The second and more widely credited explanation concerns two young Melbourne women carrying a small fortune in jewellery who disappeared when a Cobb & Co. coach they were travelling in broke an axle at Conroy’s Gap. The driver told the women to stay inside the coach while he rode into Yass for help. When he returned a few hours later the women were gone. One female skeleton and a gold ring (hooked on a twig) were later found in what became known as Dead Woman’s Gully.
Whoever they were in life it seems these ghostly damsels are in no hurry to leave. As recently as 1994 workmen at the Bogo Stone Quarry at Conroy’s Gap reported seeing a young woman dressed in a long white dress standing near a gate; she suddenly took fright, scrambled up an embankment and vanished. Then in 2007 a public servant inspecting the site for a proposed wind farm at Conroy’s Gap claimed to have seen the same figure on a hillside — but only its head, torso and dress. Where its legs and feet should have been was nothing but thin air!
Before we leave stories of ghostly spare parts here’s a final one recounted in a national magazine in July 1979. The correspondent wrote that she and her family had recently moved into an old house in the northern New South Wales town of Casino. At around midnight on the third night the woman’s mother got out of bed to go to the bathroom. There was bright moonlight so the mother didn’t bother to switch any lights on. As she went to open the bathroom door a shadowy black-skinned hand appeared on the door handle and opened the door for her — just a hand, ending at the wrist.
Badly shaken the mother returned to her bed but was unable to sleep. She got up again and this time headed for the kitchen via the lounge room. Halfway there a sudden gust of hurricane-force wind hurled her backwards through the still open bathroom door. When she regained her feet the terrified woman ran to the kitchen and searched for the light switch. The wind followed her and she could feel the solitary hand trying to drag her back to its lair.
The correspondent ended her account there. If the angry spirit (presumably Aboriginal) that manifested itself that night thirty-two years ago has ever reappeared no one has reported it. I, for one, sincerely hope it and all the other dismembered bits described in these stories never do!
28.
The Bugler’s Ghost
When the night wind howls in the chimney cowls,
and the bat in the moonlight flies,
And inky clouds, like funeral shrouds,
sail over the midnight skies —
When the footpads quail at the night bird’s wail,
and black dogs bay at the moon,
Then is the spectres’ holiday —
the dead of the night’s high-noon!
As the sob of the breeze sweeps over the trees,
and the mists lie low on the fen,
From grey tombstones are gathered the bones
that once were women and men,
And away they go, with a mop and a mow,
to the revel that ends too soon,
For the cockcrow limits our holiday —
the dead of the night’s high-noon!
And then each ghost with his ladye-toast
to their churchyard beds take flight,
With a kiss, perhaps, on her lantern chaps,
and a grisly grim ‘good-night’;
Till the welcome knell of the midnight bell
rings forth its jolliest tune,
And ushers our next high holiday —
the dead of the night’s high-noon!
Ruddigore, Gilbert and Sullivan
(writer and composer of comic operas)
There’s an old story still told around the Castlereagh area of outer Sydney about the Bugler’s Ghost. While no one can vouch for its authenticity, its charm is undeniable and the principal named characters were real people.
Until well into the nineteenth century the Hawkesbury – Nepean river system formed the frontier of white settlement in the colony of New South Wales and, at what is now Emu Plains on the west bank of the Nepean, stood a stockade — a meagre bastion of British military might, protecting the settlement from the perils of the wild mountains beyond. Later this became the barracks for a detachment of troops assigned to guard the convicts working on the road over the Blue Mountains. Nothing is left of the complex today, but it is commemorated by Barracks and Stockade Streets and some of its probably reluctant occupants are recalled in this old story.
Off-duty soldiers from the barracks would row across the river to enjoy the delights of Penrith (a couple of inns and a bawdy house or two) and return to quarters, rather worse for wear, late at night. One night a small boat overloaded with a group of these revellers returning to their quarters hit a floating log in the river. The boat almost capsized and three of the occupants were thrown into the water, including the company’s bugler who was as we might say today ‘legless’. There was much yelling and thrashing about as the men in the boat tried to drag their comrades back on aboard. Two were rescued spluttering foul water but alive. The bugler was less lucky. When found he was floating face downwards and when dragged aboard he was quite dead.
The wet and bedraggled party rowed back to the eastern bank and carried the bugler’s body to the Penrith courthouse, where a doctor was roused from his nearby bed. Yawning uncontrollably, the doctor pronounced the bugler dead and suggested that as the weather was hot, he should be buried forthwith. ‘Can’t have him going orf now, lads,’ the physician advised (between yawns). ‘He already has a very peculiar pong about him from the river and very soon, I promise you, he’ll stink worse than that little fish we pulled out of his drawers!’
