Welcome, Creighton Barrel III

In March 1979, a strange spectacle was witnessed by many on the streets of Liverpool - a ghostly funeral procession from the Edwardian or Victorian eras. Around one in the afternoon, people enjoying window seats at Kirkland's Café on Hardman Street noticed a tall gaunt looking man in a long black coat walking up the road outside. He wore a tall top hat with long ribbons streaming from it in the cold March breeze. In his hand he held a staff with a…

Love can transcend almost any obstacle. It can leapfrog over age differences, it can see beyond the colour of a person's skin, and it can bridge the gulf between rich and poor. The following story, which happened a long time ago, seems to indicate that love can even transcend time itself.

On the snowy Saturday afternoon of December 1901, Mrs Rose Mooney sat in front of the blazing fire in the caretaker's quarters at Speke Hall, an old but beautiful half-timbered mansion in…

There was once a curious Irishman named John Hannigan who appeared on the Liverpool scene at the turn of the 20th century. Nothing about the middle-aged Hannigan was known, except that he came from County Meath in Ireland around 1905. The rest of his background is a blank. He didn't seem to work, but was never short of money, which was mostly spent in the public houses of Liverpool. He wore a pair of wire-framed spectacles and sported a trimmed moustache, but was said to be handsome, and…

In the 1890s, an eccentric but well-intentioned character of distinction named Danby Gifford cut a well-known figure on the streets of Liverpool. An incurable insomniac, Danby, or "Dashing Dan" as he was known, would leave the 380-roomed North Western Hotel on Lime Street each night, and patrol the midnight streets, armed with a silver gilt-handled malacca sword stick and .22-calibre two-shot Derringer, said to be the very same pistol that Wilkes shot Lincoln with, won from a riverboat…