Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  15.

  Sportin’ Types

  Now about those ghosts. I’m sure they’re there and I’m not half so alarmed at meeting up with any of them as I am at having to meet the live nuts I have to see every day.

  Bess Truman (wife the 33rd President of the United States)

  It is inevitable that in a country as sport-obsessed as Australia our folklore should include some spirit sportsmen and spirit sportswomen. One of the most remarkable of these stories concerns a now-retired senior public servant who had a nerve-jangling experience on Royal Perth Golf Course many years ago.

  The future bureaucrat was just fifteen at the time and employed as a part-time caddie. He and another lad were accompanying two intrepid, middle-aged golfers around eighteen holes on a wet and windy afternoon when another party appeared out of the mist ahead of them. The second party was made up of two men and two women and one of the men had clearly lost his golf ball in the rough. He was searching for it while the others waited in the middle of the fairway.

  One of the two players with our narrator called out ‘fore’, expecting the party ahead to move and signal back to play through, but his call seemed to go unheeded. A chorus of ‘fore’ echoed down the fairway but the party ahead seemed not to hear. Our narrator was told to ‘Go and wake ’em up, lad.’ He set off towards the other group and, as he drew closer, noticed that their clothes were old-fashioned and their clubs antiquated. At about fifty paces he opened his mouth to call out ‘Excuse me’, but the sound never left his throat. The three figures on the fairway had vanished. Instinctively he looked to where the fourth figure had been, in the rough, just in time to see it fade slowly away.

  The two middle-aged golfers and the other caddie were as mystified as our narrator. From the greater distance of their vantage point they were able to convince themselves that the other party had just wandered off into the mist but the future public servant knew exactly what he had seen. Back at the clubhouse he asked if two men and two women fitting the description of the mystery party had signed on that day and he was assured that they had not. Later he went back to the spot and poked around in the rough where the solitary figure had been searching. Buried beneath fifteen centimetres of leaf mould he found an old golf ball — of a type and brand that had not been manufactured for fifty years. The ball is now almost a century old and the retired public servant still has it.

  A group of youths had a similarly unnerving experience when they went to do a ‘bit o’ kickin’’ on the Rugby Oval in Mulgoa Road, Penrith, at dusk on a summer evening a few years ago. The youths were having a fine time, ducking and dodging and planting easy goals between the white-painted posts. The sun had set behind the mountains across the river, but the warmth of the day lingered and there was not a breath of wind.

  Suddenly everything changed. The youths heard footsteps pounding across the ground and they all turned expecting to find someone approaching but apart from them, the field was empty. At the same moment a narrow tunnel of strong, icy cold wind roared across the playing field, making their clothing flap and knocking the football from one youth’s hands — but not disturbing trees just ten metres away. As quickly as the phenomenon had arrived it passed, leaving the group shivering with cold and shock. The boy who had been in possession of the ball was the first to find his tongue. ‘What the fuck was that?’ he asked, but none of his mates could offer an answer.

  The youths told their parents then thought nothing more about the incident — until it happened again in the same place at the same time of day a couple of weeks later. No explanation was found for this strange phenomenon. History shows that a man murdered his wife at nearby Peach Tree Creek and a rower died on the Nepean River in a boating accident long ago. Perhaps it is connected with the murder (the unseen ghost of a running victim or a chasing killer), or the unfortunate rower wanting to join in the fun — or maybe it’s the spirit of some long-dead Penrith Panther still adding goals to his score.

  A visible ghost put in an appearance during a cricket match in the New South Wales town of Orange about forty years back. This happened on another balmy summer day when half the town gathered to watch the local team compete against a visiting eleven. The visitors won the toss and chose to bat first. Their opening batsmen were both professional shearers — tough men with powerful arms and broad shoulders conditioned by years of back-breaking labour. Between them the two amassed a score of 160 before their captain declared. The local team came stumbling off the field, drenched in perspiration and dazed by two hours of standing in the hot sun.