By this time most of the damp soldiers were tired of hanging about and decided to return to their barracks. Only two of his erstwhile comrades volunteered to bury the unfortunate bugler. They commandeered a farmer’s horse and cart and loaded the body onto the tray then drove ten kilometres to the nearest cemetery at Castlereagh.
On arrival the pair roused the Anglican minister of Castlereagh, Henry Fulton, from his bed. Now Fulton was a fiery Irish patriot and no admirer of the military and he was not best pleased to be troubled on a hot summer’s night by two redcoats smelling of grog and bearing the remains of a third in a cart. Muttering words no one would expect to hear from a clergyman’s lips, Fulton sent one of his sons to rouse the local grave digger. That worthy then set to work by lamplight to gouge out a shallow grave in the hard, dry soil of the cemetery with pick and shovel. By the time all was prepared it was after midnight and the bugler was laid to rest by moonlight attended by his two remaining friends, the sleepy grave digger and the crotchety parson.
Thereafter, the story goes, the bugler, angry at being deserted by the rest of his comrades, would rise from his grave at around nine each night, dance a jig and play his bugle. The people of Castlereagh lived in fear of this awesome sight and none would venture near the cemetery after dark. Not many claimed to have actually seen the ghost, but everyone had heard his bugle. It was described as an eerie sound like a bugle being played a long way away and the few who claimed a glimpse of the ghost swore he wore his military uniform and that his red coat glowed, his pipe-clayed belt glistened and his polished buttons glinted in the pale moonlight.
A few witnesses also told of being able to smell the strong, sweet odour of rum wafting across the graveyard when the ghostly music started and one Castlereagh matron (of impeccable character) claimed the ghost had made a ‘most unseemly’ proposition to her as she passed the graveyard on her way home from a prayer meeting one night.
Reverend Fulton’s son, John, determined to lay the ghost and prove these stories were figments of over-fertile (or over-fuelled) imaginations. He went to the house of a friend who lived near the cemetery and asked him to join him in a vigil to catch the ghost. The friend refused, saying he had heard the spooky bugle and nothing would induce him to enter the cemetery at night. Young Fulton then asked the grave digger if his two sons (both big, burly lads like their father) would accompany him, but they too claimed to have heard the m
ysterious music and would have no part in the venture. So Fulton set out alone, carrying an unlighted lantern, a tinderbox, a roast beef sandwich, a stone jar of beer — and a long coil of rope, with which he presumably expected to catch someone pretending to be the ghost.
The young man arrived at the cemetery at around eight o’clock in the evening and positioned himself behind a tall gravestone just a few metres from the bugler’s plot. There was a cool breeze blowing from the north-east that set trees bordering the graveyard shivering and whispering. The moon was rising and its light cast deep shadows around the gravestones and made dew on the grass glow with an eerie phosphorescence. It was, one might say, a perfect night for ghost hunting and while he tucked into his sandwich and his beer, young Fulton felt an exhilarating cocktail of excitement, anticipation and trepidation coursing through his veins.
On the stroke of nine the sound began: a soft, wavering trumpeting that floated over the graveyard and made young Fulton sit up and brace himself. He peeped over the headstone and focused his gaze on the bugler’s grave — but of a dancing ghost or any other visible form there was no sign. Fulton also sniffed the air but found no trace of rum. He climbed to his feet, emerged from his hiding place and listened more closely, then burst into raucous laughter — laughter that echoed across the graveyard and sent startled night birds flapping into the sky.
John Fulton enjoyed telling the story of the Bugler’s Ghost for the rest of his life, not least because he believed he had ‘laid’ it. The sound, he would explain, did not come from the bugler’s grave but came floating in on the breeze, carried over the waters of the Chain of Ponds Creek from Windsor, where the Windsor Town Band practised twice a week, commencing at 9 pm.
Now, readers who know the area might argue that fifteen-odd kilometres is a long distance for sound to carry, but John Fulton was convinced his theory was correct. Most of the good people of Castlereagh, however, continued to avoid the cemetery at night.
29.
‘Do You Have That in Grey?’
There is a ghost that eats handkerchiefs.
It keeps you company on all your travels.
Christian Morgenstern (German poet, 1871–1914)
If someone conducted one of those ‘Top 10’ surveys on the colour of ghosts’ clothing, then grey would undoubtedly be the first colour on the list. It seems to be far and away the most fashionable shade for lady ghosts, in the form of grey crinolines, grey uniforms, grey dresses and grey habits. And why is that? Well, historians might suggest that the colour has links with death and mourning, but I suspect it’s simply vanity — choosing a shade to match the wearer’s complexion! Jokes aside, the dozen or more ‘grey’ ladies who feature in Australian ghosts stories (including the couple we’ve already met) have little else in common. They range from kind nurses to cruel harridans and from gracious women who are ladies to a gracious lady who was not a woman at all.
