Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

For the next two days Chloe could not bring herself to unlock the drawer but the longer she delayed the more morbidly curious she became. Finally, near lunchtime on the third day, when bright sunlight was streaming into her flat and the noise of birds, cars and people going about their business in the street drifted in through the windows, she unlocked the drawer and carefully took out the laptop. Chloe placed it in the centre of her kitchen table and gingerly opened it. A second later she began to tremble uncontrollably. The ghost of the cadaver (for that most assuredly was what had entered Chloe’s computer) was now quite clear and filling about a third of the screen. Its head was turned towards her, the face carrying a hideous scowl and those pig-like eyes wide open and staring back at Chloe.

  Now most of us might have smashed the laptop at that point or taken it somewhere and burned it, but Chloe lacked the resolve to do either. She locked the laptop away again and tried to forget its existence, but curiosity inevitably got the better of her. The next time she looked the ghost had ‘grown’ again in size and had raised itself up on one elbow. Its free hand was extended towards Chloe and those awful eyes were still staring directly at her.

  A week later when she looked again, she found the ghost had begun to rise from its table and now had the grey sheet secured around its belly. The head and the hand were halfway across the black void between ghost and victim and reaching out towards her. A day later it was closer again — almost filling the screen — and Chloe could see the individual hairs on the ghost’s chin, its bloodshot eyes and the blackened fingernails on its outstretched hand.

  On what would prove to be the last time Chloe looked at her ghostly tormenter, it was so close its face alone filled the screen. Chloe realised that the ghost’s next step would be to leave the screen and to materialise in front of her. The whole experience had been terrifying, but that prospect did not bear thinking about.

  Chloe slammed the lid, grabbed the computer and ran from her flat. With the computer held firmly under her right arm she ran the two kilometres that separates her flat from Reece’s. People stared as Chloe careered along quiet suburban footpaths. Two individuals asked if she was OK as she rushed by, but Chloe didn’t stop to reply. All the while she was praying that Reece would be home when she reached his flat.

  He was and responded immediately to Chloe’s pounding on his front door. ‘What’s wrong, babe?’ he asked. ‘You look awful.’ Chloe was panting and between gasps for breath she asked Reece if he would get his car out and drive her somewhere. ‘Anywhere,’ he said and five minutes later Reece, Chloe and the laptop were speeding along Oxford Street then Old South Head Road, heading for The Gap.

  ‘Why are we going to The Gap?’ Reece asked. He was growing increasingly concerned about Chloe’s state of mind and her insistence that they drive to Sydney’s most notorious spot for suicides alarmed him.

  Chloe had thrown the laptop onto the back seat of Reece’s car and she now pointed over her shoulder to it. ‘We’re going to get rid of that thing,’ she explained and a shiver coursed through her body when she spoke the final word. ‘I want to see it smash into a million pieces and be swallowed up by the sea!’

  Reece concluded that he must trust Chloe and pressed her no further, concentrating on his driving and fulfilling Chloe’s insistent pleas to go faster.

  The car screeched to a halt in the car park in Military Road at The Gap and Chloe reached into the back for the laptop, but it had shifted along the seat during the journey and she couldn’t reach it. Reece reached over and took hold of it. ‘Don’t open it!’ screamed Chloe and Reece assured her he would not.

  Reece carried the laptop once the couple had abandoned the car, leaving the doors open. They raced along the cliff-top paths towards the highest point, startling lazy lizards sunning on rocks and making gulls squawk indignantly and take flight. Finally they stopped at the railing of an observation ledge, both breathless and windblown.

  Stretching as far as the eye could see was the vast blue Pacific Ocean. To their left rose picturesque North Head across the entrance to Sydney Harbour and to the right the spectacular coastline stretched away towards Bondi Beach. 100 metres below them, at the foot of a perpendicular cliff, the sea boiled and roared as it crashed onto jagged rocks.

