Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  The husband by then had become a respected member of the local Lutheran Church and it was there he sought help. Before the whole congregation he declared that his wife had fallen into sin through idleness. The pastor advised him to keep his wife constantly pregnant to prevent her fornicating with the devil. The husband took the pastor’s advice and bedded his wife as often as he could physically manage.

  Two children were born within two years and after each birth the husband returned to his task with renewed vigour. Finally the wife protested and refused to submit to her husband’s constant assaults. He then took a whip to her and beat her mercilessly until her back and buttocks were raw. In despair the young woman ran away from home — to Kaiser Stuhl Mountain.

  When she returned a few days later she possessed strange new powers. She crept up on her husband while he was ploughing in the vineyard. She drew some cryptic designs in the dust and mumbled an evil incantation. When her husband saw her he reined in their white plough horse, but when he tried to remove his hands from the plough he found to his horror that he could not. His hands were as rigid as stone and his fingers were firmly locked to the handles of the plough. Try though he might he could not free himself.

  The wife had placed a hex on her brutal husband and it seemed he was fated to spend the rest of his life endlessly ploughing the strips of ground between the vines in fair weather and foul. The wife cared for the horse, feeding it and stabling it at night. She brought food to her miserable husband and fed him with a spoon. She also took down his trousers each day so that he could relieve himself onto the soil. Unmoved by his tears and pleas she went about the business of running her own property once more and caring for the babies while he stumbled along behind that plough from dawn to sunset.

  News of the husband’s plight spread quickly through the village but no one dared come to his aid. It was not until he developed pneumonia and was close to death that his wife finally removed the hex and released him. He struggled to the cottage and crawled into bed where, just hours later, he died, cursing his wife. At her husband’s funeral the young widow refused to don the traditional sackcloth and ashes or even wear black and while the rest of the congregation offered prayers for the soul of their departed bruder in their mother tongue, she was heard muttering incomprehensible words in a strange language.

  After the funeral the widow was spat on and reviled by the old women of the village. Some said that, as well as her other sins, she conversed with her cat and grew herbs to concoct magic potions. She was blamed for every ill that befell the village. Finally, the elders of the church pronounced her to be ‘the bride of the goat’ (the Devil’s bride) and ordered that she be tried by dunking. ‘If she drowns her innocence will be proved,’ they said, ‘and if she does not, then God will have confirmed that she is a witch — and we shall burn her!’

  The young woman was dragged, screaming, to the dam near the village and her head held under the water for more than an hour while the onlookers prayed fervently for her salvation. She struggled for a while but the strong hands of the self-righteous held her down. When they lifted her dripping body from the water, smeared with foul-smelling mud and weed, she was dead and two lifeless eyes stared accusingly at her judges.

  Her innocence proven, the young woman was treated far better in death than she ever had been in life. The villagers gathered flowers from their gardens and the surrounding meadows to carpet the graveyard where her funeral was conducted. The pastor delivered an impassioned eulogy while his flock prayed and wept for her and themselves.

  As the years passed the villagers tried to put the whole affair out of their minds but they could not, for the ghost of the young woman returned from the grave to take revenge on all those who had mistreated her. The story goes that the pastor, the church elders and each of the young woman’s accusers were visited in turn by her vengeful ghost and that all met horrible deaths soon after.

  True-believers claim that the ghosts of the young woman and her husband haunt the district to this day. Terrified witnesses have reported seeing the young woman dancing naked on her own grave when the moon is full, a wild and ferocious expression on her face, her body still streaked with mud and her hair matted with slimy russet-and-black weed.

  The ghost of her unfortunate husband also appears in the old vineyard that was once theirs. He is seen at midnight and only when the moon is full: a ghastly spectral figure (little more than a skeleton), bowed and cowed, stumbling along behind a spectral plough drawn by a spectral horse.

  When this story was made public some years ago the source quoted was a handwritten journal found by descendants of the young couple in a strongbox under the floorboards of the cottage. The vineyard is still there and so are the ghosts but the owners, not surprisingly, are reluctant to discuss this strange and dark episode in their family’s history.

  Another ghost whom locals can (and in this case will) put a name to haunts an abandoned farmhouse six kilometres from Greenock. Travus Klinkwort’s story is well known in the district and very few feel sympathy for his ghost. A widower, Travus owned the farm many years ago and eked out a living growing vegetables, aided by his two daughters, Josia and Esther.

  Travus was a cold and heartless man who worked his daughters hard and denied them any pleasures. He was also fanatical about protecting their virtue, but over-protection simply increased their curiosity and their desirability to the young men of the district.

  Josia, the prettier of the two, invited a youth named Randall to meet her in the potato patch one night. Esther stood guard at a distance while Josia found out what she had been missing. Travus, suspecting deceit, grabbed his gun and ran to the potato patch. Esther screamed while Josia and Randall scrambled to their feet and tried to pull on their clothes. Travus fired both barrels of his gun.

  The lovers were never seen again but it is said that Travus’s potato crop the next year was the richest ever. Travus died a few years later and Esther went to her grave a crazed, crippled spinster, still hiding the secret of what had occurred that night.