  While wives, mothers and sisters served tea and the smell of sandwiches and cakes wafted through the pavilion, the coach of the local team tried to motivate his batsmen into pulling off a miracle in the second half. Among them was a young shop assistant playing his first game for his hometown team. He was slight in build and an unproven player but his cricketing pedigree was impressive. His late grandfather had been captain of New South Wales and a crack batsman who had demolished the attacks of many celebrated bowlers. The coach took the novice aside and said: ‘Listen, kid, I’m gonna put you on at the end of the tail. Just do your best.’

  The bad luck that had plagued the home team continued when they stood at the crease. By the end of eight overs their best batsmen were back in the pavilion and their score stood at six for forty-one. The middle order stood their ground and amassed another seventy runs between them, but when the young man’s turn to bat came, the deficit still stood at fifty.

  The novice batsman’s mother and his kid sister were seated on a bench beside the railing and cheered him as he strode out onto the field. His mother was a war widow and ever since her husband had fallen to a Japanese sniper’s bullet in the jungle of New Guinea, she had doted on her ‘boy’. ‘You show ’em, love!’ she shouted proudly as he passed. Then she added as an afterthought: ‘Remember your grandpa!’

  The man of the moment reached the pitch and if the opposing team had known how much he was quaking in his shoes and sweating under his cap, they could have dismissed him with one curly ball. Instead the opposing batsman lobbed him a short ball. The batsman stepped up to it and struck it squarely. The ball raced away and the novice had his first runs on the board. Fears of being out for a duck were dispelled and the runs kept coming until just six more were needed for victory. Then a vicious ball rose off the hard, dusty pitch and struck him hard on the elbow. The frustrated bowler shouted for an ‘LBW’ dismissal, but the umpire shook his head. Meanwhile our hero was suffering excruciating pain in his arm. The limb hung limp at his side and when he tried to grip the bat again his hand felt numb.

  While the bowler strode off to commence his run, the batsman closed his eyes to try to block out the pain and when he opened them again he glanced across to where his mother and his sister were seated. What he saw made him blink again. Sitting between them was an elderly man in a dark suit with a black waistcoat. A broad-brimmed Panama hat obscured most of his face but a drooping white moustache was visible below it and the studs that secured his old-fashioned starched collar glinted in the sunlight.

  The novice batsman had never met his famous cricketing grandfather, but he had no doubt that it was he who was sitting beside his mother at that crucial moment. As if by some form of telepathy he heard the old man’s voice speaking in his ear: ‘You can do it, lad. I’m with you.’

  Our hero faced up at the crease, the crowd held its communal breath and the bowler delivered a fast ‘Yorker’ that sped down the pitch like a bullet, hit the ground at the batsman’s feet and spun off to the side. Just how he managed to get into a position to strike the ball, the young man never knew, but strike it he did, straight off the middle of his bat. The ball soared skywards and a fielder on the boundary positioned himself to catch it — but failed. The ball flew over the fielder’s head, over the boundary and over the clubhouse, finally coming to earth beside a startled cow in a neighbouring paddock.

  The crowd roared their approval and the rest of the Orange
team ran onto the field to congratulate the hero of the moment. They hoisted him onto their shoulders and carried him back to the pavilion. The young man himself was in a daze brought on by surprise, relief, pride and the realisation that he had had an uncanny experience. He saw his mum clapping so hard her hat had toppled off and his sister jumping up and down with excitement, but the figure that had been sitting between them was gone.

  Amid the handshakes, the slaps on the back, the hugs and the kisses, the young man kept his own counsel about what he had seen and heard. Neither his mother nor his sister mentioned it so our hero concluded that he alone had been privileged to see the ghost of his late grandfather. That is until he was packing up his gear in the pavilion half an hour later and the coach sauntered over. ‘Well done again, mate,’ he said. ‘You saved our bacon. Oh, and by the way, who was that old geezer sitting next to your mum when you hit that six?’

