Great Australian Ghost Stories

by Richard Davis

  Flour also produced a much more likeable and less frightening spectre which haunts a large pocket of vine-infested grassland known as Munro Plains, a few kilometres west of Tully in far north Queensland. Settler Colin Munro established a farm there in 1852 and built a substantial homestead for his young family. He also employed an Englishman named Dick Grosvenor as tutor to his children. Grosvenor was a gentle giant weighing 140 kilograms, well educated and softly spoken, who admitted, proudly, to being eighty years old. The Munro children adored the old man and would sit for hours on his ample knees, stroking his waist-length beard while he told them tales of his travels and explained the mysteries of the world to them.

  One day while the family was away Dick went to get a dish of flour from the 90-kilogram bag kept in the homestead storehouse. While reaching in the old man overbalanced and fell headfirst into the bag. He was unable to regain his footing and within minutes had smothered in the flour.

  Old Dick Grosvenor was sorely missed by the Munro family but they were not deprived of his company for long. He reappeared as one of the fattest ghost ever seen in Australia, his head, whiskers and clothing covered in flour, smiling benignly and waving a ghostly white hand at the children.

  Around 1908 the family left to take up another property near Mission Beach but the ghost stayed on at Munro Plains. Soon there was no one left who remembered him or could put a name to him. Later residents in the area, who occasionally saw him wandering about dejectedly, referred to him simply as ‘the sad old cove with the long, white whiskers’.

  Also from Queensland comes a gruesome ghost story set in a Brisbane butcher’s shop. The shop stood behind the Brisbane Arcade in Adelaide Street, facing the present King George Square. It was there during World War Two and for many years after, but it is gone today. The shop was L-shaped, the meat being prepared in one part and the customers served in the other.

  The story goes that the butcher and an apprentice got into an argument one day. A meat cleaver was thrown and the apprentice died. Subsequent owners of the shop, their staff and customers would occasionally hear the sound of the men arguing and struggling, then terrible screams coming from the back of the shop. A former customer told the Courier Mail years later that the sounds she heard there one afternoon were the most terrifying and disturbing she had ever heard in her life.

  ‘I started going there to buy sausages; they made good sausages they did, with plenty of meat in them — not like the rubbish you get today — and my hubby loved them. Anyhow, I went in there one day just on closing time. It was a stinking hot afternoon I remember and I said to the lady behind the counter I’d just have a pound because they might go off in the heat. She went round the corner to get my sausages and as soon as she moved out of sight, there was this terrible, blood-curdling scream that echoed off the tiled walls, followed by a shocking gurgling noise. I was the only customer in the shop and I hadn’t seen anyone else behind the counter, so I didn’t know what to do. I called out “Are you all right?” I got no reply, so I put down my shopping bag and stepped behind the counter, expecting to see the woman lying dead or some bloke attacking her. But the woman was just standing there with my pound of sausages in her hand. She was white-faced and trembling, but there was no one with her. When she saw me she pulled herself together and said, “Oh, you mustn’t come back here … this area is for staff only.”

  ‘I said: “I heard you scream. I thought you were in trouble.” She replied, “No I’m all right, thank you. It wasn’t me who screamed.” I could tell something was going on so I pressed the point. “Look,” I said, “I was only a few feet away and I heard you scream and then a horrible gurgling noise!” At that the woman turned even paler and I thought she was going to faint. My sausages slid from her hand and landed in the sawdust on the floor. There was a chair for customers out front so I insisted she sat down there. She seemed terribly relieved to be on the outside of the counter. When I put my hand on her arm to comfort her I could feel her trembling and she started to cry. “I just can’t take it any more,” she said. “I’ve worked here for just over a year and that’s the third time I’ve heard those awful noises. It’s just horrible … and there’s no one there. It’s the ghosts … I know it is!”

  ‘Between sobs the woman told me the story of the butcher murdering his apprentice and I advised her to find another job. I don’t know whether she took my advice or not, but I told my hubby if he wanted any more of their sausages he’d have to go and get them himself.’

