The following is an excerpt from the South Liverpool section of 800 Years of Haunted Liverpool (History Press, 2008)
Today’s Toxteth Ambulance Station opened on Grafton Street in 1984, built as a replacement for the previous station on Upper Stanhope Street which is now privately owned but unused. The Grafton Street station was constructed on part of the large site where the Royal Southern Hospital had previously stood, having been opened in May 1872, closed 1978 and demolished in 1980.
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Maybe it should come as no surprise that a former hospital site should be a location of alleged hauntings. After all, numerous people would have met their end on that spot, many of them in considerable pain and distress. However, there are some who would suggest that the site’s ethereal residents date from a time prior to the hospital’s construction. Caryl Street, where the hospital’s entrance once stood, is very close to the docklands and it has been alleged that this area was once the location of a dreadful place of confinement. According to Terence Whitaker’s Lancashire’s Ghosts & Legends (written before the hospital had been demolished),
“The site on which the Royal Southern Hospital now stands is said to be haunted by the restless spirits of African slaves, who, during the great slaving days of Liverpool were confined to cells in this part of the city, prior to being shipped to the plantations of the West Indies and the deep south of North America”.
Whitaker goes on to assert that many of the slaves would have perished in the inhumane conditions of the dockland prison and that this could be the reason for their remaining in this realm and haunting the locationii. Interested to see if there was any historical record of such a holding place in the Toxteth or Dingle area, I contacted the International Slavery Museum (www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism) who in turn put me in touch with Liverpudlian historian and journalist Laurence Westgaph. Mr. Westgaph responded
“I have heard of nothing to suggest that there were slave cells in the area. As you are probably aware, most slaves never set foot in Britain as ships sailed to Africa with goods that were traded for slaves and then the Africans were taken to the Americas where they were sold. Ships returned to Britain with sugar, tobacco and bills of exchange so most enslaved Africans did not end up on British shores. Also during the slave trade period Toxteth park was very rural, just farmers fields and a few fishermen. So whether or not there would have been a permanent, jail like structure to hold captives is highly unlikely. There is certainly no reference to this in any of the sources I have come across in my studies”.
And yet despite such assurances, stories of ghostly slaves and hidden cells are still common along the docklands. Tales are told of strange happenings during the renovation of the Albert Dock (which now houses the International Slavery Museum) with spectral arms reaching out toward workmen as they sandblasted walls which still had “slave chains” attached to themiii. The Baltic Fleet public house, about one mile (2.54 km) northwest of the ambulance station, is rumoured to have its own subterranean passageway leading to the docks and again, there are stories of wall mounted chains and slaves hidden away in dank cells. Are these macabre tales echoes of some clandestine part of Liverpool’s history, unrecorded but known to the few, or is this simply a city haunted by its past misdeeds?
i www.toxteth.net/places/liverpool/history/firemen.htm
ii “Lancashire’s Ghosts & Legends” by Terence Whitaker, 1982, Granada Publishing LTD.
iii www.bbc.co.uk/liverpool/content/articles/2005/10/31/halloween_dock_ghosts_feature.shtml
1974 I was 21 and had my appendix out at the Southern Hospital Carl Street Liverpool one night during the week I was recovering there I awoke to a medium height elderly man with long blonde hair pull my bed from the wall got behind it and My thought at the time was he wanted to run my bed down the ward crashing out of the large window. As I was in a lying down position on my back I raised my hands to the rails of the bed to try and stop him he dug his long finger nails into the back of my fingers screaming in pain and terror I shouted for a nurse telling her about the man at the back of my bed the nurse hushed me by saying I had been dreaming as she pushed the bed back against the wall but my hands I said he pressed his nails into my fingers which where slightly bleeding, you’ve done that yourself she soothed now go to sleep. What I didn’t tell the nurse was when I was a baby one half years old I pulled paper from a fire in a grate setting my dress on fire and right hand years of skin grafts saved my fingers but I have no nails. The old man at the back of my bed was swaying back and forth making counting sounds he dug his long fingernails into the the back of my left and right hand fingers leaving broken skin dent marks causing slight blood. There is no way I could have done this myself. The next day I told my mum (who had come to visit me) and showed her the dent markes back my fingers. Over the years have often wondered about that man and why he would want to do me harm.