  Chloe took the laptop from Reece. She held it in both hands, raised her arms above her head and hurled it out into the windy void beyond the railing. Reece and Chloe clung to the railing so tight their knuckles turned white as they watched the laptop falling and tumbling over and over as distance made it grow smaller and smaller. Finally it struck a jagged rock at the base of the cliff and shattered into ‘a million pieces’. A huge, foam-capped wave rolled over the rock and swept away what remained of the laptop and, Chloe hoped, its ghostly occupant. At that moment a sound that resembled an immense sigh resounded through the jagged rifts in the cliff and swept up and over the two tiny figures on the cliff top — a combination of wind, waves, the cries of seabirds and perhaps another element that had once been human.

  One day if you are unlucky enough to need the services of the accident and emergency department of the hospital where Chloe is now an intern, you may encounter her, but you will be unlikely to realise it is she as she tends to you with calm professionalism and gentle skills — and that’s exactly how Chloe would like it to remain.

  20.

  Ball, Chain and Whip

  Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I am afraid of them.

  Marquise du Deffand (French aristocrat, 1697 –1780)

  Australia was colonised by the British to provide a dumping ground for murderers, thieves, rapists and rebels, but if the villains who arrived in chains were an unsavoury lot, those put in charge of them were often not much better. The power-drunkenness of such men (liberally spiced with sadism and bestiality) created monsters and their convict charges were easy prey. Not surprisingly many a brutal overseer or superintendent of convicts met a sticky end and their enraged ghosts refuse to depart, still seeking retribution 200 or so years later.

  One particularly nasty example is said to reside at Hyde Park Barracks in Macquarie Street, Sydney — once home to 900 convicts and arguably Sydney’s most haunted building. Reports of the ghosts of emaciated convicts in convict garb, female figures in filmy white robes, clanking chains, ghostly footsteps and strange lights have been reported from this building for the past sixty years, but the phenomenon that upsets witnesses most is the ghost of a former superintendent. This evil spectre materialises in the doorway of what was once his office; and all agree he is not a pretty sight and the sounds he makes are far from pretty.

  ‘I was leaving the building one night at about six o’clock when I remembered that I had not switched a photocopier off,’ one former employee recalls. ‘Only the security lights were on, but because it was summer there was plenty of soft light coming in through the windows. I was walking back to the office when I heard a noise behind me. I turned thinking another colleague was working back or a security guard was on his rounds, but what I saw stopped me in my tracks and made me scream — the first and only time I have ever screamed involuntarily in my life.

  ‘In a pool of bluish light like a spotlight stood a giant of a man dressed in old-fashioned clothes — a greasy white shirt with a red bandana knotted around the neck, tight black pants, heavy boots and a maroon jacket. He had a large belly that hung over the top of his pants and tufts of wiry, grey hair poked through gaps in his shirtfront. He was completely bald and his face was red and veiny with bulbous lips and bulging eyes. He was leering at me and I could see spittle dribbling from his mouth.

  ‘I knew without doubt that I was face-to-face with a ghost. It seemed solid but parts of it were fuzzy and moved in and out of focus. I held my briefcase up in front of me and yelled “Leave me alone!”, then I backed away and the thing followed me. Then it spoke and I can still hear its gruff voice and its hollow-sounding tone as clearly as if I had heard it yesterday: “’Ello, m’dear,” the spectre said. “You come t’ keep me compan
y?” “No!” I shouted back. The creature’s expression changed. What had been half a smile turned into an evil scowl. “Ain’t I good enough for ya … ya stinkin’ whore? You’ll feel me fist if ya don’t gimme a kiss!”

  ‘At that point I ran. I didn’t look behind me to see if the thing was following but I could hear it shouting abuse at me. Never in my life have I heard such awful language. I didn’t stop running until I reached St James’s Church across the road. I don’t know what led me there — shock, fear, a cry for God’s help? Who knows? I pushed on one of the old doors and it swung open. I stumbled into the church and slumped down on the nearest pew. I sat in that peaceful, comforting House of God for almost an hour until I had calmed down enough to go home. And you know, after that I never stayed in the barracks alone — day or night.’