  The glutinous, yellow lining of a cow’s stomach known as ‘tripe’ was a staple in butchers’ shops until about fifty years ago and is on the menu for our next story. Served piping hot with lashings of onion, tripe was a dish relished by our forefathers, although it has now gone right out of fashion and its passing seems to have caused little regret.

  One such forefather was a stevedore who lived at Cottesloe near Fremantle. His great delight was to come home from the Fremantle wharves to a plate piled high with freshly steamed tripe and fried onions. The pungent smell of the food would fill the house while the stevedore filled his stomach.

  Pain, warning of a heart-attack, was mistaken for indigestion one night and the offal-guzzling gourmand departed this life unexpectedly. His disconsolate widow stayed on in the house for the rest of her life, but could not bring herself to cook tripe and onions ever again. That did not stop the unmistakeable smell of that dish from returning to the dining room about once a week at dinner time for the next twenty years!

  Tripe was a food that children had to be ‘encouraged’ to eat and one of the many ghosts stories from the historic Rocks area of Sydney concerns a man who made encouraging his children to eat a mission. Louis Garel lived in Harrington Street in The Rocks in the late nineteenth century and the story goes that he would pace around his dining-room table at meal times with a stern look on his face and his hands clasped behind his back admonishing his large brood with his favourite saying: ‘Eat up and grow strong!’

  When Mr Garel’s mortal life ended they carried his body out of the house in a coffin but his spirit remained. His ghost was regularly seen by family and visitors to the house, gliding around the dining table and up and down the stairs, stern expression still on his face and hands still firmly clasped behind his back. Observers swore that the faint, hollow sounds that came from the ghost’s lips were the words: ‘Eat up and grow strong.’

  Like private dining rooms, public restaurants seem to be among the most popular haunts for ghosts and a couple of Australia’s most famous have resident spooks their owners have been proud to acknowledge. One such restaurant is Oatlands House at Dundas in Sydney’s west. Oatlands House has a long and colourful history. It was built in the 1830s by Percy Simpson, former officer in the Royal Corsican Rangers and one-time governor of the Greek island of Paxos. In Australia he (like many men of his class) pursued two careers — civil servant and pastoralist. At different times he was superintendent of the Great Northern Road, a police magistrate and a crown lands commissioner — all the while building a rural empire at Oatlands.

  The next owner was also a politician – pastoralist, James Brindley Bettington. The last of his line to own Oatlands House died in 1915. Today Oatlands House is an award-winning function centre and, although the cuisine is nouvelle and the service up-to-date, one timeless link with the past is said to remain — a ghost called Rebecca.

  According to local stories Rebecca was a beautiful young woman who was jilted on her wedding day. Occasionally since then her ghost is reported to have appeared in the upper storey of the house or in the garden, magnificently dressed in an old-fashioned satin wedding dress and searching for her errant bridegroom.

  The owner in the 1990s, celebrated restaurateur Oskar Nemme, reported that his staff were reluctant to go upstairs on their own and some who had worked at Oatlands House for twenty years and more claimed to have seen this sad, romantic spectre many times. But it is not only staff who have seen her, according to Mr Nemme. A woman sitting
in a car outside the restaurant one day (who knew nothing about the ghost) came running inside, pale and trembling, with a remarkable story to tell.

  She accosted the first staff member she encountered and with a trembling voice posed two questions: ‘Where is the bride?’ and ‘Is she all right?’ The staff member (a waitress) could see the woman was in distress and shepherded her to a chair. ‘What bride would that be, madame?’ the puzzled waitress asked.

  ‘The bride who just arrived, of course,’ the woman replied and when she saw the doubtful expression on the waitress’s face she became impatient. ‘The one who walked through the bougainvillea … she came in through the same door I did, just a moment ago!’

  Now the waitress knew there was no wedding reception booked for their establishment that afternoon, no bride was expected and the only person to enter the restaurant in the previous fifteen minutes had been the confused woman herself. The waitress began to wonder if the woman was drunk or mentally unstable and called to a colleague to summon the manager.

