Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  In 1956 the Commonwealth Government bought what remained of the land as the site for the Overseas Telecommunications Commission’s radio transmitting station. The facility required a wide belt of open land around the transmitter and the decision was made to demolish what remained of the historic old house. If such a decision was made today it would raise a storm of protest, but in the 1950s the community was largely indifferent to issues of heritage and conservation. Those who knew the house and its reputation were probably glad to see it go. Fortunately the man chosen to deliver the coup de grâce to the 130-year-old building, a Rooty Hill builder named John Lawson, had a passionate interest in history. Lawson dismantled the ruins carefully, preserving many of the old building materials and meticulously recording the antique building methods.

  Lawson discovered that the round tower was supported by two hollow columns, which stood the full height of the building. Inside these were the bones of hundreds of possums who had fallen in and been unable to escape. He attributed the scratching and screaming sounds heard in the tower to these animals and the bloodstains to their urine. He may have been right but nothing Lawson turned up could explain the ghostly figures seen by so many people. The legends and stories persisted long after the building disappeared; and to this day senior citizens of the district still speak with awe about old Bungaribee — Australia’s most famous haunted house.

  18.

  The Ghost of Mount Victoria Pass

  You’d call the man a senseless fool,

  A blockhead or an ass,

  Who’d dare say he saw the ghost

  Of Mount Victoria Pass;

  But I believe the ghost is there,

  For, if my eyes are right,

  I saw it once upon a ne’er-

  To-be-forgotten night.

  The lonely moon was over all

  And she was shining well,

  At angles from the sandstone wall

  The shifting moonbeams fell.

  In short, the shifting moonbeams beamed

  The air was still as death,

  Save when the listening silence seemed

  To speak beneath its breath.

  The tangled bushes were not stirred

  Because there was no wind

  But now and then I thought I heard

  A startling noise behind

  Then Johnny Jones began to quake;

  His face was like the dead

  ‘Don’t look behind, for heaven’s sake!

  The ghost is there!’ he said.

  He stared ahead — his eyes were fixed;

  He whipped the horses like mad.

  ‘You fool!’ I cried, ‘you’re only mixed;

  A drop too much you’ve had.

  I’ll never see a ghost, I swear,

  But I will find the cause.’

  I turned to see if it was there,

  And sure enough it was!

  From The Ghost at the Second Bridge, Henry Lawson

  (Australian writer and poet, 1867–1922)

  The spectacular Blue Mountains of New South Wales have been a popular playground for holidaymakers and day trippers for over a century, but their rugged beauty was not always appreciated. To early colonists the mountains formed a seemingly impenetrable barrier to the expansion of the settlement; and it was not until 1813, twenty-five years after the colony was founded, that a primitive road was hacked through the dense bush and rugged sandstone ridges, opening the western plains to acquisition and development.

  Convicts laboured and lost their lives building that road, moving thousands of tonnes of rock with picks and shovels and constructing stone bridges as strong and dependable today as they were nearly 200 years ago. The steepest section of the road wound up and over Mount York, but the danger of accident was so great that an alternate route (only slightly less precipitous) was opened and Victoria Pass came into being in 1832. Modern travellers speeding along the smooth black ribbon that is the Great Western Highway give little thought to the perils, physical and otherwise, that lurked at Victoria Pass. In earlier times it was quite a feat to climb to the top and descend the other side without mishap or delay and, if travelling at night, there was the added risk of encountering the Ghost of Victoria Pass, which haunted the second bridge on the eastern side.

  Travellers reported that their horses would become restless as they approached the bridge, then the ghostly and ghastly figure of a young woman would suddenly appear in front of them. As suddenly as she appeared the spectre would then disappear, leaving witnesses anxious to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the scene of their harrowing experience.

