Story about our house by Tom Slemin: The Brick Wall Inn is a pub that stands on Netherley Road, Tarbock., on the outskirts of Liverpool. It was built in 1940 on the site of the original Inn of the same name, which was built in the 17th century, and although the Inn today still has its own collection of innocuous ghosts (as do most pubs) , the area in which it is set was once the backdrop of a terrifying supernatural mystery. The creature was known as the ‘Tarbock Fiend’, or the ‘Cronton Vampire’ and by many another name as well, but to this day no one knows just exactly what instilled so much fear into the hearts of the people who lived in the countryside surrounding the Brick Wall Inn all those years ago. Around 1838, a group of farmers formed the Farmers Rest Lodge, a friendly society that acted both as a co-operative group and a charity for worthy causes. The lodge met at the Brick Wall Inn, and one blazing July day in 1839, as the farmers converged on the meeting place, two of them came across an injured girl of about 14 years of age, crying inconsolably as she staggered about a cinder track that is now Greensbridge Lane. The girl was clutching her neck which was soaked in blood, and further down the road her frightened horse was seized. The whites of the terrified animal’s eyes could be seen, its nostrils flared and its ears pinned back. It was quivering with fear and bore the marks of what seemed like a knife attack. The farmers tried to ascertain what had happened to the girl and has her sobs died down she gave a garbled description of her attacker. He was much much taller than herself, she said, muscular, and with a mass of unruly black hair and a beard. His nose was large and wide, his mouth contained a row of half rotted fangs. His bulging eyes were crackling with insanity and he looked more like an animal than a human being. He wore a long flowing black cape and a pair of black leather gauntlets, and he had used is gloved hands to try and throttle the girl as he attacked her after jumping out from behind some trees as she rode along the lane. The brute had dragged the girl off her horse and bit into her neck. He ran off when she screamed and managed to wrestle herself out of his clutches and vanish into the nearby woods. The girl was taken to the Brick Wall Inn where her wounds were cleaned and bandaged by a local doctor. The ‘fiend’ was seen mostly at night after that, and despite the attempts of a posse of of armed farmers to track the beastly assailant down, he was never caught. There were reported sightings and attacks of the ‘Tarbock Fiend’ across several manors, and he was sighted in places ranging from the land were Netherley now stands, right up to Cronton, where he was regarded as some kind of vampire. The Fiend then seemed to go into hibernation for many years but returned with a vengeance in the 1840s. At around the time, the cloaked figure of the Victorian bogeyman Spring-Heeled Jack was also seen in various parts of England, and some witnesses confused sightings of the caped fiend with Jack and viceversa. Eventually the fiend of Tarbock once again vanished into obscurity for a time , but then between 1858/59 - years after the initial attacks - a rumour spread throughout an area bounded by Halewood, Tarbock and Knowsley which stated that the dreaded fiend had returned. One stormy night in 1898, a local vagrant barged into the Brick Wall Inn, completely out of breath and in a state of abject terror. He told the pub landlord Jim Ambrose that the devil had chased him across the fields . The tale the tramp told was so frighteningly convincing that the superstitious landlord locked the Inn door and loaded his shotgun. Moments later, something pounded heavily at this door, and a grotesque spine chilling face was spied gazing through a window. People refused to go home from the pub until almost 4.00 o’clock in the morning when the grey light of dawn crept over the manor. Was the visitation no more than the work of a prankster ? Was it all in the mind ? If the attacks were the work of a real vampire, is it possible that the Tarbock Fiend could still be around today.
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 15:00:00 +0000
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