Lost passages were French connection to the past
In October 1951, workmen excavating the foundations of the bomb-blitzed Corn Exchange in Brunswick Street came upon a series of strange subterranean passages at a depth of 46 feet. The diggers explored the passageways and came upon a walled, waterlogged chamber, 12ft square. Old maps were consulted, but none of them provided any information on the chamber and the secret passages. The general consensus among local historians was that the workmen had stumbled upon a dungeon where French prisoners, captured in the Napoleonic Wars, had been detained and interrogated.
Not long after the discovery of the dungeon, staff at a nearby bank on Brunswick Street reported hearing the sound of singing voices and the faint rattle of chains. The ghostly sounds were usually heard in the late afternoon and seemed to originate in the bank vaults. Around this time, a shop near to the bank was being modernised, and when a wall was demolished, a room containing a coffin was discovered. The walled-up room was not a burial vault, and the well-preserved corpse in the coffin - dressed in expensive mid-Victorian clothes - was never identified. Weeks after the coffin had been buried at a local cemetery; staff at the shop were startled by the sudden appearance of a smiling Dickensian-looking man with rosy cheeks.
He wore a monocle, a chequered suit and a high white collar, and even when he couldn't be seen, he was often heard laughing or singing somewhere out of sight. The most intriguing haunting in this part of the city is the strange man in black who haunts Derby Square, and is believed to be a phantom who dates back to medieval times, when Liverpool Castle stood on the spot where the Victoria monument is now located. In the early 1980s, when workmen were excavating Derby Square to clear a space for the foundations of the Queen Elizabeth II Law Courts, a startling discovery was made.
A fully preserved clothed and helmeted man - believed to have been a Roundhead soldier from the English Civil War - was found in the clay, among the vestiges of Liverpool Castle's dungeons. Within an hour of the discovery, a group of mysterious people who claimed they were from Liverpool University turned up at the building site and claimed the 17th century corpse. The body was carefully removed from the clay, put in a container, and whisked away in a van. When a local historian made enquiries at Liverpool University's archaeology department, he learnt to his horror that no one from the university knew about the find in Derby Square, and the whereabouts of the helmeted soldier are still unknown.
