Get all your news in one place.
100’s of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
National
Tom Slemen & Aaliyah Rugg

Tom Slemen: 'Sobbing' child waves down man to rush to the aid of a woman who collapsed

Our latest spooky tale by Tom Slemen for Christmas, focuses on a young girl who helped her older sister....

In December 2011, just a few days before Christmas, 22-year-old Jack Davies was walking up Linacre Lane, Bootle in a fog on his way to his mum's house, and as he was passing Bootle Cemetery he saw the faint outline of a little girl at the cemetery gates. She waved at him and shouted, "Help! My sister has fallen over! Please help her!"

And Jack ran to the little girl, and she led him to a grave, sobbing, "she fell!" And when Jack got there he saw a woman in her fifties lying face down at a grave. Jack vaguely remembered the recovery position he had learned in a first aid class in school some years ago, and wasn’t sure what to do.

READ MORE: Pub goers desperately tried to give CPR to Wallasey shooting victim

He stooped down and carefully turned the woman over and asked if she was alright, and the woman opened her eyes and said she had fainted. Jack helped her up and thought it odd that the girl who had brought him here had looked as if she was about seven and yet she had said she was this woman's sister, whereas the woman looked old enough to be her grandmother.

"I got upset, and then I just felt faint – I’m diabetic," said the woman, who thanked Jack and said her name was Maureen. Jack mentioned the little girl who had brought him to her aid, and he looked about and noticing she was nowhere to be seen, he asked who she was.

"It’s been my sister," said Maureen, and she pointed to the headstone of the grave and explained that her sister had died back in the 1960s. "It's been her who brought you here," said Maureen in a broken voice, but Jack couldn't take it in and his eyes searched the fog, looking for the girl in question.

Bootle Cemetery.(Pic Andrew Teebay). (Andrew Teebay Liverpool Echo)

"She’s a ghost," said Maureen in a whispering, timid voice, and she produced a handkerchief from her coat pocket and dabbed her tears away. There was a pause, and then Jack said, "She wasn't a ghost, she was real."

"She looks real sometimes," said Maureen. She looked at the flowers left at the bottom of the moss-covered headstone where her sister had been buried so many years before, then walked away – out of the cemetery, with Jack, who slowly came to realise that the ghost of a little girl, worried about her now much older surviving sister, had called upon him to help her.

All Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.

READ MORE

Faces of 30 people police want to speak to immediately

Anfield redevelopment moves forward as club confirm new approach

UK's most wanted list after Liverpool fugitive arrested in Marbella

Experts urge people not to put Amazon Echo in bedrooms

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100’s of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.