oh yeah, and the other fellas ~
'In the district of Everton in the English city of Liverpool in 1930, a series of baffling and alarming events unfolded at a lodging house in Sackville Street. It all started on a Good Friday night when the landlady of the house, a Mrs Hagerty, descended into the cellar to fetch a bucket of coal. She was astonished to see an old-fashioned gentleman with a three-pointed hat and a long old-fashioned coat, standing in the corner, eyeing her. He wore knee-length trousers of some sort with long white stockings below, and the hair beneath the tricorn hat was a snowy white. Mrs Hagerty let out a yelp and dropped the bucket. Before she turned and stumbled up the stairs, she noticed that the stranger seemed as scared as her. The landlady gasped out an account of the ghost she had just seen in her cellar, and an old merchant seaman named Babcock bravely asserted that he would go down to the cellar to fetch the coal, ghost or no ghost. Minutes later, Babcock returned from the cellar without the bucket, trembling. He babbled about the cellar floor giving way beneath his feet and how the walls seemed to curve before his eyes. As he jabbered about his inexplicable experiences, an eerie cacophony of moaning sounds drifted up from the cellar, followed by a deathly stillness. Not long afterwards, at 10 pm, Mrs Hagerty was ringing the bell of the priest's house near St Peter's Church on the corner of Langrove Street. Father Doyle answered and listened with incredulity to the landlady's garbled tale of the devils in her coal cellar. The priest accompanied her back to the lodging house and inspected the cellar alone. He found nothing out the ordinary down there, and brought up a bucketful of coal. He jokingly hinted that the only spirits present in the house were those being consumed by the intoxicated lodgers, then left. However, on the following morning, three of the lodger's were eating breakfast in the kitchen when they noticed that the knives and forks they were using were so magnetic, they kept sticking together. A few of the residents' pocket watches and clocks had also stopped at precisely 9.55 pm - the exact time of the supernatural goings-on in the cellar. A clock-mender subsequently discovered that all the affected timepieces had been magnetised by something. Some of the pots and pans on the kitchen stove were also magnetic.
Two days later, Mrs Hagerty found lumps of coal scattered all over the cellar. She rushed upstairs and asked two lodgers on the ground floor named Hughie Moran and Thomas Pugh to gather the coal down in the cellar. The two men - both brawny labourers - did not believe the tales of the spooky shenanigans, and they went to fetch the coal for Mrs Hagerty. The two men failed to return from the cellar after a duration of fifteen minutes. Mrs Hagerty shouted to them but received no reply. She was too nervous to try the cellar door, so she asked a young lodger named Mickey Ryan, but he couldn't open the door. Twenty five minutes later, the cellar door burst open, and the labourers hurried out and threw themselves up the steps in a state of terror. They'd been 'lost' in the cellar, and unable to find the door. The men were so shaken by the episode they left the lodging house that day.
The uncanny events reached a crescendo in early May that year, when people in the lodging house were awakened at four in the morning by the beating of a drum somewhere in the vicinity. Everyone in Sackville Street heard the racket. Mrs Hagerty grabbed a poker and crept downstairs to locate the rhythmic pounding sound. She heard what sounded like a tuba and penny whistles - then she got the shock of her life as she was halfway down the last flight of stairs. A band of ten or more quaintly-uniformed men were standing in the hallway. A huge bass drum was strapped to one and another held a tuba. They looked very sinister, and the smiling rosy-faced man who was obviously the band leader remarked to a lodger, 'I think we have lost our way again. Goodnight.'
The brass band filed down the steps into the cellar and vanished, one after the other. After that nerve-shattering night, there were no further paranormal incidents at the house, but many Evertonians living today know the old tale of the haunted house on Sackville Street.'
Oooooooer
Hammy x x x
*waves Teddy wearing Liverpool scarf*
