HAUNTED WIRRAL: Phantom dinosaurs

In this latest tale, Tom explores the mystery surrounding Wirral's phantom dinosaurs...

"The distinction between past, present and future is an illusion, although a very persistent one," said Albert Einstein, a genius who was always decades ahead of the scientists of his day, and nowadays we know that what he said is perfectly true – that the past, present and future all exist simultaneously, and what we perceive as the course of history is like the groove on an old vinyl record; the ‘present’ is merely the stylus needle playing a certain part of the groove.

All of the songs on the record can be likened to the periods of our history, and to travel in time you have to ‘lift the stylus’ - detach yourself from the present - and move up or down the ‘groove’ to the desired period in the past or future, and sometimes nature uproots people from the here and now in what we label – for want of a better name - as timeslips, and some of these slippages in the space-time continuum can be truly terrifying.

On 1 April, 1958, a gang of Wirral Teddy boys accosted a middle-aged policeman on his bike near the Wishing Gate, Red Hill, and told him they’d seen a ‘big monster’ that looked like Godzilla stomping towards nearby Brackenwood Park.

"Get out of here, idiots!" the bobby told the dapper youths but they seemed genuinely shaken.

The policeman later saw huge three-toed prints in the sand of a local golf course.

It had to be an April fool prank, the copper decided. Then, on the Friday afternoon of 22 August that year, the entire country was visited by some of the worst summer thunderstorms in living memory, with many fatalities from lightning strikes, and Wirral did not escape lightly.

The Wallasey Fire Brigade tackled blazes caused by lightning igniting houses, and that Friday afternoon, a fork of lightning struck something in the woods north of Redhill Road. That something crashed to earth with a sound that was initially mistaken for a roll of thunder.

Two schoolboys came upon the unearthly casualty – a dinosaur – possibly a Tyrannosaurus Rex – lay crumpled in a clearing with a smoking wound on its head where the lightning had struck it.

It was breathing when the schoolchildren found it but when they returned with two policemen, the flesh-eating reptile from the Cretaceous Period (85 to 65 million years ago) seemed to be dead and its eyes were closed.

As chance would have it, two of the Teddy boys who had told the bobby about the monster back in April came on the scene and said they had seen the thing before crossing Brackenwood Park.

A man holding his child dared to touch the snout of the fallen giant and a nervous policeman yelled at him to keep away from the animal.

I later spoke to this man (when he was 70) on the Billy Butler Show and he told me that the ‘monster’ had feather-covered patches of skin on some parts of its head.

It is now known that some species of Tyrannosaurus Rex do have such feathers on parts of their bodies, but this fact was unknown back in 1958. A schoolboy told the other policeman that there was an old man in the monster’s mouth.

People looked into the dark hollow of the carnivore’s gigantic mouth, through the bars of its massive deadly-looking teeth, and there was the body of an inert man identified by some as an elderly local tramp known only as 'Old Hughes.'

"We’ll have to get him out," the Teddy boy told the gathering crowd, but the police told everyone to get away from the nightmare lizard.

"You should contact the RSPCA," an old man surreally suggested, and then there were screams.

The eyes of the thing opened. Everyone ran off, but when they looked back, the dinosaur had vanished.

The old tramp in its mouth was never heard from again. Had such a timeslip concerning a prehistoric monster happened at sea, we would have tales of sea serpents, and if a timeslipped Plesiosaur (a marine reptile from 200 million years ago) had appeared in one of the United Kingdom’s lakes or lochs, we’d have people swearing they had seen the Loch Ness Monster.

Wirral was once overrun with dinosaurs and less than half a mile from the spot where the possible Tyrannosaurus Rex was allegedly felled by a lightning bolt, you will find Storeton Woods perched high on the ridge of a Roman quarry, where, in the 1830s, a number of tracks were discovered that had been imprinted into the sandstone when it was still wet sand – over 200 million years ago.

The tracks had been made by a prehistoric creature that had roamed the mudflats of the Wirral.

Phantom dinosaurs have been seen in other places across the North West – including a strange giant long-necked creature the size of an elephant that has occasionally been encountered by visitors to the Delamere Forest. I

nexplicable Sabre-toothed tigers were spotted in the Bickerton Hills in 1978, and mysterious big cats resembling the Surrey Puma have been seen across Wirral.

These out-of-place creatures are exceedingly difficult to explain, but perhaps we are seeing creatures of the remote past via some fault in the space-time continuum – we will hopefully know more one day.

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