Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  Lucian (Greek satirist, 2nd Century AD)

  The tragic slaying of thirty-five innocent people by a crazed gunman at Port Arthur in 1996 and the devastation caused to historic buildings there by a tidal surge just a few months ago are still fresh in the minds of Australians and yet, when history replaces memory, these events will come to be seen as single chapters in the long saga of cruelty and hardship that is the history of the old penal settlement. That Port Arthur is the haunt of many ghosts should surprise no one.

  What is surprising is that the most haunted places in the complex are not the sombre prison buildings but the innocent-looking parsonage and the comfortable former residences of the commandant and the medical officer where families lived, for the most part happily and well, amid all the misery and deprivation that surrounded them.

  Rumours of ghosts at the Port Arthur parsonage go back to the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Reverend George Eastman, a man of enormous girth, died in an upstairs bedroom. His empty coffin was manoeuvred up the narrow stairs but, when filled, it was found to be too heavy to be brought out the same way. A rope was rigged to lower the coffin from the bedroom window to the ground, but halfway down the rope snapped, the coffin fell and the bloated corpse of the late, lamented clergyman tumbled into the garden. For many years after that people reported smelling putrefying flesh, hearing moaning or morbid screams and seeing strange lights inside the parsonage. Some claimed Reverend Eastman’s corpse reappeared from time to time, spread-eagled in the garden where it had, so ingloriously, landed.

  The photographer and journalist George Gruncell published an account of other strange events at the parsonage in the 1870s. Gruncell told of a doctor finding all the windows of the parsonage ablaze with light one night and deciding to call in to welcome home Reverend Hayward (one of Eastman’s successors) and his family, who had been absent for some weeks. Reverend Hayward answered the door but said that his wife and children had not yet returned. The embarrassed doctor explained that he had assumed all the lights had been Mrs Hayward ‘putting things in order’. ‘Lights?’ asked the puzzled cleric. ‘What lights?’ Hayward and a servant had been alone in the kitchen at the back of the house and the only light burning was there. Others had also seen the bright lights and the phenomenon was the talk of the settlement the next day.

  The Haywards themselves discovered light streaming from under the door of the minister’s upstairs study one night soon after. The door was closed and the room apparently empty. When they peered through the keyhole the couple were amazed to see the whole room brightly illuminated but when they opened the door all was in darkness. A sceptical judge visiting the house soon after witnessed the same phenomenon, but a careful investigation of every object in the room by the minister, the judge and the doctor failed to find any explanation.

  Later the sister of the Catholic chaplain at Port Arthur slept in a ground-floor bedroom at the parsonage while her brother was away and woke, screaming, one night, terrified by a loud banging sound that seemed to come from the floor and walls all around her. In the same room a few months later a housemaid fainted and when Reverend Hayward brought her round (by boxing her ears) she told of seeing a horrible, spectral figure at the window with a knife in its hand, poised to strike some invisible victim. Gruncell himself stayed at the parsonage and heard ghostly footsteps at night when all the living occupants of the house were in bed. He also observed Reverend Hayward’s distress when the minister was walking down the stairs one evening and a cold, clammy hand came to rest over his own on the banister rail. Also, in company with Mrs Hayward, Gruncell found a lighted candle in a locked room early one morning before anyone else had risen.

  What the Haywards believed to be the cause of all this mischief finally appeared (as a filmy, white figure) one night to Mrs Hayward’s mother, a formidable lady whose husband had once been commandant at Port Arthur. Thinking it was a burglar and fearing attack, the old lady lay still in bed and watched the figure strike a match then glide silently across her room and out the door. When recounting her experience the sharp-witted matron did not comment on the size of the spectre (or Gruncell didn’t report it), which effectively eliminates Eastman’s ghost as the intruder.