  Our final sporting story proves that the supernatural (like sport) breaches international boundaries and ghosts are not limited by distance.

  It concerns the Sydney Olympic Games of 2000 and recent events in Japan — and a more thought-provoking story would be hard to find.

  Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the International Olympic Committee at the time, pronounced the Sydney Olympics ‘the best ever’ and that was due not only to the spirit of goodwill that characterised the whole enterprise, but also the care that had been taken over preparations. A contingent of 5000 international journalists (for example) found themselves accommodated together in a well-appointed, high-tech media village at Lidcombe, about twenty kilometres west of the city. Comfortable accommodation was provided in a mixture of old and new buildings and the supernatural must have been far from the minds of the keyed-up commentators as they settled in and set up to report on their respective nation’s participation in the games. If they had known the history of the old building however, they might have given a casual thought to ghosts, for it was the former Lidcombe Hospital and reputedly haunted by many disturbed spirits.

  A Japanese sports writer sent by a Tokyo-based magazine discovered he was not alone in his room one night when a hazy, female figure dressed in a hospital nightgown appeared suddenly at the foot of his bed. ‘She had a friendly, concerned expression on her face and I did not feel at all frightened by her presence, although I knew instinctively that she was not a living person,’ he told colleagues the next day, most of whom dismissed his story as a dream or the result of jet lag. With the spectacular opening ceremony to report on and the start of competition, the sports writer put the whole episode out of his mind and had almost forgotten it when he went to visit his aged parents in the town of Kamaishi on the east coast of Honshü in March 2011.

  ‘My parents lived in a house near the harbour,’ he recalls, ‘and when the tsunami struck we had no warning. A giant wall of debris with cars, boats, parts of other buildings and the bodies of people and animals came roaring down the street. It reached my parents’ house in seconds. The sound was indescribable. I could see my mother screaming, but could not hear her. I put my arms around my parents just as everything around us disintegrated. I remember being lifted off my feet and then everything went black.

  ‘Some hours must have passed before I came to. I found myself sitting on the sharp edge of a piece of concrete that might once have been a building or part of a bridge, sticking out of a swirling sea of watery mud. It was deathly quiet. I was not sure whether I was alive or dead and I couldn’t work out where I was. Kamaishi as I knew it was unrecognisable; I could see nothing familiar at all. I couldn’t even tell where the land ended and the sea began. Then the strangest thing happened. I suddenly realised I was not alone on my small concrete island. There was a woman sitting beside me and when she turned her face I could see she was European. For a moment I didn’t recognise her, although she was smiling at me as though she knew me. Then, as you would say in English, “the penny dropped”. It was the figure I had seen in Sydney eleven years earlier dressed as I had seen it then and suddenly I felt at peace and safe. The lady kept me company for many hours. We didn’t speak; there didn’t seem to be anything to say. I tried to move a couple of times but she put her hand on my shoulder. As night came lights appeared in the distance. It was a team of rescuers with powerful torches and they had spotted me. The lights blinded me momentarily and when I turned to look at my companion she was gone. I was alone again and about to be rescued. I had survived by some miracle and the intervention of a yrei — a kindly spirit — from 8000 kilometres away in Sydney.’

  The protagonist in this story can be found at his desk in Tokyo or out on assignment any day of the week. He has not shared his experiences with many others and would only allow his story to be published here if his name was withheld. And can he explain what happened in Australia in 2000 and in Japan in 2011? To that question he simply shakes his head and says that some things are best left unexplained. He’s probably right.

  16.

  Romeo and Juliet in the Jungle

  If a man is killed before his life span is completed, his vital spirit is not yet exhausted and may survive for a while as a ghost.

