Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  ‘The ghost just stood in front of us, blocking our way, for maybe three or four minutes, then she sighed — a deep, mournful sigh that sounded like a rush of wind — then she faded until only her outline was visible, then that disappeared into the strange mist … and the mist itself just evaporated, leaving bright moonlight. Five minutes after she appeared, she was gone. Mother grabbed my hand and we ran back up the hill as fast as our legs could carry us!’

  Most people believe that this footloose phantom is the ghost of Jane Wiseman. Sceptics argue, quite rightly, that Jane died a full five years before construction began on Cobham Hall but forget that she was originally buried close by and that some reports of the ghost refer to it rising from Jane’s original tomb and hurrying towards the house. Where legend and history do clash is concerning Jane’s death. Legend would have us believe she was thrown from the balcony at Cobham Hall by Solomon and died when her head struck the semi-circular steps below. History, of course, proves that impossible. Springing from this story was a claim, still repeated, that bloodstains appear on those steps from time to time. If they do, the blood was never Jane Wiseman’s.

  Another contender in the identity stakes is Rosanna White, a housemaid whom Solomon found one day in bed with another servant, Richard Maddox. Stories tell of Solomon ordering Rosanna’s hair shaved off and Maddox heavily flogged. Rosanna was reported as cursing her employer and swearing that she would one day come back to haunt his house. Perhaps it is she, not Jane Wiseman, who haunts the building and its surroundings.

  The shade of Solomon himself is said to wander his former home and the cemetery where his bones were finally interred. A European traveller staying in the hotel room that was once Solomon’s bedroom claimed to have been awakened in the night by a strange scraping noise (‘like rats’ he said) and when he opened his eyes a ‘most singular-looking old gentleman’ was standing by the window.

  ‘His face was the colour of parchment, crowned with a mass of white curls, his eyes small and his jaw prominent and lantern-shaped. He wore an old-fashioned coat of dark-coloured velvet and tight knee breeches. He had large buckles on his shoes and a heavy gold watch chain was fixed to his waistcoat and glinted in the moonlight. Under his arm he carried a brass telescope — like those used by ship’s captains — and I fancied that before I had woken he had been using the instrument to look out the window. Now, however, his gaze rested squarely on me in a piercing and accusing stare. He was scowling at me as he would if he had come upon an intruder.’ The traveller reached for his walking cane and the apparition vanished. Next morning when he described his nocturnal visitor it fitted the description old-timers gave of the King of the Hawkesbury.

  The ghosts of three different convicts are also said to haunt the house. One, according to a popular but unlikely story, was Jane Wiseman’s lover whom Solomon caught, tied in chains and dumped in the river. The second is an old lag who was supposed to have been flogged to death at Cobham Hall and the third a young convict-servant who came to Solomon one day begging to be allowed to go to Sydney to visit his dying mother. Solomon, the story goes, refused his request, saying there was too much work to do. The young man ran away and tried to swim across the river (which is odd considering Sydney is in the opposite direction), but his leg-irons dragged him under.

  This convict was said to appear regularly at the door of Cobham Hall in ghostly form searching for his former master and still begging for permission to go to his mother. A witness described him as covered in weed and slime and with tears coursing down his ashen face: ‘His hands were raised and held together, like he was prayin’ or beggin’. There weren’t much flesh on him … maybe like he’d been eaten by the fishes, but his leg-irons was still on his ankles. I ain’t never seen anything so bloody terrifying in all me life!’

  One, or both, of the other convicts have been heard slowly dragging their leg-irons and chains across the yard, into the house and up the stairs — an eerie clanking sound that is all the more frightening because it has no visible source.

  In the spring of 1961 Jane’s ghost was blamed for a farcical sequence of events while the hotel was being renovated. An old wall was deliberately knocked down and, at the moment it fell, thunder boomed overhead and another wall collapsed spontaneously. An embankment close by gave way, allowing 5000 gallons (22 cubic metres) of water to rush like a tsunami through the ground floor of the hotel, smashing furniture and making what the appalled owner at the time called ‘a horrid mess’.