  The same strange, bright lights have been seen by staff and visitors to the Port Arthur parsonage in recent years and the mysterious banging heard by a house attendant. The same attendant (who, until then, had not believed in ghosts) also listened in horror one day to the stairs in the parsonage creaking loudly — first the bottom step, then the second, then the third and so on, until whatever invisible thing it was that was climbing reached the top. Objects, including a heavy vase filled with flowers, have also been mysteriously moved about inside the parsonage at night, long after it has been locked up and the burglar alarms set.

  In the early 1980s when three builders were staying in the much-haunted house renovating it, one of them reported seeing a ghost — the first recorded sighting since Mrs Hayward’s mother’s ‘filmy, white figure’ of more than 100 years before. As the builder was entering his room one night he caught sight of a woman dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Instantly the temperature in the room dropped and the curtains billowed, although the windows were firmly closed. Seconds later the figure vanished and everything returned to normal. Another of the builders woke in the middle of the night with the sensation that he was being attacked. It felt, he said, as if someone was sitting on his chest and driving the breath from his lungs. At the same time each of the builders heard the oft-reported banging noises. The work the three were carrying out well might have upset the spirits in the old house — they were removing the second floor where much of the ghostly activity had occurred over the years and reducing the building to its original, single storey.

  The Port Arthur church, now in ruins, stands a few metres from the parsonage. When foundations for the church were being dug in 1853 two convicts, William Riley and Joseph Shuttleworth, got into an argument. Riley killed Shuttleworth with a blow from a pickaxe and was hanged for the crime. The following year another convict fell to his death from the roof of the almost completed building after another argument. It was popularly believed that these two violent deaths were the reason the church was never consecrated — which is untrue. It was never consecrated to one denomination because it served all denominations. Less easy to explain is the fact that ivy, which grew in profusion on every other part of the building, would never grow on the bloodied spot where the second convict landed.

  The church also figured in a strange occurrence a few years back when a large party of tourists were assembled there at 10.45 pm on a clear, starry night. Suddenly the whole church was lit by a brilliant flash of light that illuminated every side and every corner. It was not lightning and was far brighter than any camera flash could produce.

  The medical officer’s residence, which housed a succession of doctors and their families, is also reputed to be haunted. When it was used as a hotel in the 1920s a lady guest was wakened in the middle of the night by a tiny girl dressed in an old-fashioned nightgown, tapping on the outside of her bedroom window — metres above the ground — and attendants in recent times have heard children’s laughter coming from empty, upstairs rooms. A lady dressed in pearly grey is also said to haunt the medical officer’s residence. According to a former resident this ghost was often seen drifting down a passageway in the house and terrified at least three housekeepers, who resigned in quick succession. The same resident claimed he was awakened one night by the grey lady standing at the foot of his bed, snorting loudly. He assumed she was displeased at his presence and he was not overjoyed at hers. He switched on the light and shouted: ‘Go away! Get out now! Get out of here!’ and claims she did, never to return.

  Strange noises (moans, footsteps, etc.) have been heard in the former commandant’s residence for more than a century. Like the medical officer’s residence this gracious old house, with its charming English gardens overlooking the bay, was turned into a hotel in
the 1880s. Ghostly activity seems to have peaked in the last twenty years, since it, too, was restored to its original condition. Stories, and spirits, are numerous.

  The ghost of Commandant Charles O’Hara Booth, the house’s most famous occupant, is said to stand at the window of the room in which he slept, keeping a watchful eye on the settlement and silently weeping; and the ghost of a former nanny (dismissed after one of her charges met with an accident) has been seen in a wooden rocking chair in the nanny’s room at the end of the house. This room and the innocuous-looking, spindly old chair are the subject of many stories. An attendant found the chair gently rocking by itself one Christmas Eve morning and on the same day another year voices were heard in the apparently empty room. Attempts by visitors to take photographs inside the nanny’s room sometimes produce quite unexpected results: cameras jam; flashes fail to work; and when someone does manage to take a photograph, faint, shapeless, blurs usually appear on the screen.

