St Helen's Church, Sefton, dates in part from the twelfth century and stands in the small village of Sefton on the flat land between Liverpool and Southport, immediately beside the Punchbowl public house, itself the subject of its own separate local cupboard-ghost story, giving this quiet corner of the village two connected pieces of haunted-place tradition standing almost side by side.
Local tradition holds that a photograph taken inside or around the church in 1999 appeared to show a ghostly figure, believed by those who circulated the story at the time to be a former vicar of the parish, caught unexpectedly in a frame that was presumably intended to capture nothing more than an ordinary image of the historic building.
No further detail on the photograph itself, its photographer, or its current whereabouts has been traced in the sources available for this entry, and it is recorded here as a single, thinly documented local claim, the kind of photographic ghost story that circulates readily within a small community but rarely survives long enough in any fixed, verifiable form for later researchers to examine directly.
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