This spooky incident allegedly took place shortly before Christmas one snowy
December in the 1970s.
The time was 1 a.m., and Brownlow Hill was
deserted. A light snow was starting to fall, and there was already a frosted layer of fallen snow on the ground. It was bitterly
cold, but one person who was out at that unearthly hour was seemingly unaffected by the chilly weather. He was a Liverpool
businessman named Mr Smith, and he walked up the flights of frosted steps in Brownlow Hill that led to the Metropolitan Cathedral's
main square, which was covered with virgin snow. Mr Smith reached the top of the icy steps and walked across the square. His
snow-crunching footsteps echoed about the square in the deadly silence of this still monday morning.
The businessman stopped
in his tracks and took out his keys. On his key-ring there was a little blue plastic Smurf character, given to him by his
wife three years ago. Mr Smith had stopped off at the very place where he and Melanie had walked hand in hand on the night
of their first date. He had met Melanie at the 'Augustus John' pub on that summer evening. They had both been students at
Liverpool University. He had always been very sceptical about so-called 'true-love' and romance - until he met that girl.
Melanie had moved into his flat with him and they were married in less than a year. But then Melanie tragically died from
a brain tumour. It hurt Mr Smith just to think of his wife's suffering in the last weeks of the terrible illness; he preferred
to stroll down the sunnier side of memory lane. He just couldn't come to terms with the loss of his wife, and so, with tears
in his eyes on this freezing December morning at precisely 1.15 a.m., Mr Smith climbed onto the snow-covered wall that bordered
the square and decided he would end it all by jumping down into the crypt area, some fifty feet below. Life was so unbearable
without Melanie, and Mr Smith just knew he couldn't spend another Christmas without her. He closed his eyes, and prepared
himself, but someone shouted out behind him.
"Don't!" shouted a scruffy-looking man standing in the square behind Mr Smith.
He held out his arms to the would-be suicide.
"Shut up! Beat it!" Mr Smith warned the man, and said, "Leave me alone."
And the businessman started to sniffle and cry.
"No, I won't. It isn't right. Just because your little world is falling
apart. That's the coward's way out!" said the tramp.
Mr Smith shouted a string of four-letter words to the tramp, then
said, "I don't want to live, so just leave me alone."
The tramp said, "Okay friend. But have you ever wondered what will
become of you - if you do decide to jump?"
"Yeah," said Mr Smith, "I'll be dead, that's what'll become of me."
"A child
knows that," said the tramp, then he said, "But what if that isn't the end?"
"You're drunk, just leave me alone." said
Mr Smith, and he looked down at the glistening ground below.
"You mightn't even die if you fall down there," the tramp
said, then chuckled.
"Just go will you?" said the businessman.
The tramp stayed put and rambled on, saying "You could
smash your head in and end up like a cabbage. You'd have to be spoon-fed."
Mr Smith took a deep breath and started to
sway back and forth slightly, as if he couldn't make up his mind whether to hurl himself off the top of the wall.
"Even
if you smash your brains in and your organs fly everywhere, you might still take a few minutes to die." said the tramp. Then
he said something that sent a chill up Mr Smith's spine. He said, "And you know when you're lying there after the fall, and
you're barely alive; all your organs are ruptured and your blood is spreading into a great big puddle. You taste your own
salty blood in your mouth, and you are seized by this terrible panic, and you always change your mind and suddenly want to
live. You hope and wish that it's all just a bad dream, but it isn't; you realise with horror that you're going to die."
"And
how do you know all this?" Mr Smith asked the tramp.
"I'll give you a clue." said the tramp, and he gave a sinister grin,
then tilted his head. His head kept tilting until his ear touched his shoulder. Mr Smith shuddered when he saw the tramp's
contortion act. Surely he was just double-jointed.
The tramp said, "Now watch this." And he flipped his head right back
in one swift movement so the back of his head touched his shoulder blades. With a sense of mounting horror, Mr Smith realised
that no one - even someone double-jointed - could flip their head back like that. The tramp turned around on the spot and
his dangling head swung about as if - as if, his neck was broken. With his face upside down, he smiled, then said, "I jumped
and look what happened."
Mr Smith got down of the wall trembling, and ran across the square in a state of fright, almost
slipping several times. He turned back once and saw that the tramp had vanished. The businessman hesitated for a moment, and
looked in the snow. He could see his trail of footprints, but there were no footprints leading to the spot where the vagrant
had appeared. Mr Smith hurried down the stairs and raced up Brownlow Hill non-stop until he ran out breath near Paddington.
It had stopped snowing by now and the full moon had emerged from a break in the clouds. Mr Smith glanced back towards the
cathedral and saw a solitary shadowy figure coming down the cathedral steps in the moonlight. The businessman couldn't be
sure but the figure looked like the eerie tramp with the broken neck. Mr Smith saw to his horror that the figure was heading
his way, and he ran up Irvine Street, where he was relieved to see a black hackney cab. He flagged it down and the taxi took
him to his home in Old Swan. The chilling experience left Mr Smith with no further desires to end his life, and he gradually
pulled himself out of his depression. In the February of the following year, Mr Smith read an interesting article in the Liverpool
Echo. The article said that a group of tourists visiting the Metropolitan Cathedral had encountered the ghost of a shabby-looking
man in the cathedral's main square. After smiling at the Americans, the man vanished before their startled eyes. A researcher
into the paranormal looked into the case and said that over the years, many other people had seen the same solid-looking phantom
of a bedraggled figure, and a medium who was brought in to make contact with the ghost claimed that the apparition was of
a man named Bernard Brown. The medium said that "Bernie" Brown had died in the Liverpool Workhouse in the 19th century after
breaking his neck from jumping to his death from a window. This seemed to make sense, because the Metropolitan Cathedral was
built on the site of Liverpool Workhouse.