  As if condemned to endless punishment, Travus Klinkwort’s ghost is trapped at the scene of his terrible crime. He has often been seen (and even photographed) standing in the doorway of the crumbling building. He wears a torn great coat, baggy trousers and a battered hat. He stares unrepentantly back at observers while they wonder if he still has his gun.

  A real-estate agent (new to the district and knowing nothing about the house’s history) ventured up the dusty driveway to the Klinkwort house one day a few years back, hoping to find a property to list and, to his dismay, discovered the answer to the question about Travus’s gun.

  Finding the house deserted and the front door ajar he ventured inside. At first he saw nothing but dust and cobwebs and heard nothing but the wind whistling through gaps in the roof. ‘I was just doing a few calculations in my head about what it might cost to fix the place up when I heard a sound behind me,’ the real-estate agent later explained. ‘I thought I must have disturbed a dog because it sounded just like that deep growling sound dogs make in their throats. I turned around very warily and to my surprise found, not a dog, but an old man standing in the doorway of the front room. I was relieved that it was not a vicious dog, then terrified when the man raised an ancient shotgun and pointed the barrels at me.

  ‘The old man’s mouth was closed and the strange sound seemed to be coming from inside his body. The sound got louder and louder until it was a deafening roar and then I saw one crooked, bony finger begin to close around the trigger. I yelled “Don’t shoot!” but it was too late. I saw the gun fire, but heard no explosion and in that instant the figure and the roaring sound vanished … and so did I a split second later. Up until then I’d never believed in ghosts, but real guns go “bang” and real people don’t vanish into thin air!’

  The real-estate agent also recalled the awful stench of rotting potatoes in Travus Klinkwort’s house … and smells of an even worse kind figure in our final story of ruptured re
lationships from the Barossa Valley.

  When a thirty-six-year-old shy spinster met a like-endowed bachelor in a café near Nuriootpa, love (or desperation) brought them together. Certain that the bride’s tyrant of a mother, a widow herself, would not approve of the match, they eloped. Eventually the mother came round — or appeared to — and invited the couple to share her house, but it soon became apparent that all she really wanted was an unpaid labourer to tend her garden and a handmaid to wait on her. She also took every opportunity to drive a wedge between husband and wife, telling each the other was ‘screwing around’.

  The old woman had some other objectionable habits. She weighed 130 kilograms and consumed platefuls of spiced sausages, dill cucumber, pickled onions and sauerkraut at every meal. Dessert comprised dozens of cream cakes that she devoured with glee, cream dripping off her jowls. After these gargantuan feasts she would repair to the stone dunny in the yard, there to sit and fart thunderously for the best part of an hour.

  The repugnant parent insisted the daughter sleep with her, so these times were the only opportunity the unhappily married couple had to be alone and to catch up on some of the pleasures they had missed out on in their youth. One night the husband and wife realised that Mother had been an unusually long time in the dunny and that they had not heard the results of her labours for some time. The daughter went down with a torch and found her mother slumped on the wooden seat, her voluminous red bloomers hanging around her bulbous ankles. The old woman’s face was much the same colour as her bloomers and she was quite dead.

  Daughter and son-in-law had a terrible time shifting her. Finally they dragged her out of the dunny and rolled her onto a sheet of corrugated iron. This they dragged under a stout tree branch then winched the body into a wheelbarrow with a block and tackle. When the doctor arrived the old woman was lying angelically composed on her bed and the couple were drooping with exhaustion.

  During the old woman’s wake the daughter excused herself from the guests and went down to the stone dunny. She was glad of a few minutes’ rest and solitude but soon her relief turned to terror. The carefully bolted door was suddenly flung open then slammed, jamming securely. The daughter’s screams attracted the guests, who came running to her aid. When they tried the door it swung open effortlessly.

  Next time the daughter used the dunny the contents of the pan boiled up and splashed over her shoes, and when her husband was taking a pee the raised wooden seat was slammed down with dire consequences. That was too much for the couple; drastic remedies were required. They decided to demolish the old dunny and build a new one (with one of those newfangled flushing systems) attached to the house.

  A team of workmen arrived a few days later to begin work. The husband thought the solid wooden door on the old dunny worth saving, so while the workman started removing the roof he went inside to unscrew it. The door slammed, trapping him. ‘Let me out you bloody old bitch!’ he screamed (or words to that effect). The workmen told him not to worry; they would pull him out through the roof. Then it happened. As the workmen watched, mouths agape, the large metal can rose from its spider-infested bed, hovered momentarily in mid-air then flipped upside down, pouring its stinking contents over the mortified husband’s head.

  ‘I copped nothing but shit from the old girl when she was alive, but I copped even more after she died,’ the husband remembers. Rhubarb and flowers now grow where the haunted dunny once stood — and very well they grow too.

  5.