  In 1967 a well-known psychic and her assistants spent a night in the hotel with photographic and sound-recording equipment. At around midnight the temperature in the kitchen plummeted and a black cloud (‘like smoke, but not smoke’) enveloped half the room, obscuring everything it covered. Photographs taken then reveal a dark haziness over the affected area.

  The expressway now linking Sydney and Newcastle takes a different route from the old Great Northern Road. There’s not much traffic through Wisemans Ferry any longer but it is a popular spot for campers and visitors to nearby national parks. There is a cable-operated vehicular ferry where Solomon’s ferry ran, and Cobham Hall under its Wisemans Ferry Hotel guise is still there — much altered but intact. To this day if you ask staff about the ghosts they will tell you stories of doors mysteriously opening and closing just last week, of strange noises heard the week before, of items moved by unseen hands and of the shadowy figure seen ‘not long ago’. Whoever the restless spirits are that haunt Wisemans Ferry, they don’t seem to show any inclination to depart.

  11.

  The Guyra Ghost: A Touchy Subject

  ‘Oh, Sir, Sir, there are more tricks done in the village than make a noise!’

  Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (Spanish writer, 1547–1616)

  In the autumn of 1921 the town of Guyra in northern New South Wales found itself in the international spotlight. For a period of about six weeks the world watched with morbid curiosity as a worker’s cottage about a kilometre from the town centre was assaulted by a destructive, invisible force, the occupants were driven to despair and the rest of the community tottered on the brink of mass hysteria.

  It all began one morning when Bill Bowen, a gang foreman who worked for the Guyra Shire Council, walked into the town’s police station and complained to Sergeant Ridge that during the night someone had placed a heavy wooden railway sleeper up against a window of the cottage he and his family rented. Putty, he said, had also been removed from around the pane of glass in the window.

  The sergeant sent his two constables out to investigate. One, Roy Stennett, recalled fifty years later that when they got to the Bowens’ house they inspected the window and removed the railway sleeper, leaving it fifty metres from the house. As the previous day had been April Fool’s Day, the police concluded that the whole incident had been either a prank played on the Bowens by someone else or played on them by Bill Bowen. Mild amusement turned to annoyance when Bowen turned up at the police station the next morning complaining that the sleeper was back and more putty gone. Sergeant Ridge was now convinced that Bowen was pulling his leg. He told his constables to go back and shift the sleeper then return, secretly, after dark, to keep watch on the house.

  Stennett and his colleague arrived at the Bowens’ for the second time that day at dusk and settled down behind some bushes to watch — confidently expecting to catch Bill Bowen setting them up again. Less than an hour later they heard the crack of a .22-calibre rifle close by and the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the house. They ran towards where the shot had come from but could find no one. They returned to the house, where Bowen, his wife and three children were huddled in the kitchen, clearly frightened.

  The next day the police and most of the townspeople were distracted by another problem. An eighty-year-old Irish woman, Mrs Doran, had been seen wandering around a paddock the day before with a potato in each hand. She had not returned home that night, so a full-scale search was undertaken. No trace of the old lady was found and the search was
called off when darkness fell.

  The two constables returned to the Bowens’ home for another night vigil, this time inside the house. Soon after their arrival loud thumping was heard on the walls near the window where the railway sleeper had been placed and in one bedroom. From inside it sounded as though the thumping was coming from outside, but nothing could be seen through the windows. When the police went outside to investigate, the sound seemed to be coming from the inside. These unexplained noises continued for another two nights, then stones ranging in diameter from three to eight centimetres began to rain down on the corrugated iron roof of the house — singly and in deafening showers.