  After being given a glass of water and reassurances that no one was trying to trick her and that she was not the victim of some conspiracy or cruel practical joke, the woman calmed down and was able to relate exactly what she had seen.

  She had driven into the car park intending to have lunch in the restaurant, she said, but before she got out of her car she noticed a young woman in a long white satin bridal gown striding across the car park. Thinking it odd a bride should be arriving alone and on foot the woman watched her head towards the building. In the bride’s path was a huge, purple bougainvillea in full flower, but rather than stepping around it, the bride headed straight towards the thorny bush. The woman watching felt a cold shiver pass through her body, thinking the bride must have been daydreaming and was about to destroy her gown and possibly injure herself badly.

  ‘I jumped out of my car and called out to her to be careful of the thorns, but she didn’t seem to hear me. She kept walking and went straight through the bougainvillea … as if it wasn’t there!’

  No one knows what Rebecca’s surname was. Perhaps she was one of Simpson’s numerous offspring, or perhaps she was a Bettington. Whoever she was she certainly is a benign and harmless spirit — ‘A very friendly ghost’ is how Oskar Nemme described her — who only very occasionally alarms.

  Cleveland, on the shores of Moreton Bay near Brisbane, also has a famous haunted restaurant. This pleasant suburb almost became the capital of the State of Queensland. Many people believed it a much better site for a state capital than the flood-prone and insect-infested former penal colony on the Brisbane River. Among Cleveland’s strongest supporters was Francis Bigge, late of the Royal Navy, parliamentarian and grazier, who built a residence there in 1853. Later the house was leased by the State Government as a police residence and court house. It stands today in yet another guise: as the award-winning Olde Courthouse Restaurant, complete (it is proudly claimed) with its own resident ghost.

  Stories of the Cleveland Courthouse ghost — a middle-aged woman in a long gown, her dark hair gathered in two tight buns over her ears — have circulated for generations. No one knows for sure who she is, but most people believe it is Francis Bigge’s wife, Elizabeth. Mrs Bigge actually died back home in England (she hanged herself, legend has it), so if it is she, her spirit must have decided to return to the scene of one of the happier periods in her life.

  This spectre is normally well behaved, content to amuse itself tapping staff and diners on the shoulders or blowing gently in their ears, but it has been known to lose its temper on rare occasions. Crockery and ornaments have occasionally taken flight, seemingly on their own, and crashed into broken shards. Light switches have been turned on and off by her unseen hands, sometimes at embarrassing moments. Taps are also a favourite prop for this meddlesome spook. Carefully turned off they suddenly appear to turn themselves on; and turned on (to fill a sink, for example) they will be found moments later firmly turned off. Valuable pictures have also become dislodged from walls and crashed to the floor — curiously without the frames ever breaking or the glass shattering.

  No doubt out of consideration for the restaurant’s fine reputation and its patrons, ‘Elizabeth’, as everyone calls the ghost, usually behaves herself during trading hours and confines her rare destructive acts to when only staff are about to witness them.

  One former employee explained that no one is really frightened of the ghost. ‘I guess we’ve all got used to her … and she is a great excuse for anything that goes wrong in the kitchen or the dining room. I always liked to think of her as one of the team; someone who was just as proud of the place as we are … and who got a bit annoyed when we didn’t quite meet her standards.’

  So, dear readers, next time you tuck into fresh bread, succulent sausages (or even sizzling tripe) don’t be surprised if there’s an uninvited guest at your table; and when you treat yourself to a meal at a famous restaurant check the bill of fare for phantoms.

  26.

  Spirits You Can’t Drink

  You want to know whether I believe in ghosts? Of course I don’t. If you’d known as many of them as I have you wouldn’t believe in them either!

  Don Marquis (American journalist, 1878–1937)

  Like restaurants, hotels seem to be among the favourite haunts of ghosts the world over. Here are a collection of spooky tales from some of Australia’s most famous haunted hostelries, featuring gory ghosts, sad ghosts — and a phantom pussy.