  Amityville, Australia

  A ghost is the outward and visible sign of an inward fear

  Ambrose Bierce (American short-story writer, 1842–1914)

  In 1980 American husband and wife psychic investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren were invited to Melbourne to appear on a popular late-night television variety show. The Warrens had become world famous for their involvement with the Amityville Horror house (long before the book and film) and in the case that inspired the film The Exorcist.

  On the night they appeared the program’s host invited viewers to phone in if they had a supernatural problem the Warrens might be able to solve. A young couple called long distance from Sydney with a harrowing story. They told how they and their children moved into their Gladesville house three years before and had been tormented by strange and terrifying events ever since. They described how they all felt deeply oppressed by some strong, invisible force whenever they were inside the house. For the wife and children this produced mind-numbing lethargy and for the husband homicidal tendencies. ‘I love my wife,’ the distressed man explained, ‘but I find myself reaching for a knife and barely able to control the urge to stab her … it’s as if some evil takes control of me and the only way I can escape is to leave the house.’

  They told of loud, eerie laughter echoing through the house and robbing them of sleep night after night and strange symbols that looked as if they had been drawn in thick dust appearing on the interior walls. They also described how cadaverous faces suddenly appeared, reflected in windows and mirrors. The man described the faces of several ugly, evil-looking old men, two haggard crones and an attractive younger woman, all leering and scowling at them from within the glass. One particularly terrifying face that appeared on a mirror had an expression of such hatred and malevolence that it had turned their stomachs, they said. After three years of psychic persecution the family were at their wits’ end and begged for assistance. The Warrens agreed to fly to Sydney the next day, visit the house and do what they could to help.

  When they arrived (with a television crew in tow) they found a well-kept, split-level brick and tile house about forty years old and showing no outward signs of the tumult within. As soon as Lorraine Warren entered the house she said she could feel a great pressure bearing down on her, so strong that she could barely raise her arms. ‘There is something very evil here,’ she announced. When she lay on a bed in the room where she felt the force was centred, the television crew watched in amazement as her features changed and she seemed to visibly age before their eyes. Her back arched, her hands clenched and unclenched convulsively, her eyes blazed and they knew that she had entered into some kind of mental combat with whatever it was that held sway over the house.

  In the meantime they were having problems of their own. A fully charged battery pack went dead after just a few minutes and their cameras failed, then worked, then failed again. When they tried to phone for back-up equipment they found the line was dead. Twenty minutes later it was working perfectly.

  After five hours in the house the Warrens gathered the family and television crew together to deliver their verdict. The house, they were reported as saying, was cursed. An old woman had placed a hex on it and its occupants and it was now in an advanced state of demonic possession. If the family remained there any longer a psychic explosion would occur and their lives were at risk. ‘Leave now,’ was their advice.

  The family fled, leaving most of their possessions behind. The press picked up the story and the headline ‘FAMILY FLEE GHOST HOUSE’ was splashed across the front pages of newspapers across the country. The orgy of publicity lasted (as such stories do) for about two days and has been followed by thirty years of silence. The Warrens went back to America and the family moved to another suburb. Someone else now lives in that house in Gladesville which, had the Warrens not intervened, might have become as famous as the one in Amityville.

  Strange events that had a few years earlier overtaken a West Australian family, first in a small flat in Shoalwater then at Medina, also attracted national press and television coverage, keeping readers spellbound for several weeks.

  The parents, Peter and Faye, and their three small children (the youngest a baby), were a very ordinary family in most ways: battlers trying hard to make ends meet. Peter had been out of work for some time then found a job in January 1973. Faye missed having him around all day and began to feel lonely and trapped in the little flat. Nerves were on edge and tempers probably flared, but the events that followed soon reuni
ted the family, in fear for their sanity and their lives.

  Some unseen force began throwing objects around inside the flat. The youngest member of the family seemed to be the main target. A large saucepan filled with boiling water and potatoes was hurled at the baby’s cot moments after Faye had lifted her out. A loud bang in the bedroom brought both parents running just in time to see a heavy hairbrush rise from the dressing table and strike the baby’s pillow just millimetres from her head. A mosquito net covering the cot was ripped down and tossed to the floor. When Peter was stepping out of the shower one day he watched, horrified, as a heavy pan came hurtling down the hallway, made a right-angle turn and crashed into the frame of the bathroom door, leaving a deep gouge.

  When a reporter from the Sunday Independent visited the flat a heavy china mug crashed to the ground beside his feet and skidded across the floor. A kindly Methodist minister who called to offer comfort found himself the target of a flying drinking glass that shattered in mid-air just centimetres from his nose. Newspapers across the country picked up the story and the flat was besieged by well-meaning people offering help, the morbidly curious and many cranks including a couple who turned up in a black limousine saying they collected ghosts and were going to take the family’s away in the boot of the limo!

  After forty separate incidents in ten days both parents were at their wits’ end. Two Catholic priests tried to exorcise the ‘demon’ without success. Faye collapsed and had to be hospitalised. The state Minister for Housing agreed to provide alternative accommodation for the family and they moved to another flat at Medina several kilometres away, but the mayhem started up there. Whatever it was that caused it had travelled with the family to their new home.