Birkenhead Priory, founded around 1150, holds a genuine distinction that needs no ghost story to justify it: it is the oldest standing building anywhere on Merseyside. Its Benedictine monks did far more than pray within its walls; they looked after travellers and operated the first officially regulated ferry crossing of the Mersey, the very origin of the phrase later made famous as "Ferry 'cross the Mersey", running that crossing for nearly four hundred years until the Dissolution of the Monasteries finally ended the priory's religious life in 1538. The nearby Monks Ferry crossing point still carries their name today, a small piece of medieval Birkenhead surviving in modern signage long after the monks themselves were gone.
The priory ruins now operate as a heritage site open to the public, and a regular venue for organised ghost hunts drawn by its genuine age and atmosphere. Modern reports connected with the wider priory and Monks Ferry site include one widely circulated and genuinely striking claim: CCTV footage from a nearby car park, associated with a building referred to locally as Priory House, said to show three young boys with old-fashioned bowl-cut haircuts standing quietly in the car park, with no explanation ever offered for either their presence or their distinctly dated appearance.
As with most CCTV-based ghost claims recorded anywhere in this collection, this footage has never been independently verified in any formal sense, and no contemporary account attaches a specific, named ghost to the medieval priory building itself beyond its broad and well-earned reputation as Wirral's oldest and most atmospheric surviving haunt. The three boys remain, for now, exactly what the footage shows them to be, an unexplained image rather than a documented story.
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