by Tom Slemen
In the Northern Hospital that evening, Susan's husband Ralph was lying in a bed, drifting in and out of a comatose state with a blood clot on his brain. The doctors had told Susan that he was in a critical condition and there was a high probability that he would not pull through. It had already been explained to her that brain surgery would be far too risky in Ralph's weakened condition.
At home, Susan fastened the top and bottom bolts of the front door, and locked her back door. Not only was she totally distraught about her husband's grave condition, but also deeply troubled about the meeting with Raymond, after all those years. She also wondered if the eerie Raymond had somehow followed her home. She took an old Bible up to the bedroom and sat up in bed, listening to the radio. She reached for the old Bible and opened it at random. She scanned a passage about the transfiguration of Christ, and for some reason it made her think about Raymond. With shame, she recalled the strange, unearthly sensations she had experienced when she was in the bed with him all those years ago, and of that mysterious word he spoke - prana.
At almost three in the morning, Susan drifted into a fitful sleep that was haunted by dreams of Raymond. At eight o'clock the bell of the alarm clock sounded, and she swung her legs out of the bed like an automaton, with her eyelids still stuck together. With a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach, she went downstairs to the hall, still in her nightdress, and telephoned the hospital. She feared the worst and dreaded to hear what they would say about her husband's condition. She was in for a massive shock. The sister on duty said that she had some very good news. Ralph was no longer on the critical list; in fact, he was sitting up in bed, eating a hearty breakfast and laughing and joking with all the nurses. He had made a recovery that was nothing short of miraculous.
Susan was dressed and ready within half an hour of hearing this wonderful news and was soon riding in a cab to the hospital. Bursting with excitement, she rushed into the room where Ralph had lain at the gates of death for almost a month ... and found the bed empty. The other bed in that room, in which a young man had been recovering from a spinal injury, was also vacant. Then she heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor to her right. It was Ralph, walking along with a nurse on either side of him, supporting him as he walked along. When he saw Susan he stopped in his tracks, and she ran to him with tears welling in her eyes. She hugged him so tightly, and he kept saying, "There, there, love," as he patted her on the back.
The nurses seemed to be just as overjoyed as they were - such miraculous recoveries happened so rarely. They showed Susan and Ralph into the two-bed ward, then left to give them some privacy. Ralph told Susan a tale that made her stomach somersault. He said that a "funny-looking man" had come into his room some time after midnight. He had walked over to Pete - the young man who was lying asleep in the other bed - and had placed his hands on the young man's chest. Ralph had been barely conscious, and the whole thing had a dream-like quality. The man - who was dressed in black - then came over to Ralph's bed and placed his palms on his chest. The intense heat from the stranger's hands penetrated right through his pyjamas, and his vest, straight into his heart. Ralph felt his entire body tingling, as if he had been plugged into the electricity mains. The man then assured Ralph that he would get better soon, then left the room in absolute silence - just like a ghost. At six o'clock in the morning, Ralph opened his eyes, feeling like a new man. He sat up, stretched and yawned, and found a Catholic priest, a doctor and three relatives surrounding the bed of the man opposite, who was obviously dying. The priest was administering the Last Rites of the Roman Catholic Church, and Pete died soon afterwards.
"You don't believe me, do you?" Ralph said to Susan, who was staring at the single red rose, backed with a stem of maidenhead fern, lying on the bedside cabinet.
She knew exactly what had happened. Raymond - or whatever his real name was - had siphoned off the life of the young man in the other bed, and had infused that life into Ralph. Why had he done this? Susan still doesn't have any answers to this question.
Before Susan left Woolton Hall that stormy night, she told me that she was convinced that Mr Sphinx was still around.
"He will probably visit you if you put him in one of your books," she told me. She then bade me goodnight, and a hackney cab took her off into the night.
The Brownlow Hill Vampire
I first read about the basic details of the following creepy story from an article by the world-renowned criminologist and folklore historian historian Richard Whittington-Egan, and it led me on to research the story in much more depth. Whittington-Egan mentioned a bookseller's house on Liverpool's Brownlow Hill which was haunted by an entity, and tin researching the background to his story, I discovered that the so-called haunting, believed to have been the work of a poltergeist, had a much more sinister history. This is what I unearthed with my delvings.
In the 1930s, a family at a house on the corner of Brownlow Hill and Trowbridge Street, were troubled by what they assumed to be rats in their cellar. The Williams family heard a loud scratching sound coming from the cellar on many occasions, and so rat catchers were brought in but caught nothing.
