domestic violence – couldn’t help but inform Liz about something quite unusual. In a hushed voice Elsie revealed: ‘Mrs Shine used to have your room, but she went off her rocker; said she heard voices whispering about her in the night.’ ‘Voices?’ Liz asked with a concerned look. Elsie nodded, and told her the rest. ‘She told Mrs Creedy the room was haunted but Mrs Creedy said it was news to her after running the place for twenty years. The voices were all in her head, poor thing. They came for her in the end – the men in the white coats, you know – and they took her away because she started sleeping with a big carving knife under her pillow, and then one night I saw her roll up and Echo newspaper, and she lit it and said, “I’ll bleedin’ show them!” and she nearly set fire to her room.’
This account of voices and people going insane started to play on Liz’s mind, and so she went into the parlour and watched an old black and white television set with two other women. Liz recalled the programme she watched that evening was a comedy called Inside George Webley, which starred Roy Kinnear.
That night, Liz relaxed into the old palliasse and pulled the thin sheets over her on the bed in her room, that first night away from home. She thought about her 5-year-old girl Sandra, now staying with her gran for a while till Liz could get a decent place. Liz gazed pensively at the moon beyond the net curtains, shining over the rooftops of Stoneycroft, and she drifted off into the carefree world of sleep – but not for long. Strange sounds woke her up. Raspy whispers, like two old crotchety men talking in the distance somewhere. ‘I could easily kill her!’ said one voice, and Liz shuddered as she recalled the voices that had sent Mrs Shine insane. ‘Not yet!’ said a harsh higher-pitched voice that seemed to come from a buzzing throat. ‘We’ll both kill her!’ the other eerie speaker said with enthusiasm.
Liz sat bolt upright and looked to her right, to the source of the sounds, expecting to see two wicked old men at side of the bed, but instead she saw something both surreal and spine-chilling. Two bizarre-looking winged creatures, each just bigger than Liz’s thumb, were standing on the bedcover, and these entities had a pair of human-like legs and two arms with tiny hands, but their heads looked grotesque. The noses of the creatures were pointed, and their eyes were black twinkling beads. The backsides of the beings tapered like the body of a wasp and ended in a huge needle – a stinger perhaps. One of the winged horrors was red and the other was a metallic purple, and the red creature flew forward and pierced Liz’s lower lip with its nose. Liz fell backwards onto the floor, picked up her shoe, then swatted the red “fly” with it. The impact sent a dark-coloured liquid spurting from the weird insect onto the blanket. The injured creature made a high-pitched buzzing sound as its wings and little limbs shuddered. Liz ran out of the room screaming and woke up the entire lodging house. When Mrs Creedy asked what the matter was, Liz could hardly get her words out straight. She sat in the kitchen downstairs as Elsie made her a cup of tea, and Mrs Creedy calmed down her lodger by saying she’d had a nightmare. Liz refused to go back into the room until it was light, and the beings were nowhere to be seen, but on the candy-striped blanket and pillowcase, Liz saw green stains – no doubt the “blood” of the thing she had swatted with her shoe.
Liz went home in a dreadful state that day, and as soon as her drunken husband opened the door, he looked her up and down with a sneer, and was about to say something derogatory, when Liz punched him in the jaw, knocking him clean out. He changed for the better after that. This account dovetails with some very similar accounts that I researched and published in Haunted Liverpool 15 under the chapter “The Purple Fly Encounters”. Within that chapter I documented encounters with what seemed to be an unknown species of overgrown dragonfly, coloured Tyrian purple, which had two human-like arms and legs, and a face with a pointed snout set on a globular head. The eyes of these flies were always described as diamond-like – exactly how the eyes of the sinister insects were described by Liz in her 1970 encounter. After the publication of Haunted Liverpool 15 I was contacted by people from all walks of life who believed that they too had encountered these strange flies, and one particular hotspot where the creatures seemed to gather was in Childwall, especially on the island in the middle of the Fiveways Roundabout. Whether these beings hail from another planet in this boundless universe or from some parallel dimension is still unanswered.