I have warned readers of my books and columns many times to refrain from any involvement with the inverted wine glass – a way of contacting spirits and the deceased known as the Ouija – because no good will ever come of it come.
Most spirits that do visit are out for mischief and will provide misinformation and scare the Ouija session ‘sitters, sometimes telling them that their days are numbered and someone is going to die.
The Ouija also occasionally opens up the room where the session is being held to all kinds of dark forces and can open doors to evil presences that can never be closed.
An example of this is the Ouija session held at the Farmers Arms pub in Frankby on a stormy afternoon in 1952.
The dangerous ‘game’ was initiated by two bored women in their 30s and there were seven minders in the pub who gathered around a table and placed their index fingers on the base of the upturned glass.
One of the attendees asked the spirits to speak through the glass and then the said glass began to slide around and touch some of the 36 paper squares with the letters of the alphabet and the numbers zero through nine scrawled on them.
The glass spelled out the name HENRY repeatedly and everyone laughed; they had expected some dramatic name or message to come across, but the laughter quickly ceased as the glass flew off the table and shattered into the coals of the fireplace.
There was a noticeable drop in temperature in the pub, and as the sky outside darkened, the two women who had suggested the Ouija session – Janet and June – both said they felt something brush past them.
They left the pub and walked along Montgomery Hill to their respective homes – and to their horror the two ladies saw that they were being followed by something – it appeared to be a tall man wearing a long black cape and a hat of the type the Quakers of old wore.
A violent thunderstorm broke out over Frankby to heighten the tense atmosphere as the sinister figure approached the two women and they both began to run and gasp in fear.
June said it could just be someone from the Farmers Arms messing around, trying to scare them after that glass splash, but Janet disagreed; she could see that the figure moved smoothly, as if on wheels.
The shadowy pursuer suddenly accelerated and the women ran screaming through a lane known as Birch Heys.
At that moment, the terrified women and a man emerging from a cottage on the lane could hear the figure laughing hysterically. The man looked at the fleeing women in bewilderment, thinking that there was just some shenanigans going on and that the man in black was a prankster that Janet and June knew.
The women tried to take a shortcut to their homes by running up the stone steps to a stile to get to the public path, but here, as the sky exploded with a burst of Biblical thunder, the thing seemed to attack the women to jump. his cloak blows in the wind.
The man from the cottage heard their screams and decided that these were not young people playing fools; those women sounded like they were being attacked. He ran to the stile and found the women lying on their backs and the cloaked man in the strange hat gone.
The man couldn’t make sense of June; she stared with wild eyes at the oppressive, low storm clouds, but Janet was in tears. She held her hands to her slender neck, which looked red and bruised.
She said a ghost tried to strangle her and June. June had the same bruises on her neck. June ended up in a psychiatric hospital and needed six months to recover from her ordeal, and Janet was plagued for years by nightmares about the grinning ghost strangler and his “glowing evil eyes.”
An old and highly respected resident of the Farmers Arms called George subsequently claimed that ‘Henry’ – the name of the glass – what we would now call a serial killer – he had been responsible for many unsolved murders in the twentieth century. west coast of Wirral and he had made many of the murders appear to be suicides.
George claimed that Henry had been hanged by the father of a girl who had died at the hands of the murderer and had been buried overnight in a shallow grave not far from the Farmers Arms.
The body had been buried face down and a crucifix had been chained to it to prevent the spirit of evil Henry from ascending. Occasionally, people walking up Montgomery Hill – the avenue overlooking the Farmers Arms – have seen a man in a black cloak following them or heard footsteps of someone close behind them.
In a small but beautiful semi-independent street on St Andrew’s Road, so called because it is close to St Andrew’s Church in Bebington, there was another visitor from the upside-down glass in the summer of 2009. It was July, and the elderly couple who owned the semi were visited by their 21-year-old cousin Ryan and his girlfriend Beth – both from Heswall.
Ryan parked his Volkswagen camper in front of the home and told his uncle that he was having trouble finding a place to live since he left home and was currently looking for a job.
Ryan’s aunt and uncle were due to fly to Spain for a fortnight’s holiday and let the young couple stay in the house until they returned, in the hope that Ryan would have found work by then. Once the couple was on vacation, Ryan had a party in the semi, and while drinking, someone suggested they “hit the Ouija board,” claiming they were good at receiving messages from spirits.
Six people were working with the upturned wine glass that evening and at one point the glass was seen moving on its own along a table top.
Most of the words produced were nonsensical, but one of them appeared twice, and that was: MATHOLWCH – one of the people at the party – a boy from Rhyl who didn’t want to get involved in the Ouija session – claimed to be a Welsh name. .
By 4am the party was over, but many did not want to stay in the house because they said there was a sinister ‘presence’.
Ryan fell asleep drunk on the couch with Beth in his arms, and he was woken up around 4:30 a.m. by Beth screaming.
She said she woke up to see a man in old-fashioned clothes with a terrifyingly decomposing face leaning over her. His icy kisses had woken her up. She had heard him say to her, “My love, I will take your vitality, but steal a fraction of your life, so that I can live and love you again.”
His accent had a Welsh tinge, Beth said, and as soon as she woke up and screamed, he was gone, smiling. Ryan knew that his girlfriend was a level-headed and straightforward person who never lied and had no interest in the supernatural, so he just knew his girlfriend was telling the truth.
Two days later, Ryan was standing at the top of the stairs at ten o’clock at night, looking down the hallway, waiting for Beth to come to bed, when he saw a tall, grotesque-looking man with a skeletal face in what appeared to be Victorian style. clothing reaches the foot of the stairs.
He put his bony fingers on the railing – and the lights went out. They flashed on again – the menacing ghost was about five steps further up the stairs, and Ryan cursed in fear.
The lights went out again, leaving the hallway pitch black – and when they came back on after a few seconds, the solid-looking ghost was standing right in front of Ryan, who turned and ran into his bedroom.
Then he heard Beth screaming downstairs, and so he left the room and saw that the ghost had disappeared, and the young man ran to the kitchen where Beth became hysterical.
She said the horrible-looking ghost had put his arms around her and tried to waltz her around. She hit it with a wine bottle and it disappeared.
That evening the couple left the house on St Andrew’s Road and have still not returned.