  History can put a name to this ghost. She was born Caroline James, and at the time of her death she was Mrs William Collits. Caroline came from a shady and unstable family. Her father ran a sly grog shop on the land where the old Woodford Academy now stands in the village of Woodford and her drunken mother had hanged herself there. Despite this unsavoury background Caroline married into a respectable family: the Collitses, proprietors of the inn at Hartley Vale. Unfortunately for Caroline, the Collits who took a fancy to her was the black sheep of the family, William, described by his father as ‘a spendthrift idiot’. William Collits and Caroline James were married in 1840, but their marriage was anything but blissful. Caroline’s younger sister was married to a thug named John Walsh, who was Caroline’s as well as her sister’s lover before and after their marriage. When her new husband turned out to be a poor substitute for Walsh, Caroline left him and moved in with her accommodating sister and brother-in-law in a ménage à trois.

  There was talk of reconciliation between Caroline and William in the New Year of 1842. They met, along with Walsh, for a drink in Joseph Jagger’s tavern near Hartley, but soon after leaving the tavern Walsh attacked William. Caroline came to her husband’s aid by holding Walsh’s arms and screaming to William to run for his life — which he unhesitatingly did.

  The next morning a postman delivering mail came upon the battered body of Caroline Collits beside the road on Victoria Pass. Her skull had been smashed with a large stone which lay, stained with her blood, nearby. John Walsh was arrested for her murder but pleaded innocence, accusing not William Collits as you might expect, but Joseph Jagger, the tavern keeper, of committing the crime. The jury at Walsh’s trial did not believe him. He was convicted and hanged.

  William Collits remarried seven months after Caroline’s murder and lived a long and happy life. His family achieved posthumous fame in the 1930s when they and their inn became the subject (with much alteration of fact) of the first successful musical comedy entirely written and produced in Australia on an Australian subject — Collits’ Inn, starring Gladys Moncrieff and George Wallace. Needless to say, the black sheep’s branch of the family and this gruesome episode do not figure in the plot.

  Poor Caroline achieved fame of an entirely different kind — destined to spend an eternity of cold and windy nights haunting the bridge at Victoria Pass, spooking horses and terrifying travellers. There were numerous hair-raising accounts of encounters with her ghost including this one from two youths driving a cart over the pass near midnight one night.

  The youths reported that as they approached the bridge their horse became so skittish that one of them had to climb down and the lead the animal. The youths assumed it was a night bird or another animal that had spooked the horse but as they drew closer to the bridge they saw what the horse had already seen or sensed — a tall, slim, female figure dressed in a black gown of some shiny material that glowed darkly in the moonlight. The figure was standing beside the stone parapet of the bridge looking down into the gully below.

  The youths assumed it was a living person and the one leading the horse called out: ‘You’re out late, miss. Are you all right?’ At first the figure seemed not to hear, then it turned slowly towards the youths and their horse and cart, keeping its head tilted downwards and its features in shadow. When the figure moved, the horse stopped in its tracks and no amount of encoura
gement or tugging would make it step onto the bridge.

  The youth sitting on the cart called out. ‘Would ya mind steppin’ off the bridge for a moment, missus? It’s our horse, ya see, she’s scared —’

  The youth never finished his sentence. The words froze in his mouth as Caroline’s ghost raised its head to show its face and stared directly at the group. ‘I never seen nothin’ so bloody frightenin’ before or since,’ he later said. ‘A soon as we saw ’er face, we knew she weren’t ’uman. ’Er eyes shone like a tiger’s … there were sparks of fire in ’em and shooting out of ’em. She raised one arm ’igh in the air then t’other and her ’air streamed out in the breeze like seaweed in shallows. Then the worst part ’appened. The thing’s mouth slowly opened and a soft moanin’ noise came from inside the black ’ole. It got louder and louder until it seemed like it was all around us and inside us; and it changed from a moan to a terrible ’owl. You know they talk in the Bible about demons howlin’? Well I reckon that’s what that were … a demon howlin’! It sounded like no ’uman or animal I ever ’eard.’