  The gate to the commandant’s residence has been opened by unseen hands in full view of a group of tourists and many visitors’ wristwatches stop at the moment they enter the building. A male attendant, claimed that, when alone in the house one day, he was grabbed on the bottom by an invisible assailant; and a spectral male figure with its head twisted to one side (like a hanging victim) has been seen at least twice in the hallway. Bells installed in the nineteenth century to summon servants occasionally ring when the house is empty; and a phantom coach and horses has been heard (and on one occasion seen) by groups visiting the cottage at night. One visitor started a sketch of the commandant’s residence while visiting Port Arthur but did not have time to complete it. Some days later and many kilometres away the amateur artist got the sketch out to finish it from memory and found to her amazement that a female figure in period costume had been neatly and mysteriously drawn in the foreground.

  A ghostly legacy seems also to have been left from the time when the house was the Carnarvon Hotel. A group of archaeologists sleeping there during restoration in 1983 had several terrifying experiences. One female heard footsteps in the night climbing the stairs and entering the room she slept in. No figure appeared but a soft groan echoed through the dark house before the footsteps returned the way they had come. Another of the archaeologists was awakened in the night by the hand and face of an elderly woman (no body or arms) looking over his bed then floating up towards the ceiling and fading away. A different female member of the party claimed to have seen a vision on the ceiling of a room where they were all playing cards one night. She saw, she said a woman being chased by a man. Her description of the woman tallied with her colleague’s memory of the face he had seen; and later both recognised her in an old photograph they were shown of the former manageress of the Carnarvon Hotel.

  Beside the commandant’s residence stands the old powder magazine surmounted by an impressive watch tower. A reliable witness claims that he was grabbed on the arm by an invisible hand when walking nearby and on one memorable morning the sound of a ghostly bugle was heard playing Reveille from the empty tower. Directly behind the watch tower stands Tower Cottage, the former married officers’ quarters. Two people who slept there at different times in recent years either dreamed identical dreams or saw the same apparition — a soldier in a red uniform leaning over the bed looking down at them.

  Directly across the bay from the commandant’s residence stands Jetty Cottage at the end of the commandant’s jetty. The ghost of a young man, possibly Private Robert Young, who drowned near the jetty aged just twenty in 1840, is said to haunt that area. According to the account of a woman who, staying at Jetty Cottage a few years back, woke in fright to find the ghost in her room, he has straight black hair and wears a ruffled, white shirt. Another guest at another time saw the same figure sitting on the front steps of the cottage and on the jetty on two consecutive nights. This second guest also claimed to have heard a woman screaming at exactly 10.30 o’clock each night. Others too have heard the pitiful screams that resound through the lonely cottage and float across the water.

  There are many other stories of ghostly activity at Port Arthur, not all confined to these comfortable houses and cottages. The multi-storeyed penitentiary, built in 1848 and now a roofless shell, seems blessedly free of ghosts at the moment but the smaller Model or Separate Prison, where inmates were kept in solitary confinement and required to wear masks to hide their features, echoes, it is said, to the screams of a fourteen-year-old prisoner who was confined in the condemned cell for two weeks awaiting execution. Another convict, William Carter, committed suicide in his cell in the Model Prison by hanging himself with the straps of his hammock. Tourists visiting this particular cell often experience unaccountable feelings of anxiety and depression long before they are told the story of Carter’s suicide. Then there are the dark cells where prisoners were inhumanely imprisoned for long periods in total darkness and total silence. Is it coincidence that light bulbs in one of these cells continuously blow, just as visitors enter?

  Many prisoners arrived at Port Arthur insane and many more became so after a spell in the punishment cells of the Model Prison. To cater for these unfortunates an asylum was built. This quaint building with its three-tiered tower became a museum and the rear portion was converted into a staff tea room. Two women working at the museum had a strange experience one day when a door slammed shut, trapping them in a small room. Try though they might, the heavy door would not budge. Their calls for help attracted two visitors walking by. The man tried to open the door from the outside but it seemed to be stuck fast. His wife half jokingly said, ‘Let me try,’ and applied her slender hand to it. The door swung open effortlessly. It had never jammed before and has never jammed since. Two other employees seated at a table in the staff tea room one day watched in amazement as a heavy ashtray glided across a flat bench top and had to be grabbed to stop it falling to the floor.