  A few years ago an organisation called the Centre for Metaphysical Studies conducted a survey of supernatural events at the barracks and members of that group reported being confronted by the same nasty spectre and also being given one of its foul-mouthed tongue-lashings.

  Just how this obnoxious spectre came to meet his death is unclear. Witnesses have never commented on any life-threatening injuries visible on his face or figure, but visible (and horrible) they most certainly are on the one in our next story: another convict-keeper whose haunt lies about fifty kilometres west of Macquarie Street.

  The old Great Western Road between Parramatta and Penrith is rich in ghost stories. According to an article in the Nepean Times, ghosts would sit upon the top rail of the fences that lined the road ‘like swallows on a telegraph wire’ and the most ghoulish of them all was to be found at Quarry Hill, near where the University of Western Sydney now stands.

  Quarry Hill gets its name for the obvious reason — there was once a quarry there where hundreds of convicts toiled and many died, gouging thousands of tonnes of stone from the hillside with picks, shovels and bare hands to pave the roads of an expanding colony.

  The gruesome saga of this ghost begins at the quarry face in the winter of 1838. A young convict, unfit for such hard labour, collapsed one day and the overseer had him carried a short distance away. The young man regained consciousness to find his face pressed against the rough bark of a gum tree, his shirt ripped down and coarse ropes binding him to the tree trunk. By turning his head slightly he could see the fate that awaited him. The overseer was limbering up his right arm and in his hand he gripped a vicious-looking cat-o’-nine-tails. The first lash drove the breath from the young convict and a searing pain the like of which he had never experienced before shot through his whole body. Fifty hard lashes were rained down on him and by the time the overseer desisted there was little flesh left on the young man’s back.

  The swooning and delirious convict was carried to a local infirmary where rum was poured on his wounds and later salt rubbed into them to aid healing. After a month of excruciating and unremitting pain, a surgeon pronounced him fit to return to work at the quarry.

  The convict’s back (which had been soft and white) was now tough like leather and so was his resolve to avenge himself on the overseer. He waited two days for the right moment. While the overseer’s attention was diverted he crept up behind him, raised his pick and swung it with every ounce of strength he could muster. The overseer never knew what hit him — the sharp point of the pick entered his head at the base of the skull and ended up poking out of his forehead.

  The convict paid for his moment of sweet revenge with his own life — strung up by the neck then buried in an unmarked grave, but it was not his ghost that was soon being reported by travellers on the Great Western Road. It was the overseer’s and a more terrible sight, witnesses said, could hardly be imagined.

  The ghost appeared near the entrance to the quarry, sometimes by moonlight, sometimes in lightning flashes on stormy nights. It was covered from head to toe in fine dust. In its hand it carried the blood-soaked pick that had taken its life and from a huge cavity in the ghost’s forehead rivulets of dark blood streamed over its face, neck and chest.

  Coachmen cracked their whips and raced their horses past the spot while mothers covered their children’s eyes and closed their own for fear of seeing the grisly sight. Travellers on foot prepared themselves with tots of rum and ran as fast as their legs could carry them to the next inn. Plenty saw the ghost and many who did not (including those who closed their eyes) imagined they did.

  Stories of the ghost of Quarry Hill persisted for fifty years and more. One night in 1880 an employee from Fleurs, a large estate near today’s St Marys, was sent to Penrith to fetch a doctor. When the man approached Quarry Hill his horse took fright and his dog began to howl. Only by blindfolding and leading the horse and carrying the trembling dog was the man able to pass. Well into the last century old-timers still spoke in whispers about the Quarry Hill ghost and travellers (unaware of the stories) commented on the unaccountable feeling of dread that overtook them on that stretch of the busy road.

  It is impossible to put names to either the ghost at Hyde Park Barracks or the one at Quarry Hill, but a third colleague of theirs is the most famous of the many ghosts who haunt the picturesque village of Richmond in Tasmania and he can be named. A few biographical details about him also survive.