  The terrifying sound was too much for the horse. Using today’s vernacular we might say it ‘freaked out’ at that point and, unable to turn around, reared in the shafts of the cart. The youth on the driver’s seat had to hang on for dear life as the animal bolted, carrying the cart with it. The other youth grabbed the tailboard as it passed and clambered aboard. Horse, cart and passengers careered across the bridge — over the ghost, through it or under it — and on down the road for several hundred metres before the youth in the driver’s seat managed to bring the horse under control.

  ‘What in the ’ell was that?’ one youth asked the other.

  ‘I dunno, but I ’ope I never see it again. It ain’t followin’ us, is it?’ his companion asked.

  The first youth mustered his courage, turned and looked back. ‘It’s still there … on the bridge,’ he reported. ‘Go mate! Just go!’ he shouted, his voice quaking.

  The youth on the driver’s seat flicked the reins and the horse picked up speed again. They didn’t stop till they reached their home town, Blackheath, five kilometres further down the range; horse and humans all lathered in sweat.

  Some comfort from her tormented afterlife may have come to Caroline in the 1880s when Henry Lawson came to live in the nearby village of Mount Victoria: the young poet wrote a sixteen-verse poem about her, entitled ‘The Ghost at the Second Bridge’, quoted in part at the beginning of this story and reminiscent of the youths’ experiences. The poem gave Caroline a permanent place in Australian literature, but it was small recompense for the ills done to her in life.

  Some say that Caroline Collits put a curse on the village of Mount Victoria, but its current prosperity belies that. No one has seen the Ghost of Victoria Pass for many years, which is hardly surprising. The road has been upgraded and widened so many times that the old bridges are barely visible; and if Caroline was still inclined to put in an appearance on the roadside at night, dressed from head to toe in black, it’s doubtful if the occupants of the cars hurtling by would even notice her.

  19.

  The Ghost in the Machine

  There are two gates of sleep, one of which it is held is made of horn and by it easy egress is given to real ghosts. The other shining, fashioned of gleaming white ivory, but the shades send deceptive visions that way to the light.

  Virgil (Roman poet, 70BC – 19BC)

  Most doctors (like other practitioners of the sciences) are sceptical about things supernatural. An exception is Dr Chloe Hill — and, no, that’s not the good doctor’s real name. As her remarkable story unfolds you will understand why a pseudonym had to be used to preserve her anonymity and her reputation.

  Chloe is currently doing her internship at a Sydney public hospital and hopes to set up in private practice in a year or two, but her story begins when she was still a student in the autumn of 2010. The school of medicine Chloe attended offered dissection of human cadavers as an elective component in the medical degree course and Chloe, like most of her fellow students, opted for it, believing that exposure to a real body would be more beneficial than studying plastic models or computerised images.

  The cadaver allotted to Chloe to work on was that of a middle-aged man who had bequeathed his body to medical science. The man was overweight and had succumbed to a massive heart attack, so the external parts of his body were untouched, but large flaps of fatty tissue had to be divided and clamped back before Chloe could begin work on his internal organs.

  Chloe worked quickly and deftly, all the while trying not to let her gaze wander onto the cadaver’s face. A short, thick, grey-streaked beard that looked more like steel wool than human hair framed the lower part of the face in sharp contrast to the upper part which was hairless — no eyelashes, no eyebrows and a smooth, shiny scalp. This curious arrangement made the cadaver’s head look as if it was attached to its body upside down. That might have struck your average medical student as comical, but a twisted mouth and tiny, pig-like eyes gave the face a sinister cast, as though cruelty in life somehow lingered on in death.

  After removing all the cadaver’s abdominal organs and laying them out on stainless steel trays, Chloe reached for her laptop and began making detailed notes of her observations. Apart from the cadaver’s face, which continued to trouble her, Chloe found the whole exercise exhilarating and engrossing. The professor of anatomy who was supervising came by and questioned Chloe about the condition of the cadaver’s heart, praising the acute observations she had made about it. Time passed quickly and in what seemed much less than the four hours the clock on the wall of the dissecting room indicated, Chloe was removing her surgical gown and mask and cleaning herself up in the scrubbing room.

