Tom Slemen THE HIGHWAY MAN A MAJORITY of the strangest tales sent to me are from night people – citizens who work the ungodly hours while the rest of us are tucked up fast asleep in our beds. Security guards, milkmen, bakery workers on graveyard shifts, postmen of the pre-dawn winter hours, and, dare I say it – even women of the night have occasionally dropped me a line to tell of some paranormal encounter. Crime and the law never sleep, and both patrolling policemen and pilferers on the prowl have seen some spooky things as they go about their respective businesses in the small hours of the morning. One moonlit October night in 1967, a 23-year-old policeman we shall call Stephen was on the Norris Green beat. The time was around 2.40am, and not a soul stirred on Lorenzo Drive as Stephen took measured steps by a bakery as he headed towards Utting Avenue East. He had gone on this same beat many times before, but on this night, the constable felt as if someone’s eyes were upon him – and he was right. On the corner of Wandsworth Road, a man in a ‘type of cape’ trotted silently towards the young copper. He wore a three-cornered hat, and a ’Lone Ranger’ mask across his eyes. He halted, and produced an archaic pistol – a long barrelled flintlock – and pointed it at Stephen’s face. Stephen thought some drunk or nutter from a fancy dress party was trying to spook him, but the man said something unintelligible to the policeman, and it sounded as if it was spoken in some Lancashire brogue. At this point another policeman, named Ken, who worked an adjoining beat, was passing the Territorial Army Centre on nearby Parthenon Drive when he noticed the suspicious scene a few hundred yards down the moonlit road. When he saw the gun pointing at a colleague he blew his whistle and dutifully ran to his associate’s aid. The highwayman ran off and was pursued around the corner onto Broad Lane, where he vanished for a few minutes near a laundry. A third policeman arrived upon the scene and all three policemen saw the weird caped man in the mask running at a phenomenal speed down Richard Kelly Drive, where he somehow gained access to the allotment gardens. The policemen chased the eccentric man and he fired a single shot from his antiquated pistol into the air. Upon reaching a school playing field that was adjacent to the allotments, he was seen to vanish into thin air. The trio of stunned officers wisely decided not to say anything about the creepy incident to their superiors or other colleagues. That ghostly highwayman could be the same one who has been seen on horseback across north Liverpool and Knowsley over the years, and if recent reports are anything to go by, this odd phantom is still being seen in parts of Huyton and Whiston, but why is anyone’s guess. These ghosts often come out the woodwork when an old building is demolished or renovated and, curiously, in 1967, excavations were under way to repair pipes on a triangular-shaped green off Queens Drive West Derby, the foundations to an ancient dwelling were unearthed which dated back to that infamous era of the highwaymen. In my own experience, the month of October seems to see a proliferation of ghosts, and some occultists believe this is because the partition between this world and the next is at its thinnest at this time of the year – as we head towards Halloween…
Posted on: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 21:59:42 +0000
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