  George Grover was convicted of stealing at Winchester in the south of England in 1825 and transported to Tasmania where he served seven years before obtaining the post of flagellator (official flogger) at Richmond. When repairs were required to the stone bridge spanning the Coal River alongside the village, Grover was also put in charge of the convict work force.

  Chained convicts quarried large blocks of stone at nearby Butchers Hill, then carried them in handcarts to the bridge. The stout and sadistic flagellator rode on top, cracking his whip like an Ancient Egyptian slave driver and inflicting as much pain and misery as he could on his long-suffering charges.

  Grover’s reign of terror came to an end one foggy day in March 1832 when he fell or was pushed off Richmond Bridge. One version of the event has the convicts turning on him and beating him to death with their manacled fists before hurling him off the bridge, but a report in the Hobart Town Courier says he fell or was pushed from the bridge parapet ‘where he had lain himself down while drunk’. Someone wrote in large, bold lettering across his convict record: Murdered March 1832 as if to say ‘thank goodness’.

  There have been claims ever since that whenever a heavy fog envelops Richmond, Grover’s angry ghost can be seen stalking the bridge, searching for his killers and lusting for revenge. Some claim to have seen him trying to clamber up the slimy sides of the bridge from the rocks nine metres below. One witness — a mild-mannered young curate who was a stranger to the district and knew nothing about Grover or his ghost — had to be hospitalised after his encounter with the spectre.

  The curate was crossing the bridge one evening when he heard a strange scratching sound and cries for help coming from under the bridge. The curate was short-sighted and when he peered over the parapet on the northern side of the bridge all he could see was mist swirling over the surface of the river. Then, when he turned to check the other side, a pair of large, hairy hands suddenly appeared, gripping the parapet. Thinking someone was clinging on for life the young curate rushed forwards. Below the hands was a pair of brawny wrists and these the curate grabbed in his own slim, white hands. ‘Hang on,’ the curate said, ‘I will try to pull you up.’

  The curate was not a strong man and he doubted he had the strength to be a Good Samaritan, but he was determined to give it his best shot. He prayed for divine assistance, took a deep breath then tugged. To his amazement the figure offered no resistance; it rose quite effortlessly. In less than a second the figure’s face was level with the curate’s, but it was not a normal face; anything but. The curate later described it as the face of a demon from hell — ‘living, yet not living’. The eyes were alive and fixed on the curate with an evil, mocking gaze; the rest of the face was a bloody mass of whiskers and battered flesh.<
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  The curate let go of the spectre’s wrists and ran for his life. He looked back just once and the spectre was still there, floating beside the parapet, and from its bruised and broken lips came a cackle of demonic laughter. The curate ran to a house at the end of the bridge and pounded on the door before collapsing on the doorstep. Later he was admitted to a hospital in Hobart and it was many weeks before he recovered his senses.

  Richmond Bridge is not the only place in the village that Grover’s unsightly spectre is said to appear. A figure, believed to be him, has also put in occasional appearance in the flogging yard at Richmond Gaol, where he plied his bloody trade as flagellator. One small boy who visited the gaol with his grandmother a few years ago became visibly distressed when they entered the flogging yard. When asked what the matter was, the child pointed at an empty space and denounced ‘the horrible man with the bloody face’ that only he could see and who was terrifying him.

  George Grover and his two nasty colleagues in New South Wales all began life at the bottom of the social ladder and none climbed up it very far, but our fourth and final convict-keeper came of more distinguished stock. Captain Patrick Logan, commandant of the penal settlement at Moreton Bay (Brisbane) from 1825 to 1830 could trace his ancestors back to the time of the Crusades. He was a distinguished soldier, a capable administrator and a far-sighted visionary. Unfortunately he was also ruthless and just as merciless to his charges as the others.

  Captain Logan’s cruelty earned him the title ‘The Fell Tyrant’* and made him the subject of one of Australia’s best-known folk songs, Moreton Bay, which describes the horrific plight of convicts under his rule. Misconduct earned them up to 300 lashes and many died strapped to the flogging frame. Logan was feared and despised by the convicts and the final verse of Moreton Bay rejoices at his violent death.