  That evening Chloe’s boyfriend Reece took her to a Thai restaurant for dinner. During the meal Chloe regaled Reece with all the details of her morning’s anatomical adventure. Now Reece was not a medical student (he was studying architecture), but he knew Chloe well and appreciated how passionate she was about medicine. He put up with all the gory details while he tried to enjoy his roast duck in red curry sauce and his jasmine-scented custard, but when it came to responses the most he could manage was an occasional, unconvincing ‘wow’ or a half-hearted ‘terrific’. Reece was a patient and trusted friend and although neither he nor Chloe knew it then those qualities were about to be tested.

  A week later Chloe discovered she had a minor problem with her laptop. A tiny spot of bright light (no bigger than a pin head) appeared in the centre of the screen. Chloe thought nothing of it the first time the spot appeared, reminding herself that the machine was getting old. If the spot didn’t go away, Chloe decided she would drop her laptop off at the local computer repair shop to have it checked, then thought no more about it.

  Chloe had noticed the spot of light on a Friday and did not switch her computer on again until the following Monday morning. When she did the spot was still there and she fancied it was a little brighter than she remembered. It was annoying, but nothing more. That night when she checked her emails the spot was definitely brighter and also a little larger; and to her surprise Chloe found that it remained on the screen after she switched the laptop off. Thinking there must be some leakage of power from the battery, Chloe made the decision to call into the repair shop the next day.

  Before she left home the next morning Chloe checked that the spot was still there and it was, but when she reached the computer repair shop and opened the laptop to show the technician, the spot was gone. ‘Prob’ly just a glitch in the wiring that’s fixed itself,’ the technician said. When Chloe reached home she opened the laptop again and the spot was back, glowing brighter than ever in the centre of the empty black screen. It also appeared to be larger again, as if it was growing a little in size each time Chloe looked at it. It was now about the size of a match head and large enough for Chloe to discern that it was not round but oval and slightly elongated, like an egg lying on its side.

  Ch
loe had a lecture that day and she took her laptop into the lecture theatre, but it would be fair to say that she did not hear most of the talk. When she opened the laptop, the elongated, glowing shape was now about two centimetres long and Chloe found herself absorbed in trying to work out whether the shape had any recognisable form. As the lecture came to an end and Chloe closed the laptop she concluded it did not and that the thoughts of planets, glow-worms and jelly fish that had flashed through her mind were all fanciful.

  Reece came around that evening and Chloe told him about the annoying fault in her laptop. ‘Give us a look,’ suggested Reece. When Chloe lifted the lid of the laptop she gasped. The glowing spot was now about four centimetres in length and a centimetre in height and its shape instantly triggered an alarming memory. Reece was mystified when his girlfriend slammed the lid down and announced firmly, ‘No, I don’t want to look at it any more … let’s go out and get a coffee.’

  Reece sensed Chloe’s distress and over two cappuccinos tried to reassure her with: ‘Don’t let it get to you, love … it’s only a machine’. But Chloe knew that sitting on her coffee table in the lounge room of her flat was something much more than a few circuit boards, a collection of wires and a plastic case.

  Later that evening after Reece had gone home Chloe summoned up the courage to open the laptop. The glowing shape had grown larger again and Chloe could now make out the shape of the cadaver she had dissected ten days earlier, laying in profile on its dissecting table, half covered by a grey cloth as she had first seen it. There was no mistaking the shape: the cadaver’s belly rose like a smooth mound in the centre, its feet stuck up at one end and its bald, bearded head made another bump at the other end. Chloe stared at the image in disbelief and with fear rising inside her. Again she slammed the laptop closed and before she went to bed she locked it away in a drawer.