  The Coach and Horses Inn, formerly known as the Clarkfield Hotel, near Sunbury, north-west of Melbourne, has been in the news many times — not for its historical significance, its architectural charm or its good service, but for the numerous ghosts that reputedly dwell there. The old bluestone pub was built in 1857 as a stopping point for Cobb & Co. coaches on the run to Bendigo, and its two oldest ghosts belong to the gold-rush era. Legend tells of an Irish seaman named Patrick Reagan who jumped ship in Melbourne and made his way to the goldfields where he ‘struck it rich’. Unfortunately, while stopping at the Clarkfield Hotel on his way back to Melbourne, Reagan was set upon by a group of dishonest police troopers who shot him and stole his gold. A medium from Penola in South Australia visiting the Clarkfield Hotel in the 1980s claimed that she had a vision of a fierce gun battle behind the hotel, with Reagan exchanging shots with the troopers and trying to flee down the hotel steps. In later years Reagan’s ghost became a familiar sight around the hotel, usually seen racing down the stairs, clutching a bullet wound to its chest and with blood seeping through its spectral fingers.

  The ghost of a Chinese miner who was involved in a fight and later hanged in the hotel is also, reputedly, still hovering about. Then there’s the ghost of the intellectually disabled girl aged about eleven who appears in a taffeta dress. She, it is said, disturbed her parents during a violent argument in one of the hotel bedrooms and was killed by her father, who then threw her body down a well. Her ghost has been reported many times — a forlorn, wasted spectre draped in a tattered, lilac coloured nightgown — and a group of psychic investigators boasted of having recorded her sobbing and pleading on audio tape. It is also believed that the ghosts of both her parents have appeared in the room where the murder took place at different times and beside the well, which was filled in some years ago. The mother’s ghost has been described as wild-eyed and the father’s as grim and stony-faced.

  With such a fraternity of ghosts in residence it is not surprising that there are many reports of sightings and ghostly encounters. In 1983 a cocky newspaper reporter spent a night alone in the stables behind the hotel in the hope of catching a ghost to write about. He didn’t, but when walking past the infamous well the next morning he commented that the old pump mounted above the well was useless if it didn’t work. The pump, he claimed, promptly came to life and started producing a steady stream of fresh water. When a plumber inspected it a few hours later the pump was found to be dry and completely seized up with rust.

  When the o
wners at that time, Don and Judy Busner, sold up they thought it only right to warn their successors that the hotel was haunted and that they had often been kept awake at night by strange noises, glasses smashing in the back bar and pictures in the murder room flying through the air. The new owners, Frank and Sharon Nelson, were sceptical but on the third night after they took over they heard strange noises downstairs at around 3 am. Frank got up and went to investigate. He stopped halfway down the stairs when hit by a blast of icy cold air, then he was struck from behind by some invisible force. He fell down several stairs and fractured his ankle. Was he, one wonders, bowled over by Patrick Reagan’s wounded ghost on one of its headlong flights? A few days later while he lay convalescing with his lower leg in plaster, Frank cried out in pain. The same force, or something similar, was twisting his broken ankle inside the plaster cast!

  A relative of the Nelsons who slept in the murder room one night claimed that the air turned cold in there as well and that something tried to strangle her in the middle of the night. Staff also saw near-human forms on the stairs and in the murder room. Chef Ian Ross was reported as saying he heard the door of the murder room bang one night so got up to investigate. He found the door wide open then watched a bright, glowing figure walk across the room towards the fireplace and back again. Ross was, he said, too frightened to move or cry out. His successor, Nick Tsantalis, told The Age he had a permanent sensation of being followed wherever he went in the hotel and had found the kitchen filled with fine mist one morning. Something heavy that he could not see also pinned him to his bed one night, he said, and for several nights afterwards Tsantalis slept in his car.

  Frank Nelson was confronted by a hideous face staring out at him when he was cleaning the outside of a window one day. It was not, he swore, his own reflection and when he tried to open the window it would not budge. Minutes before it had opened smoothly and did again after the apparition vanished.