I imagine you probably know where this is heading, because of course when they finally got fed up of knocking on the hut door and opened it the small shed was completely empty. In fact, it looked as if it had been empty for years. There was no other way out of there and they hadn't taken their eyes off it since the old bloke had arrived. Needless to say, they got out of there pretty quick!
So you see, everyone in Liverpool has a ghost story to tell. Everyone seems to have a favourite one, and sometimes they grow in the telling. It would be fair to say that most of them are complete nonsense, but then you never know. You just never know. That's the hook.
My mate Jack swears he was followed home once after a night at the pub by a tall white shape that stopped when he stopped and started up again when he did. He had however sunk a fair few jars that night and these days he’s more likely to laugh it off as the effects of a dodgy kebab that he just happened to be attempting to get home in one piece at the time. I've noticed that. It's a bit strange but when something like that happens whoever it is can't wait to tell anyone that will listen all of the gory details as soon as they possibly can. Give it a few years though, and they began to shrug it off. It was a dodgy pie. I was off me head on Guinness. How was I to know it was the bizzies following me? So on and so forth. Give it a few years more and then they'll deny that it ever happened at all, and even sometimes even accuse you of making it up in the first place!
Still, there we go. Liverpool is full of stories, some of them involving ghosts, many of them not. It's the ones involving the ghosts that I'm going to tell you about now. Well, sort of.
When we were kids there were two of us who lived in the same street and we were as close as you could get. His name is Jack. We used to play together, go to the same school together and that carried on when we were teenagers. We had ideas of forming a band when we were about fourteen or fifteen, but neither of us could play a musical instrument so that put the kibosh on that pretty much. I'm Peter, and as I say, me and Jack were as close as that. Of course when we left school and set out looking for a job we didn't exactly have a great deal of choice about where we were headed for career wise. We were expected to bring a wage in! I found myself working in a garage, being taught how to service cars whilst at the same time having to clean the bloody things in the showroom at least twice a week. Some kind of general dogsbody is what I was, but it brought some money in so that was the end of it. Jack got a job in the factory down the road not far from where we both lived. Mind you, I think it would be fair to say that he hated his job as much as I hated mine!
Whatever money we brought in was dutifully handed over to our parents each week and we were given a few quid back which was just enough for a few nights out on the beer and perhaps a few other bits and bobs every now and then. It seems a whole lifetime away now, but at the time we were both happy and stayed close friends even though we now more or less worked full time. Isn’t it funny how time flies? I carried on working in the garage for a few years, Jack in the factory. He was the first to get married. I followed him a few years later. Mind you, he was the first to get divorced as well. Sadly, I then proceeded to follow him down that particular route myself a few years later too. No kids for either of us. Just as well, I suppose. Throughout all of this we both remained firm friends. Couple of pints on a Friday night and maybe a darts match mid-week if we could be bothered. If not just a few jars and a chat.
On my thirty ninth birthday I was made redundant and found myself out of work for probably the first time in my life. I had my own little place that had more or less been paid for with the money my mum and dad left me when the last one of them passed, so at least I had a roof over my head. Six months later Jack was made redundant too when the factory he had worked at for all his adult life suddenly upped sticks and moved to Holland. Nice. So there we were. The pair of us both forty next year, out of work and on the scrap heap. Life is funny, isn’t it? How had it all come to this? Time passes so quickly, doesn’t it? First grey hair is never far away! Nevertheless every dinner time Jack and I would wander down to the pub and nurse a half so we could compare our efforts to find a job. That was the plan. Most of the time we just talked about what had been on the telly the night before. Jobs were hardly growing on the trees. That was a fact.
On this particular day we were talking about some series that was going on at the minute about the supernatural and we got around to talking about ghosts and what have you, and how when I was a kid my dad always used to say there was always a ghost next door in Liverpool, and how I had taken that literally at the time. We were both having a laugh about it when suddenly Jack went very quiet. We had both been talking over the course of the last few months of setting ourselves up in a business of our own, but to be honest I was a pretty average mechanic and Jack, although a dab hand at packing meat, was in just about as much demand as I was. There was definitely a down turn in the amateur meat packing market, for certain. It was more or less a case of wanting to have our own business, as I’d always kind of liked the sound of that despite the fact that we were in fact a pretty clueless pair of bastards who weren’t actually qualified to set up any sort of business at all. Unless of course it involved a vague knowledge of the working of a car engine, or packing meat.
“Ghost tours.” said Jack. “Every big city has one. They had one in York when I was there a few years ago and the tourists were lapping it up.”
“Tourists? In Liverpool?” I asked, and Jack nodded. The more I thought of it, Liverpool was crawling with them these days, what with the Albert Dock and the Beatles Story museum. Not to mention the Matthew Street Festival. The Summer Pops. They both seemed to get busier and busier every year.
“They used to charge about eight quid a person in York.” he said. “Thirty odd people at a time. That’s two hundred and forty quid a night.”
“Do you know any ghosts, like?” I asked and Jack laughed.