  By then everyone in town and the surrounding district had heard what was going on. Crowds gathered around the Bowens’ house each night to witness the strange to-do. Sergeant Ridge recruited volunteers to stand guard in each of the four rooms in the house and around the outside. Motorcars were lined up in a cordon with their headlights trained on the house, ready to flood the area with light as soon as anything happened. And happen it did, just after dark. The thumping began, rocks crashed into the walls and roof of the house and window panes were smashed. No one could have broken through the cordon without being caught, which meant that either someone within the house was responsible for the thumping and someone in the crowd had managed to throw the rocks without being seen, or that invisible forces were at work.

  That weekend the story broke in the national press and curiosity seekers jammed the roads into Guyra and poured off the Sydney trains. There were journalists and photographers from city newspapers and a flock of self-styled experts on the paranormal. One of the latter, Ben Davey, described as ‘a student of spiritualism and theosophy’, told the press he had been called in by the authorities to subject the phenomenon to ‘the acid test of spiritualism’. Sergeant Ridge (who was showing signs of stress) and his two constables had more or less moved in with the Bowens and were only too willing to allow anyone who offered a possible solution to join them.

  Davey announced that the cause was almost certainly the spirit of Mrs Bowen’s daughter by a previous marriage, a young woman named May, who had died just three months earlier. May, he said, was trying to contact her stepsister Minnie, Bill Bowen’s twelve-year-old daughter, who occupied the bedroom where the thumping was loudest, and that Minnie was refusing to allow her to ‘come through’. This theory implicated Minnie Bowen and thereafter she was the focus of official and public attention.

  Minnie Bowen was a tall, thin girl with straight, dark hair and plain features, described by different newspapers as ‘a normal girl’, ‘not clever’, ‘introspective’ and ‘backward for her age’. They all agreed she didn’t smile very much and her eyes had a penetrating quality. An uncanny ability to anticipate questions was also remarked on. Davey took Minnie, her mother and a local sawmiller (just one of the troop of vigilantes who were stomping all over the Bowens’ house) into Minnie’s bedroom and told the girl that when the knocking started she was to ask the spirit if it was her stepsister. The noise began and, reluctantly, Minnie asked. Davey told the press, proudly, that Minnie then fell to her knees, crossed herself and raised her hands in supplication. The rest of the family and the policemen had crammed into the small room by then and they watched as the distressed child staggered to the bed where Mrs Bowen was sitting and laid her head in her mother’s lap.

  ‘It was May,’ she stammered. ‘She said: “Tell Mother I am perfectly happy where I am, and that your prayers when I was sick brought me where I am and made me happy. Tell Mother not to worry. I’ll watch and guard over you all.”’ There was not a dry eye in the room when Minnie finished.

  Poor Minnie. Those present believed her, but second — and third-hand retellings of what occurred in that room robbed it of sincerity. Minnie was accused of being the cause of the whole affair. She, sceptics said, banged on the walls with a stick and threw the stones. A local doctor secretly coated the walls of Minnie’s bedroom with liquorice powder to detect the marks of blows and drilled a hole through the wall so he could keep her under observation. The paranormal fraternity said Minnie was conjuring up evil spirits. Ordinary folk simply got the wind up.

  It was census time while all this was happening and the census collectors found themselves staring down a gun barrel whenever they knocked at a door. A small girl in town found the loaded revolver a parent had hidden under a pillow, fired it and wounded herself in the head. Unsubstantiated reports came in of a farmer’s wife committing suicide for fear of the ‘ghost’. Some claimed it was the shade of poor old Mrs Doran (who had been found dead) come back to haunt them. Lights burned long through the night, nerves strained and tempers quickened. A team of carpenters put heavy shutters over the Bowens’ windows, but one morning while the family were away someone or something ripped them all down and smashed every window in the house. A cocoa merchant from Samoa, Mr Moors, who claimed to be a personal friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of ‘Sherlock Holmes’), insisted on removing much of the roof so that he and his entourage of five fully-grown men could hide in the ceiling overnight.

