Tom Slemen tells the 'tale of love' about the little boy ghost of Myrtle Street...
One freezing dusky late afternoon on 16 December, 1878, a young overworked locum doctor named Charles Blunden fell asleep at his desk in a surgery off Myrtle Street.
The physician's sleep was shattered by the incessant jangling of the doorbell.
Answering the door, Dr Blunden saw a tiny ragged-trousered boy wearing a flat cap and a blue scarf, standing on the snow-crusted doorstep in his bare feet. "Please come with me sir! My ma is dying!" he pleaded.
Blunden grabbed his medical bag and followed the boy to an alleyway off Hope Street, where a poor woman of about 30 lay face-down in the snow and slush.
Blunden managed to haul the unconscious woman into a hansom cab, and he instructed the driver to take his patient to the Brownlow Street Infirmary at once.
As the hansom trundled along Mount Pleasant, the young doctor suddenly realised that the boy in the blue scarf had been left behind in the mad dash, but there was no time to go and fetch him, as the woman seemed to be in what we today would call a comatose state.
The woman subsequently made a miraculous recovery from what was diagnosed as severe pleurisy several weeks later.
She couldn't thank Dr Blunden enough, but the medical man modestly asserted it had been the woman's son who deserved the praise, running to fetch help in the first place.
He then asked if the child was staying with relatives because he had been unable to find him anywhere in the neighbourhood of Hope Street.
The woman looked puzzled when the doctor told her this, because her only son had died from a fever at Christmas three years previously in 1875.
Blunden was speechless.
The woman reached for the bedside cabinet and took out her threadbare clothes. Among the shabby garments was an item of her deceased child's clothing which she had treasured as a souvenir for three years - a little blue scarf .
The lad had loved that scarf.
It was the very same one the little ghostly urchin had worn when he had returned from beyond the grave to call at Dr Blunden's surgery on that wintry afternoon.
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