Our latest spooky tale by Tom Slemen for the New Year, focuses on "a white lady" who haunts the ruins of a popular park....
Allerton Towers is a beautiful 35 acre park situated off Menlove Avenue and Woolton Road, and the name of the park is derived from the name of a beautiful Italianate mansion that once stood proudly in the grounds – but is now just an ivy-tapestried ruin.
Allerton Towers, designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes, the architect of St George’s Hall, was completed in 1849, and inhabited by the illustrious and super-rich Earle family; but by 1924, the mansion had fallen into disrepair and was subsequently given to the Council, who decided to demolish the mansion in 1937 because deep-rooted dry rot had taken an extensive hold upon its structure.
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The ruins of Allerton Towers are haunted, and I can vouch for this, as I've seen a few figures flitting about the vestiges of the mansion’s stables and orangery over the years. The ruins can be quite romantic by moonlight, and on Christmas Eve 1996 at 11:50pm, a young couple, David and Allison, drove to the ruins and parked (illegally) near the shell of the mansion’s orangery, and they sat in the car, kissing, talking and listening to the car radio as they observed the full moon hanging serenely in the midnight sky.
David was about to propose to his girlfriend of two years when the car radio went dead. An eerie silence seemed to encompass the car.
Allison looked through the windscreen, across the frosted grass, and then she saw a weird towering silhouette of a figure which seemed to be peeping from behind a tree. She pointed the sinister form out to David, and he saw it too - an alarming, towering giant, well over 9 feet tall, in what seemed to be dark spiked armour - and it had a female shape to it.
The entity held a long sword, and the couple thought the thing might attack them, so David swore and tried to start the car – but found to his horror that the engine was dead. The couple heard a voice to their right say, 'She will not harm you,' and they turned to see a woman with long red hair, dressed in a reddish ankle-length robe standing about twenty feet away.
David tried the car again and the vehicle tore off out of the park. A white lady haunts the ruins, believed to be the ghost of a girl who fell pregnant to one of the sons of Hardman Earle, the first occupant of Allerton Towers, but what that tall armoured figure was is a mystery. Others have seen her and thought she looked medieval, and she always seems to appear around Yuletide for some reason.
All Tom Slemen’s books and audiobooks are available from Amazon.
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