If you’re ever in Liverpool, there’s one very important thing you should know: the cab drivers love to chat. There’ll be no putting your headphones on and staring at the window in a Liverpool taxi, for better or for worse.
One time it was absolutely for the better was when I was on my way home from a film shoot, and the cabbie asked me what the film was about. “Witches,” I told him; to my surprise and delight, he responded by launching into a story about his aunt, who was widely considered to be the most terrifying witch in Merseyside.
I was impressed when he told me local pubs would call her in if they were experiencing issues with gangs and watch as hulking men bowed their heads and fell silent in the face of a tiny old woman. Apparently, the travelling communities who passed through feared and respected her in equal measure, and she had a strange way of knowing things she really ought not to. What brought me up short, though, was when the cabbie told me she often visited Newsham Park.
Newsham Park is a stone’s throw from where I live, and is easily one of the most haunted buildings in Britain. It’s not hard to see why; Newsham Park was an orphanage from 1874 until 1949, at which point it was sold and repurposed as a hospital—with a psychiatric wing, of course. Now derelict, the building itself appears like a ghost of its former purposes, with hospital beds and old equipment mouldering in the hallways. The bravest of ghost hunters might also venture down to the morgue, where the fridge doors lie open and beckoning.
The Seaman’s Orphanage provided care and education for children whose fathers had perished at sea—most children living there were not, in fact, orphans, but children whose mothers could no longer afford to feed and house them once their fathers had been lost at sea. At its height in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the orphanage was home to over 800 children; with childhood mortality rates being what they were at the time, we can only guess at how many little souls might still be lingering in the vicinity.
The nurses at the Seaman’s Orphanage were famously strict, and children lived in fear of being locked in one of the “naughty cupboards”. These cupboards still line an upper corridor of the building today, and visitors have often reported the ghost of a little boy opening and shutting those cupboard doors, inviting them to play with him. Rumour has it that he died in that very corridor, trapped in the dark for some minor transgression.
When the building reopened as a hospital in 1954, patients often reported sightings of other child spirits running and playing in the upper corridors, sometimes even leaving old toys as offerings. However, the children are not the only spirits still walking the corridors of Newsham Park—a woman in Victorian garb, with a distinct air of authority, has also been seen pacing the halls. At the time, it was wondered whether the apparitions were real at all, or mere figments of the delusions suffered by the patients in the mental health ward.
After almost fifty years in operation, the patients themselves became the ghosts. Many people have reported seeing a spectral figure in one of the ground floor windows of Newsham Park, and hearing a dragging sound from the dining hall when it was known to be empty. Dark, shadowed figures congregate in Ward G, but at least one is willing to follow visitors around the building, lingering ominously just behind them. One previous employee of the hospital even reported seeing a headless figure in a white coat disappear through a wall in the basement.
So, you can imagine how impressed I was to hear that my cabbie’s aunt visited this derelict building pretty frequently. “She has an understanding with the spirits there,” he told me. “They don’t bother her.”
Needless to say, I want to be this woman when I grow up. As it is, despite my proximity to the building and the frequency of ghost tours being offered, I won’t be stepping foot in Newsham Park until I’ve got my spirit negotiations down to a fine art.
Excerpt:
I remembered the pain of transformation, if only as a haze of red and tearing muscle. I remembered the awful rasp of my canines being filed blunt and the burn of silver being placed over the stumps to keep my true nature at bay. I had gone through hell so that girls like this wouldn’t have to, and now I was failing her.
Isolde walked into my field of vision, blocking my view of the tortured girl and breaking me out of my spiral of self-pity; I folded up the memories and tucked them away with the others, shifting my focus to the present. Isolde’s arms were crossed, the tip of one boot tapping against the flagstones.
“This is very impressive. Look more impressed,” she demanded.
“Can I look horrified instead?”
Isolde huffed, childlike and thwarted.
“I suppose that will do,” she said. “You know, I was really counting on you to be more entertaining than George. Do they surgically remove your personalities when they pump you full of wolf’s blood?”
“I don’t know. Do they surgically remove your morals when you sign the Mage Registry?”
“Ha! I’ll have you know that several of my colleagues are terrible sticks in the mud and would take great offence at the suggestion. I’m quite certain they will stay within the bounds of safe magic use and never go even a little bit mad.”
“And you?” I ventured. “Have you gone a little bit mad?”
“Of course you would see brilliance and call it madness. If I do go mad, it’s because I have no one but a zombie to talk to. And George, I suppose.”
She smiled, just a little quirk of her mouth at one side as if the two of us were sharing a joke. I had never imagined that I would be gently needled by a target. I did not like it.
I would not say that I sulked. I had simply elected to end the conversation. It was in Isolde’s interest to keep me talking, I reminded myself: if I was talking, I was not thinking, was not planning. I needed to do both if I wanted to get myself and the girl to safety. I could come back for Isolde later. Or someone else could.
The problem was that, devoid of entertainment, Isolde had taken to scratching the bottom of a glass beaker with a scalpel. Her work was precise, careful, but the sound of sharp metal against glass scraped at my ears, interrupting all attempts at thought. I glared at her.
This was a mistake.
“I’m sure you must be wondering what I’m doing,” said Isolde, without looking up.
“Not particularly.”
“I’m engraving the soul-binding runes into the base of this bottle.” She paused. “Aren’t you going to ask me why?”
“No.”
She was going to tell me anyway.
“I am engraving the soul-binding runes into the base of this bottle,” Isolde repeated, her voice heavy and her words overenunciated as if my disinterest was an obstacle she could overcome by sheer force. “So that I can recapture the soul, should the experiment fail.”
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