The Liverpool Leprechaun Scare

Liverpool, summer 1964. Jubilee Park sits off Jubilee Drive in Kensington, with a bowling green at its heart. On Tuesday 30 June, children from a school beside the green saw something there during playtime.

One child's words reached the Liverpool Daily Post: "last night I saw little men in white hats throwing stones and mud at each other on the bowling green." The Liverpool Echo had them as "little green men in white hats throwing stones and tiny clods of earth at one another." Word spread fast.

Wednesday 1 July. The second night. The green was so crowded that the police had to clear the park. Park Constable James Nolan of the Liverpool Parks Police was weary. "Stones have been thrown on the bowling green and for the second night running no-one has been able to play. The kids just won't go away." Police in cars and on motorcycles cleared the hundreds of youngsters, closed the gate and stood guard. A first-aid shelter treated at least a dozen children for cuts and bruises.

Other children saw them too. A Brae Street School pupil remembered about four tiny figures, "dressed like a school book idea of a typical gnome", popping in and out of a window over the school yard and swinging their legs on the ledge. A ten-year-old on Kensington Fields saw little men, just a few inches tall, dressed in red and black, "standing in the grass, looking at me." The child panicked and ran all the way home. That evening, crowds filled Jubilee Drive.

The scare would not stay put. In Wavertree, a woman saw three little men in green clothes on her backyard wall, throwing stones at her dog. From about 10 July, children gathered in St Chad's churchyard in Kirkby. Some described "a 'strange object in the sky', which changed the colour of its lights from red to silver." Clergy and police broke up the crowds. On 13 July, Canon John Lawton told the Echo: "The children seem to have been convinced at last that there are no leprechauns."

January 1982. Brian Jones told the Echo the children had seen him, a short man playing in his grandfather's overgrown garden. "I bounded into view, babbling made-up words, I jumped up and down, picked up turfs and threw them at the children." Nigel Watson was not convinced. Writing in Magonia in 1985, he noted that Jones dated the start to a Thursday or Friday, not a Tuesday. "None of the children noticed his red waistcoat, the red bobble on his hat, his navy trousers or his denim shirt." Every report named the bowling green, never a private garden. Watson suspected that "perhaps after twenty years two separate events have become confused."

Other theories followed. Travelling performers of short stature, passing through. A prank by Constable Nolan himself. Watson and later writers pointed to Liverpool's large Irish population, to wish-fulfilment and to the behaviour of crowds of mostly Roman Catholic schoolchildren. No official finding was ever made. No photograph of the little men has ever surfaced.

The Liverpool scare came weeks after boys in Gateshead reported tiny men in bright green suits on top of a haystack. Writers have compared it with the Gorbals Vampire hunt in Glasgow in 1954. Janet Bord placed Wavertree in her guide to fairy sites. And one former schoolchild, writing to the Echo in 2009, still remembered it "as if it were yesterday."