Our haunted roads

One August night in the late 1970s, a couple in their thirties – Gary and Julie – embarked on the return journey from the home of their friends in Bebington to their home on Sugar Lane, Knowsley, and this trip necessitated a route which took them through the Queensway Tunnel.
Julie listened as the car radio went dead as Gary drove into the mouth of the tunnel. She looked at her watch and saw it was exactly midnight, and she then turned to Gary and said she’d be glad to get home to bed because she was feeling so exhausted.
Julie had been up since six because her youngest, Danielle, had developed a bad cough, and then Julie had gone to work at the Bird’s Eye factory.
She yawned, and then noticed something – a silhouetted figure of a woman – standing in the middle of the road, about a hundred yards ahead.
“What’s she doing standing there?” Julie gasped, and turned to look at Gary, but she saw that his eyes were bulging and his mouth was open as he stared transfixed at the woman straight ahead.
If he continued on this course, he’d hit the woman squarely. Julie cried out for him to swerve but Gary just said: “No!” and looked through the windscreen with a strange expression of sheer determination.
Julie’s right hand grabbed at the steering wheel as she tried to turn it to avoid running the woman down, but her husband held the wheel with a vice-like grip.
Julie let out a scream as the car smashed into the woman, and a strange icy coldness gushed through the car at the point of impact. Julie was now in tears but Gary said: “Look in the side mirror! She’s still there! She’s a ghost! Look at her!”
And Julie glanced in the side mirror and saw that the woman was still standing there in the middle of the road – even though the car carrying Gary and Julie had just run straight through her. An old Ford Anglia following behind swerved to miss the shadowy woman – and it collided with another car as a result and smashed into the wall of the tunnel.
Gary explained how, a year before, during a trip to Birkenhead, he had seen that same eerie silhouetted woman standing in almost the same spot – near a bend in the tunnel, and when he had swerved to avoid her (thinking she was a real flesh blood person), he had narrowly missed a van just around the curve in the road.
Gary had the impression that the ghostly lady had been trying to make him crash into another vehicle by standing in the path of his car.
Unknown to Gary, that uncanny apparition of a woman had been seen many times over the years, and the ghost seems hellbent on causing accidents.
She seems to date from the 1960s, and has a bob of curly hair and wears a ‘sticky-out’ knee-length dress.
The identity of the phantom is still unknown, but she is not the only ghost that haunts the Queensway Tunnel.
The ghost of a girl who had a fatal fall from a motorbike in the Queensway in the 1960s has also been seen hitch-hiking in the two-mile tunnel over the years.
There are other ghosts roaming the roads of Liverpool and the suburbs, and the most durable one if known as ‘The Thing’ on Higher Lane in Fazakerley.
This is a shadowy, amorphous entity which has been seen sliding across Higher Lane at night like some unearthly oil slick. The entity often takes on the shape of a man who runs out in front of cars on the lane near to Sparrow Hall playing fields, and the deadly ghost has caused many fatal crashes over the years.
Even patrolling policemen at night have encountered ‘The Thing’ on Higher Lane, but to date, no one knows whose ghost is responsible for causing so many tragedies at what has become an infamous black spot. The close proximity of Everton Cemetery to the lane could have something to do with ‘The Thing’ of course.
Just a stone’s throw from the haunting ground of the Higher Lane entity, there is a stretch of the East Lancashire Road which seems to be haunted by an invisible pair of hands that seize the steering wheel of passing vehicles.
In 2010 a reader named Frank Dorlin wrote to me to tell me how, one night in May 2009, he was driving along the East Lancs around 11pm, on his way to his Aunt’s home in Knowsley, when the steering wheel of the car turned in his hands as if something invisible had gripped it.
The car veered to the left and Frank just managed to regain control of the vehicle, but the ‘invisible hands’ then turned the wheel in the other direction, sending the car into a spin. As this was going on, the temperature in Frank’s car seemed to plunge to freezing point.
I have had many reports of the phantom hands grabbing the steering wheel’s of cars travelling on that stretch of the East Lancs, and it may be just a dark coincidence, but that section of the motorway passes by West Derby Cemetery.
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