  But of all the creepy places in this ghost-ridden location, the creepiest is not a building but an uninhabited island about a kilometre off shore — the ‘Isle of the Dead’. This small, windswept outcrop served as the settlement’s cemetery from 1830 to 1877. 1,769 prisoners were buried there in mass graves and 180 free people in individual plots. One of the last resident convict gravediggers consigned to this lonely place, Mark Jeffrey, a tall Irishman with a short temper, is the subject of a macabre story. Jeffrey (who was serving a life sentence for manslaughter) lived in a small hut on the island, grew a few vegetables and kept a few chickens. On Saturday night each week he was picked up by boat and brought to the mainland to attend church on the Sabbath, then returned on Monday morning. The authorities were glad to get rid of this hothead for most of the week and not at all pleased when they spotted a signal fire burning early one mid-week morning. When a detachment of guards rowed across to investigate they found Jeffrey in a wild, agitated state, begging to be taken off the island. He told how, on the previous night, his hut had been shaken and rocked by some invisible force then a fiery red glow had lit the walls and the surrounding ground. Jeffrey had scrambled from his bed thinking a fire had broken out but was confronted, not by a natural phenomenon, but by the devil himself, eyes smouldering, horns erect, encircled in sulphurous smoke. The guards and the medical officer who examined Jeffrey at the settlement concluded his mind had become ‘unhinged by crime and suffering’ and did not force him to return to the island.

  The Isle of the Dead can be visited today and even on the brightest, sunniest days there is an oppressive atmosphere there, far stronger than one feels in any conventional graveyard. The chances of encountering His Satanic Majesty are pretty remote but, with almost 2,000 bodies buried below ground, a few spirits would not be out of place.

  25.

  Ghostly Gourmands

  He was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost

  The Bible, Acts 12:23

  Given that we can safely assume ghosts don’t need to eat, it’s amazing how many of their stories involve food. That staple of human exist
ence — flour — is the common ingredient in our first two; the second as sad as the first is shocking.

  The cruelty with which many of our ancestors treated Aborigines should be a constant source of shame to white Australians today. The lives of the Indigenous people of this continent were held to be of so little value that the murder of hundreds mattered less to a station owner than the death of a favourite dog.

  As late as the 1920s there were reports of ‘pesky’ Aborigines being disposed of with gifts of flour liberally laced with arsenic. This barbarous practice had been common for a century and just occasionally backfired on the perpetrators.

  There is a story of a station owner in the Mullewa region of Western Australia who left a sack of poisoned flour lying about that his wife used by mistake to bake two loaves of bread. That evening a group of Aborigines on walkabout came to the back door of the homestead asking for food. The station owner’s wife wanted to give them one of the freshly baked loaves but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Waste o’ good bread,’ he grumbled as he tucked into a slice himself. It took about fifteen minutes for the poison to take effect and another four hours, during which the station owner writhed in agony, for death to claim him.

  Ever since (the story goes) the ghost of the poisoned poisoner has haunted the station bemoaning his fate and scaring the wits out of every Aborigine it encounters. ‘He’s a horrible sight, that’s for sure,’ one witness reported. ‘His skin’s bluey-grey and his eyes are all blood-shot, and ya know, when he opens his mouth t’ yell at yer all that comes out is this long, pitiful moan … like a dingo howlin’. You’d feel sorry for the poor bloke if you didn’t know what he did t’ them blackfellas … and if he weren’t so bloody terrifyin’. I seen him twice when I was a kid and I can tell ya, I didn’t hang around long neither time!’