  Chu Hsi (Chinese philosopher, 5th Century AD)

  We tend to think of multiculturalism as an invention of the last century when migrants from war-torn Europe and later Asia and the Middle East flocked to our shores seeking new lives and new opportunities but, in fact, Australia has been ‘multicultural’ since the arrival of the first white men more than two centuries ago. Convicts transported here were mostly British but the free settlers that followed came from right across Europe and the gold rushes of the mid-nineteenth century attracted prospectors from all corners of the globe, including tens of thousands of industrious Chinese. The benefits of multiculturalism are evident all around us today and, sadly, so are the racism and the intolerance that gave rise to the following story.

  The principal characters in this sensational tale were a nineteen-year-old youth with a Chinese father and an Anglo-Saxon mother, and a sixteen-year-old girl, daughter of an Aboriginal mother and a Spanish father, all of whom lived in Cooktown, Queensland, in the late 1870s. Like Romeo and Juliet these two were star-crossed lovers whose parents forbade them to marry on racial and religious grounds. The Spanish father swore he would strangle his daughter rather than see her marry a ‘heathen Chinaman’ and the Anglo-Saxon mother threatened to disown her son if he married ‘a papist black gin’. Tempers flared, nerves frayed, unretractable words were spoken and arguments raged in both families through long, hot, tropical nights.

  In desperation the youngsters decided to run away together. They probably planned to walk the 150 kilometres through rugged mountains and dense rainforest to the Palmer River where a gold rush was then in progress and where they might disappear and make a new life together.

  As soon as their absence was discovered the girl’s father (a store keeper) went to the police and charged the young man with abduction. The police sent out search parties and after a couple of weeks the runaways were brought back to Cooktown. Several sympathetic local residents testified to the young man’s good character and previous good behaviour and the charge against him was dropped, but one aspect of the case baffled the police. When the young man was searched he was found to be carrying gold sovereigns and small nuggets of gold worth several hundred pounds. It was known that neither family had ever possessed such riches and no one in the region had reported the theft of sovereigns or nuggets in recent weeks.

  At first the young man was reluctant to explain how he had come by this treasure but, when he realised he would be charged with stealing if he did not, he told a remarkable story. The girl corroborated every word and the police, unable to disprove the story, accepted it and recorded it in their official files. The press picked up the tale and it was reported in newspapers as far afield as Shanghai, St Petersburg and New York.

  The young man told how he and his girlfriend set out from Cooktown, avoiding the main tracks, living off the land
and supplementing their meagre diet with damper made from a small bag of flour the girl had stolen from her father’s stock. One afternoon they wandered into Limestone: a little shanty town about 100 kilometres south-west of Cooktown near the headwaters of the Palmer River. Limestone had grown up around a goldfield that had since run out. The prospectors and townspeople had drifted away and the town was completely deserted. There were a few huts with doors and windows standing open, a one-room hotel and a cemetery in which stood a tiny Chinese joss house, all rapidly disappearing under the encroaching jungle.

  The boy and girl explored the joss house. Its walls, once gaily painted red and yellow, were cracked and peeling; a faint smell of incense lingered inside and scraps of paper with Chinese characters inscribed on them hung from the ceiling. The young man noticed a glazed porcelain urn about the size of a teapot and used for storing ashes of the dead standing amid the dust and leaves on the floor, apparently forgotten when the building was abandoned. He knew the purpose of such urns but gave it an irreverent kick anyway.

  In an overgrown garden they found some dry little oranges on a stunted tree and had these for their supper, then bedded down for the night in one of the disused huts. The night was hot and sultry. Fruit bats squabbled in the forest canopy and swarms of mosquitoes plagued them, but eventually the couple fell asleep in each other’s arms.

  In the middle of the night something woke the young man. He looked towards the doorway of the hut and to his amazement saw the vaguely outlined figure of a man standing there. At first he thought it was a policeman or a black tracker and that the authorities had caught up with them but, as he watched, the figure became clearer and he could make out its face and clothing, both of which were Oriental. The figure began to glow with an unearthly light and stared back at the terrified youth with smouldering eyes. It then raised one of its arms and made a beckoning movement three times — then vanished.