“We can make that bit up. Everybody else does. We could always ask your ghost next door, couldn’t we? Give number eleven a knock. What do you think?”
I paused for a minute while I considered it. It seemed like a pretty daft idea to me. I mean, what did either of us know about doing a ghost tour? I even managed to get lost explaining various bits of a car engine, never mind ghosts and what have you.
“There’s probably loads of them already.” I concluded. “Besides. There’s only the two of us. We’d need help.” Jack nodded, thinking about this.
“Tell you what. I’ll have a look on the Internet in the library on my way home. Do a bit of research. Then we can have a chat about it tomorrow.” We agreed to this and after nursing our halves for another half hour or so we went our separate ways.
The next day found us in the pub again. To tell the truth I had more or less forgotten about our chat from the day before, but Jack was well and truly fired up. “There are one or two ghost walks already.” he said, “But I think that there’s loads of room for another one. The good news is that the average price is between ten and twelve quid. That’s a little bit more than I thought.” So we pushed the idea back and forwards a few times, and it seemed to be down to me to try and put the dampeners on it. I still thought it was a pretty daft idea. Good money, but not that easy a thing to set up. Add to that the fact that neither of us knew a bloody thing about it!
Jack, of course, was having none of it.
“Say twelve quid per person. Thirty five people at a time. That’s just the other side of four hundred quid a night. Say we do it four nights a week.” He tried to do the maths in his head but gave up. That’s not a bad little earner, is that, Pete” he finished. Sounded like it to me too.
“You probably need a licence.” I said, stubbornly clutching at straws. “And people to help. That all adds up. Before you know where you are there would be bugger all left.” Jack looked deflated.
“You don’t need a licence.” he said. I’ve looked at the business model of the other tours.” I raised my eyes at this.
“Business model?” I said. I think it was probably at that point that I knew that Jack was deadly serious about this. We both laughed. “Okay.” I conceded, “Break it down for me. What exactly does a ghost tour, or a ghost walk - whatever you want to call it - actually do?”
Jack surprised me by getting a small notepad out of his coat. It looked as if it was a new one as well. Still had the price sticker on the front. “Usually the tour will last about two hours, and visit about six different places, where an actor or player of some sort will pretend to be a ghost.”
“Six people?” I laughed. “Well that’s that out of the window then! It’ll cost too much to pay six people! We’d end up doing it for nothing!”
“No.” sighed Jack. “The actors usually take a few roles each. Get them dressed up and then swap costumes so that way nobody would notice the difference. Two actors maximum, I would say.” he continued, consulting his notes. “You would need a tour leader, who guides the people from the different locations, and perhaps another one as a marshal who would make sure everyone keeps up and what have you. Someone else to ferry the two actors about. That would probably do it.”
“You’d need to advertise as well.” I said, but Jack shook his head at this.
“Get down the dock with leaflets and what have you. We could even sell tickets as we did it. Easy.”
I paused to take this all in. “So” I said, sipping my half of lager very carefully. “A tour leader who can tell stories. Two actors, a marshal and a driver. And that’s it?”
“Yeah.” said Jack grinning from ear to ear. “Pretty straight forward, hey? Once we got under way we could get in touch with the local papers and radio stations. Free publicity, like. Oh go ahead, Pete. It’ll be a laugh mate if nothing else!”
I was impressed. He had really thought this through. To be honest I was more or less humouring him when I tentatively agreed to at least look in to it a bit further, but I kind of got sucked in to it the more I looked at it. You see, I’ve always fancied myself as a bit of a story teller, and when Jack gave me the job of coming up with six ghost stories for the tour I was interested straight away. Hook, line and bloody sinker. After a week or so I had some stuff ready and Jack came round mine to go through it.
“The haunted litter bin is a good one.” he said as we went through my notes, “But it would be pretty hard for anyone to play the part of a bin, I think. The other ones are okay, though. Especially the last one.”
So we proceeded. Our biggest challenge of course was deciding which one of us would do what. As I had written the stories Jack thought it would be best if I was the guide.
“That way if you forget any of the stories you can just make them up.” he said. I could see his point, and that was that decided. Jack came to think that he would have no objection to getting dressed up as one of the ghosts, but I wasn’t sure.
“I think we need someone who has some experience in acting or something like that.” I wasn’t convinced. “We could try and see if there any amateur dramatics groups with someone who wants to do a foreigner. They would have to be reliable though. We don’t want to be a ghost down with thirty odd punters in tow. It wouldn’t look good, would that!”
“There’s always Mad Mary” said Jack, pointing to the corner of the snug where a bedraggled middle aged woman sat nursing a drink. “She used to tread the boards, didn’t she?”
“The only boards she’s trodden are the floorboards of this alehouse!” I laughed. “Though I do seem to remember her going on about acting or something at some point or another. That’s if you believe her, that is.” Mary could often be seen sitting in the corner of the pub where she would usually regale some stranger with her long gone golden days. The facts about her life seemed to be pretty flexible, too.
“Over my dead body!” I finally concluded. “She’s a bloody nutter is that one. I’m not having her involved at all.” Jack was forced to agree, and so we left it there.