One afternoon, there was a loud crash in the cellar, and when Mr Williams went to investigate, he found a huge gaping hole in the cellar wall, and a pile of crumbled old bricks below it. He summoned his brother, and they both peered into the hole with candles. What they saw amazed them. The hole led to what seemed to be a series of catacombs and tunnels. The Williams brothers knew nothing of the so-called Mole of Edge Hill, and naturally wondered who had constructed the tunnels. They heard the sound of someone breathing heavily nearby, and the faint sounds of footsteps. It sounded like someone large and heavy, and the brothers felt very uneasy, so they left the tunnel, and bolted back in to the cellar. During this time, both men could smell something very similar to altar incense wafting from the tunnels.
The brothers ran upstairs and locked the cellar door, and told a policeman, who went to investigate the tunnels later that day with his bull's eye lantern. After a brief exploration of the subterranean passages, the constable returned shortly afterwards, white as a sheet. He told Mr Williams that subsidence was to blame, and that the so-called catacombs were just cellars. He advised him to get the hole bricked up again and left sharpishly. Two relatives were bricklayers, so Mr Williams arranged for them to do the job, but halfway through the bricking up, the men heard strange sounds from the tunnels. They continued bricking up the hole as fast as possible, when' suddenly, something very powerful punched through the newly set bricks, scattering them everywhere. The bricklayers fled from that cellar as fast as their legs could carry them, and refused to go back, even to retrieve their work tools.
Mrs Williams refused to stay in the house alone when her husband went to work, because she thought she had seen a very tall man in black dart across the hall one day towards the cellar. Matters took a sensational when an old man in Trowbridge Street claimed that an old vampire was said to have his lair beneath Brownlow Hill. The man was much respected in the neighbourhood and was regarded as a very wise person. He said he remembered people who had gone missing from the Liverpool Workhouse which stood on Brownlow Hill in Victorian times. A 'thing' was said to come from under a slab in the bowels of the workhouse to seize women and children.
Strangely enough, a man who ran Collin's Bookshop on Brownlow Hill confirmed that there had indeed been such a legend. Some said the thing was a ghoul, others claimed it was a vampiric being which lived in a labyrinth of tunnels and chambers under the city. One person in particular was said to know about the strange creature. He was Thomas Whiteside, Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool. He had even sought advice from the Vatican on how to deal with vampires, which are mentioned, or made reference to, in all of the world's cultures. The eating of the body of bread and drinking of wine for blood in the Christian Mass is thought to echo a much older ritual which had vampiric origins. There were stories that Archbishop Whiteside had tried and failed to defeat the thing
in the tunnels.
Now we go forward to the mid-1960s. The Metropolitan Cathedral was being built on the site of the workhouse, and the crypt beneath the cathedral was being visited by vandals mostly from Paddington Gardens and the Bullring Tenement. A night watchman named Sugnall was brought in to guard the crypt. In this crypt, which lies deep below the basalt and sandstone of a miniature quarry, there are tombs. There's a vaulted chapel called the Chapel of Relics, and inside there are three large tombs containing the mortal remains of the former Archbishops of Liverpool, Thomas Whiteside, Dr Richard Downey, and Dr George Andrew Beck. These tombs are sealed by a gigantic rolling stone, shaped like a disc. It weighs six tons, and requires machinery to roll it open.
One hot summer evening, the night watchman Sugnall went into the crypt with his Dansette radio and his sandwiches. He sat down in a corner near a small window which hadn't had glass put into it yet, and he was unwrapping his sandwiches - when he felt the ground shaking. The giant disc-shaped stone was moving, turning slowly anti-clockwise, until a black gaping hole appeared. From this gap walked an abnormally tall figure in black, who slipped into the room where Sugnall was on duty.
The figure was insubstantial, like a shadow, or a silhouette, and it was heading straight for the night watchman Sugnall. He couldn't run for the door, because the terrifying figure was in the way, so he turned, and in sheer terror and desperation, he tried to scramble through the small hole where the window pane was yet to be fitted. He smashed his head repeatedly against the small opening in blind panic, and then collapsed from shock and concussion.
When Sugnall woke up the lights were off in the crypt, and he had to feel his way to the door. His hand trembled as he tried each key to unlock the door, and as soon as it was opened, he ran for his life. He was later treated for a fractured skull in the Royal Hospital on Pembroke Place. Sugnall never returned to his old job, and the authorities blamed vandals for the minimal damage to the crypt, which was subsequently re-sealed.
Stranger still, that very same week, there was a series of grave robberies in the cemetery of the Anglican Cathedral. All the robberies took place in supposedly impenetrable tombs. Strange men and women in black had been seen in the cathedral cemetery that week, and police even went to the trouble of visiting schools in Edge Hill and Toxteth to advise children to avoid going near the cathedral on their way home. Considering the vast subterranean legacy of the Mole of Edge Hill, and the other unchartered tunnels of Liverpool, could the Brownlow Hill vampire still be at large beneath the city streets?
