WELCOME to Haunted Wirral, a feature series written by world famous psychic researcher, Tom Slemen for the Globe.

In this latest tale, Tom explores the spooky story of the Ghost Girl's Strange Friend.

I HAVE changed a few names in this weird story for reasons of confidentiality.

One sunny spring afternoon in 1970, 12-year-old Tessa Taylor ran out of her home on Tudor Road in Tranmere, headed for the ice cream van on the other side of Old Chester Road and was knocked down by a car.

She suffered a fractured skull and was taken to Birkenhead General Hospital.

Tessa was lucky to survive.

She went into a coma for a month and the girl’s parents soon learned that the outgoing child they had known had now become very quiet and introverted – and she also started "seeing things".

Tessa visited her school friend Elaine at her house on Mount Road a few weeks after she'd come out of the coma.

The girls were sitting watching Top of the Pops in the living room one evening when Tessa became aware of a boy of about five or six who was standing in the corner of the room, looking at her.

He had on an old-fashioned child’s sailor suit and his face was a ghastly white.

He was staring wide-eyed at Tessa and suddenly said: "Can you see me?" 

Tessa smiled and nodded, thinking the boy was some young relative of Elaine, but then the child told her: "They can’t see me because I'm dead." 

Elaine noticed something was distracting Tessa and she asked her friend what the matter was.

"Nothing," was Tessa's reply, but the ghostly boy kept talking to her and later in Elaine’s bedroom, Tessa told her there was a ghostly lad in the house and that she’d talked to him.

Ghosts were one thing that really frightened Elaine and she told Tessa she’d have to go home if she kept talking about them, but Tessa said ghosts were nothing to be scared of.

"There are no such things as ghosts and you're lying!" Elaine ended up saying to shut Tessa up, and the latter left the house in tears.

Elaine later learned from her Nan that the ghost of a boy had been seen at the house since the 1930s.

Tessa acquired the nickname "Ghost Girl" because of her uncanny ability, and she ended up with no friends outside of school.

Most evenings the girl sat on her bed, wishing she had a decent friend.

One night, as Tessa lay in bed wallowing in self-pity, she whispered: "I wish someone would come into my life, please." 

It was more of a prayer than a plea.

A strange contorted figure appeared out of thin air. 

At first, Tessa didn't know what the thing was.

Then she realised it was vaguely human shaped with two arms and two legs, but it was so tall it was bent over because it couldn’t straighten up because of the ceiling.

The girl estimated the entity's height as around 16 feet.

It knelt on the floor at the bottom of the bed and although the face looked shockingly different to the usual human face, the girl saw something childish in the huge round eyes of the visitor.

"I want a friend too", said the weird giant, its bottom lip moving up and down like the mouth of a ventriloquist's doll.

The body of the bizarre being was of a deep ultramarine with mottled patches of pine green, and the eyes were sky blue.

Tessa realised that the humanoid guest had somehow heard her cry for friendship, and she had a long conversation with the being, which had no name, so off the top of her head she named him Bill.

As soon as Bill heard Tessa's mother coming up the stairs, it vanished, but returned most nights.

All Tessa could ascertain from her long chats with Bill was that his world was "far away but quite near sometimes" and he was immortal and felt sorry for humans because they had to die.

Tessa and Bill played board games and sometimes the girl sneaked out of the house and played with Bill in Victoria Park in the wee small hours, but as Tessa started to develop into a young woman, she began to date boys, and Bill didn’t like it one bit.

Tessa discovered he was very possessive and told him she still loved him, but she also had to have a partner one day and even get married.

One night Bill burst into tears and vanished.

He stayed away for a fortnight and returned to say he was sorry.

At 16, Tessa found her first true love in a boy of 17 named Paul Cooper.

She'd met him in the library and she started spending time at his house on nearby St Georges Avenue.

One moonlit evening, Paul walked Tessa home and suddenly said: "It's time." 

"Time for what?" Tessa asked. 

Paul replied "Time for this" and embraced her and started to kiss her.

The teens moved into an alleyway and, as they kissed, a cat shrieked somewhere.

Paul looked up the alleyway and saw the silhouette of someone's head peeping around the wall.

'Nosy parker!' he shouted – and then he saw that head belonged to a gigantic shadowy figure which stood up and came striding towards him.

Paul ran off in a state of terror.

Tessa screamed at Bill and told him to go and never return. 

He vanished.

Many years later, when Tessa was giving birth to Paul's son during an epidural, she saw Bill reappear for a few moments.

He looked shocked at the arrival of the baby, then vanished.

Whatever Bill was – he has not been seen since.

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