Our latest spooky tale by Tom Slemen this Christmas focuses on an unexplained festive broadcast...
Tom told the ECHO: "I recall this case clearly from 2008, because the main witness was a dead ringer for Paul Newman; his name was Peter; he was in his 70s, lived on Durning Road, Edge Hill, and he'd been recovering from eye surgery and so he was unable to read for a while, so Peter’s grand-daughter bought him a pair of FM radio headphones.
"As Peter was tuning them, searching for a classical music station on a glacial December afternoon in 2008, he heard a child’s voice on the headphones saying, "Amy, Amy, give me your answer do, I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish wedding, we can't afford no bedding, but you'll look sweet, washin' your feet in the Manchester Ship Canal."
READ MORE: Bizarre tale of Bold Street 'timeslips'
"Pete then heard white noise in the headphones, followed by a terrific explosion and screams. He thought he'd tuned into a Radio 4 play, but then a voice mentioned Durning Road - the very road he was living on, and he heard someone swear, which was practically unheard of on BBC radio at that time.
"Pete listened to moaning voices, and one said: "Oh, Mary Mother of God save us, please." And a man said, "We're all going to die." And the cacophony of screams that followed was dreadful.
"Pete yelled to his three sons in the next room and they heard the voices on the headphones too, and then Pete and the sons saw ghostly faces appear in the fireplace - they were screaming faces, and their cries startled the four witnesses. The faces then slowly vanished and never returned and no more screams or moaning voices were heard on the FM radio headphones.
"Pete came to see me at a book-signing and when I heard where he lived, I told him this phenomenon had happened before; it had been mysteriously captured on tape and heard on a radio.
"It was the ghostly replay of the Durning Road Tragedy of November 29, 1940, when a German WWII bomb aimed at Edge Hill Railway Station hit a college on Durning Road - and beneath that college was a bomb shelter in the basement with 300 men, women and children in it.
"The building collapsed on them, the college boilers burst and scalded the victims, the gas pipes burst and turned into blow torches, and a fire broke out on top of all that, 166 people died. The firemen and ARP wardens couldn’t reach all the bodies in the massive fire pit, and fearing the spread of disease from the body parts, they poured lime over them and sealed the hole up. Winston Churchill described it as the "single worst incident of the war".
"I was baffled by the "Amy, Amy" rendition of "Daisy, Daisy" that Pete heard on the headphones, but found out it was a parody song about Amy Johnson, the popular aviator of the 1930s that was often sung by children on the streets of Liverpool in the 1930s".
All Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.
READ NEXT:
Light a Christmas candle to remember a loved one on our map of tributes
Christmas menus prisoners will be having this year from cheeseburgers to spicy pizza
Secret drug plots of 'Big Dunc', 'Musical Salmon', 'Educated Goose' and 'Heroic Fox'