“We’ll put a notice up in the library. That will do for starters.”
“What about a marshal?” I asked. Jack tapped the side of his nose.
“My cousin Arthur would probably be glad of a few bob. He’s a young bloke too, so he would be okay with all the walking.”
“He’s got a gammy leg!” I said, laughing.
“That’s what he tells the social.” said Jack, and he winked. Arthur it was then. We spent a bit of time polishing up the stories I had so far and started to write them out. Of course what I hadn’t realised at that point was that I would have to remember them! I could hardly read them from a piece of paper on the day, could I? We began to get them into some sort of order where they were at least ready to use. We wrote an advert asking for any local amateur dramatics people to email Jack, and off he went to the library to get it put up on the wall.
Next we got ourselves off to town and had a wander around a few likely routes. We walked them out at a gentle pace and began to note down where we wanted to place the acts for each of the six ghosts. Now by necessity this had to be a relatively secluded but also accessible place, and they were buggers to find but somehow we managed it. The conclusion to the tour would be in a wide courtyard that was accessed by a narrow alleyway. Perfect for the finale, this was a really good find! Very dark too. Some of the other places were quite good as well. Nice and open but generally somewhere one of our actors could hide and then jump out and surprise people when we were doing the relevant talk-through.
So on it went. God knows what people thought we were up to, pacing the streets and then stopping every now and again to read from a notebook. Increasingly I began to improvise. I had written the ghost stories after all, so I could embellish them anyway I wanted. There was however, one problem we found very early on, which involved getting the actors in place as the tour progressed. Quite simply it was a logistical nightmare. We came to the decision that Jack would use his old white van to ferry the actors from place to place, but that it would then be all of them that did the finale. Once we had this sorted everything else seemed to fall into place.
So after a while there we were. We had a route, we had a set of stories and we now knew it all fitted in to more or less two hours. Jack’s cousin Arthur was on standby as the marshal. All we needed were two actors. Jack had received a couple of emails from the advert in the library and so we asked the two of them, one man, one woman, round to Jack’s house one night with an hour’s gap in-between. Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t an interview as such but we had to tell them what we were up to, explain the pay involved (we had settled on a percentage of the ticket sales to cover our arses in case we didn’t actually sell any), but more importantly to see if we could get across to them what we wanted as well as sussing out whether they were any good.
The first one that turned up, a woman, was a complete bloody disaster. When trying to explain to her about the first ghost (a woman jilted at the altar who hangs herself in a bus stop) she kept holding her hand to her head in what was obviously meant to be a dramatic gesture but to my mind just looked stupid. She also kept asking what her “motivation” was. I tried to get across to her what we were up to but ended up telling her that her motivation was ten per cent of the ticket sales, and that she wasn’t going in for the bloody Oscar's or what have you. We politely told her we’d be in touch. Yeah right.
The next one wasn’t too bad. He was a tall middle aged guy called Edward. If you passed him on the street you would be able to tell he was involved in amateur dramatics just by the way he dressed. He had the look of a man who was about to burst out into a long, heart-wrenching speech at any moment. We didn’t think the chip shop ghost was too much beyond him as long as he didn’t get overly dramatic about the fish and chips or something.
More importantly, however, he was happy with the ten per cent. So he was hired, and we said we would be in touch once we were ready to go. I gave him a copy of his lines for the three ghosts he would be playing as well as the script for the finale and he said he would be off to
the charity shops to see if he could find any clothes for his roles. He said it would help him get into what he referred to as, “the zone”, which was fine by us, because apart from anything else it meant we didn’t have to put our hands in our mostly empty pockets to pay for his costumes.
A week later we were starting to get a bit worried. Three of the other ghosts were women, and we had no-one for the roles. The emails from the card in the library had stopped altogether.
“It’s going to be Mad Mary, isn’t it? “ Jack asked one dinner hour as we were nursing our usual halves. We both turned to the corner where the nutcase in question sat humming some kind of tune to herself whilst hugging what very possibly could have been a glass of advocaat.
“For crying out loud!” I muttered under my breath. “God help us.” Grabbing our drinks we made our way to the corner. I thought I’d let Jack do the talking. Unfortunately Mary got her nose in first.
“I knew you two would be coming today.” she nodded, and tapped the side of her nose. “Hiawatha told me.” and she placed her glass on the table before her. I was busy looking around to see who she was talking about, but Jack was a bit quicker off the mark than me.
“That’ll be your spirit guide then?” he said, and she smiled.
“One of them.” she nodded.
“Merlin the wizard busy today then?” I muttered and Jack kicked me under the table.
“An unbeliever, then?” asked Mary, looking down her nose at me. I just grinned and noticed Jack shuffling on his stool beside the two of us. “No matter. Tell me gentlemen” she said, waving her hands around like some kind of silent movie actress, “Why do you think I sit her every afternoon?”
Around about a hundred answers shot into my head straight away, but none of them would have convinced Mary that our “Witch of the park railings” part was suitable for her. Jack stepped in instead, though I could see that he was now struggling to keep a straight face too.
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