  Sergeant Ridge finally cracked and was sent away for a rest cure. A tough Sydney cop named Hardy was sent up to clean up what was fast becoming a very public embarrassment for the police and after sorting out a notorious gang of Sydney hoodlums the year before, Hardy vowed he was not going to let some hick kid make a fool of him. He was much less gentle than the country police had been when he interviewed Minnie, and he succeeded in wringing a confession out of her. ‘Yes,’ she cried, she had thumped on the walls just like everyone said she had and yes, she had thrown all the stones. A very cocky Hardy wired his superiors in Sydney that the case was closed. That night, for the first time in almost a month, there were no thumping noises and no stones thrown. Hardy, the hero of the moment, caught the train back to Sydney the next day. The following night the whole terrifying business started up again.

  At their wits’ end, the Bowens packed Minnie off to stay with her grandmother in Glen Innes for their peace of mind and to protect her from vilification and further harassment — and the noises and the stone-throwing immediately stopped. Minnie settled in contentedly with her gran in a cosy house in Church Street, Glen Innes and it seemed as though the Bowens’ problems were over. However, ten days after her arrival, to everyone’s amazement and horror, stones began hitting the house in Glen Innes. Windows were smashed and solid walls shook under heavy blows. Ornaments crashed to the floor. The police were called, crowds gathered and the whole cycle seemed about to repeat itself. The grandmother wired Minnie’s parents begging them to take their daughter back. Minnie packed her bags again and her parents reluctantly collected her.

  Back home in Guyra the family sat on the edges of their chairs each night, ears straining and nerves tensed for the sounds to begin and the stones to rain down, but they didn’t. Days went by, then weeks and nothing happened. The Bowens began to breathe easily, but the scars of the past were deep. A short time later they packed up and moved on.

  Much has been written about poltergeist activity and how it often occurs in a household where there is a girl approaching puberty. One widely held theory claims that such girls are able to use the powers of their burgeoning sexuality to move physical objects and whip up psychic storms. Some believe that young women whose emotions are deeply repressed have the same powers. Minnie Bowen might well qualify as proof of either or both theories. She may truly have been, deliberately or innocently, conjuring up powerful forces. Equally likely, it could be argued, the Guyra ghost was not a poltergeist at all but a clever man-made plot to discredit the Bowens and drive them from their home, or simply a prank that got horribly out of hand.

  When researching this story back in the mid-1990s I got some very strange responses from my inquiries made in Guyra. So strange, in fact, that I concluded the original published version of the story with the observation: Readers are advised not to go asking questions around Guyra about the ghost: they may be surpri
sed at the hostile response they get. Three quarters of a century after these events the people of Guyra still get annoyed when strangers pry into the affair. The Bowens’ house is still there, but the current occupants do not take kindly to curious visitors. Descendents of the Bowens who live in the district get quite belligerent when anyone mentions the subject, and the local historical society declines to answer inquiries about it.

  I concluded at the time that perhaps they were all simply fed up with the whole business and made the observation that, as there is a vast amount of documentary evidence about the affair available, it seemed futile for the good folk of Guyra to close ranks so late in the day. That opinion has not altered and in fact, has been reinforced by a few more recent revelations.

  When another researcher attempted to piece the mystery together in 2010 he found that archived copies of the Guyra Argus of the time were missing from the collections of both the State Library of New South Wales and the National Library in Canberra. Other inquiries in recent years prompted a few locals to come forwards with some facts that far from clarifying the situation confuse it further. One claimed that the house in Guyra that had been identified for decades as being the Bowens’ was, in fact, not — their true house had been 200 metres away in a different street. The same informant suggested that the real house was subjected to thumping and stone attacks after the Bowens departed and up until it was demolished some years later.

  A little of Minnie Bowen’s later life has also recently been revealed. When she grew up she married, becoming Mrs Inks and living a long and peaceful life in Armidale, before being struck down and killed by a car in her eightieth year. Apparently she spoke little about her childhood, but did show evidence of having psychic powers and it was said that she could always make objects move without touching them.