Things that go bump in the night

COULD St Helens borough be the spookiest place in Britain? Ghost-buster Arthur Adamson certainly thinks it's a leading candidate as he builds up his ever increasing dossier of spirit sightings and eerie happenings.

Arthur, a local artist, is currently hot on the trail of the legendary Grey Lady of Taylor Park about whom much has been reported and printed over the years.

He was first alerted to this apparition 12 years ago by a story in the St Helens Star, reporting how a retired teacher's daughter and her friend had the hair-raising experience of encountering the Grey Lady during a walk through the picturesque park, once a wealthy old-time doctor's landscaped estate.

The former schoolmistress, who had insisted on anonymity to avoid embarrassment for her daughter and herself ("People might think we are quite barmy"), was able to provide an intriguing description of the restless spirit in October 1990.

"My daughter and her friend, a very clever girl with a university degree, were sitting on a bench in the long rhododendron walk leading out to Prescot Road, Toll Bar. It was daylight but all was quiet and deserted".

The pet dog accompanying them suddenly became agitated. "Then through the partly-bare bushes appeared a young girl with pale, shoulder length hair, wearing a dress of the sort worn in the 19th-century".

Arthur Adamson, from Lyon Close, St Helens, who specialises in a range of subjects from portraiture to illustrations (including those of the spooky kind) claims to have since spoken to dozens of people, all swearing that they had made paranormal sightings - a great deal of these based around Taylor Park.

When I met him he was putting into place final plans to thoroughly investigate the Grey Lady phenomenon along with a group of fellow enthusiasts, the Ghoulsonfilm team. Infrared cameras, highly sensitive sound equipment and other technical back-up form part of their approach, along with sometimes tedious personal observation work.

Peter Crawley, another well-seasoned local ghost researcher who heads up a group known as Ghost Quest, is also digging deeply into the subject.

"If Peter and I put our heads together we would have a better chance of solving the mystery", says Arthur, who has also filed a related 1986 incident involving a courting couple who were strolling through the moonlit park when they came within a few feet of the female spectre. This stopped briefly and looked around at them before vanishing.

Despite his passionate interest in the paranormal, Arthur, 38, says: "It may sound odd but I am by nature a very sceptical person, so I tend to approach any interview as if the sightings were untrue or caused by some trick of the light".

He tried hard to pick holes in the story related by the St Helens couple, now married with two children. "But I became totally convinced that what they saw was a genuine phenomenon".

Arthur, who puts on public exhibitions of haunted images (he had a huge success during last Hallowe'en), includes another unexplained happening within 100 yards of the Taylor Park gates. Caught on camera was a strange lightning-like charge of light, leaping across the closed and boarded-up Grange Park Hotel.

The Sierra Leone-born artist (his father was working overseas as a junior accountant with a shipping firm when Arthur was born) is assisted in his research by wife, Karen, who, as a keen photographer, takes the pictorial evidence.

And it would appear that there's a huge checklist of mysteries for the ghost-hunters to tackle in other corners of the borough. Among them the Laughing Cavalier, said to haunt the Stork Hotel at Billinge, an Irish navvy ghost and the headless spirit of Old Moll Bolton, both reputed to haunt the Blackbrook area, the well-documented White Rabbit of Crank, Red Clogs, a gremlin-like image spotted around old pit workings on the Haydock-Earlestown border, and Old Harriet, claimed to flit around the Wheatsheaf, a landmark pub on the Rainford Bypass.

But just for now, Arthur has his hands full trying to crack the riddle of Taylor Park's Grey Lady. Who was she, during which period did she live and could she have suffered a tragic end?

The Ghost Jury is still out...