The Mater Misericordiae Hospital at Crows Nest in Sydney is reputedly haunted by a grey-habited nun, the ghost of a nursing sister who died during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1919. This ghost appears more often to patients than staff according to a nurse who trained there in the 1960s. Often, she is on record as saying, nurses would go to help patients only to be told: ‘It’s OK, nurse, the nun did it.’ There was, the nurse claimed, a policy not to alarm patients by denying the existence of the nun or referring to her as a ghost.
The most hair-raising experience the nurse herself had with the grey nun was on a night when a patient died. The occupant of the next bed was awake and said to her: ‘I knew she’d died, nurse: the nun came, said a prayer and turned the oxygen off.’ Sure enough the oxygen had been turned off, the hose neatly coiled and the cylinder set aside.
Another ghostly, grey-habited nun is said to dispense comforting words and good counsel to patients in the alcoholics ward at St Vincent’s Hospital in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Many a distressed dipsomaniac in Ward 14 has commended the hospital on having such a caring and compassionate team member. And, before the reader suggests the sympathetic sister might be a symptom of the patients’ condition, I hasten to add that many doctors and nurses have seen her too.
The medical superintendent of St Vincent’s spoke publicly about their grey nun in The Bulletin in 1980 and said that his staff were reluctant to talk to strangers about her, considering that their relationship with her was something special and private. Some years later one staff member, Sister Catherine O’Carrigan, broke ranks and told The Australian that there was ‘very much a sense of security’ when the ghostly grey nun was about.
Stories about this gentle spectre abound. She is supposed to have fallen to her death down a stairwell many years ago or been the victim of some unresolved crime. Since then her ghost has resided in a lift well and made itself useful around the ward, chatting to patients and dispensing blessings.
One particularly interesting feature of this ghost’s appearance is that her feet are not visible. Black stockings protrude from under her habit and disappear into the floor. Hospital records give a possible explanation for this: the floor of Ward 14 is now a few centimetres higher than it was in the grey nun’s time. She, it seems, still walks on the old level.
A motley mansion with a motley history at Bothwell, Tasmania, is said to be haunted by yet another of these ghostly grey females, but this time her occupation is a mystery. Inverhall, as the house was originally named, was built by the first Australian-born commissioned officer in the British Army, Captain D’Arcy Wentworth, brother of the politician William Charles Wentworth. Captain Wentworth sold out to a testy magistrate who renamed the house ‘Schawfield’ after himself and went bankrupt enlarging it to accommodate himself, his long-suffering wife, their one son and their seven daughters — Sarah, Anne, Susan, Isabella, Janet, Elizabeth and Henrietta.
When Magistrate Schaw and his brood departed the house became Bothwell Academy ‘for the sons and daughters of gentlefolk’, where knowledge and discipline were meted out in equal measure. Later, as Wentworth House (the name it bears today), the house had several owners before becoming an Anglican rectory.
The unidentified grey ghost’s favourite haunt is the unusual cantilevered staircase that rises steeply from the entrance hall at Wentworth House. The spectre is described as a tall, slim, elegant young woman wrapped in a long grey cloak with a cascade of reddish-brown hair falling over the collar. Her face has been described as pale and unblemished, framing an upturned nose and a pair of large, hazel-coloured eyes with very long lashes. Witnesses claim that she appears at the top of the stairs at night and seems oblivious to their presence and to whatever may be happening around her. The spectre pauses at the upper landing, gathers up the folds of her cloak then floats effortlessly down the stairs. When it reaches the entrance hall the heavy front door (whether bolted or not) will swing silently open, allowing the apparition to glide, noiselessly, out into the night.
This grey lady was also spotted in the yard one day by a tenant chopping wood. Unsure whether she was human or phantom he asked her what she wanted. In reply she simply disappeared; and a bishop staying at Wentworth House when it was a rectory mistook her for a chambermaid after she appeared suddenly behind him reflected in his shaving mirror. ‘Yes, yes. I’ll be down in a moment,’ the lathered cleric snapped impatiently. Later he complained to his host about the maid’s intrusion on his ablutions. ‘So you’ve seen our ghost,’ said his host calmly. ‘We see her all the time.’
No one has been able to work out just who this spectre was before death claimed her, but there has been much speculation that she might have been one of the magistrate’s daughters, at least five of whom he managed to marry off before he quit Tasmania. So it’s reasonable to suggest her surname might once have been Schaw — but her given name? Well, maybe it was Sarah, or maybe Anne … or Susan, or Isabella, or Janet, or Elizabeth, or Henrietta.
The town of Roma in Queensland also has a ‘grey lady’ ghost but, unlike the anonymous one at
Bothwell, Roma’s can be identified and her strange story, before and after her death, is well documented. Jim Lalor, owner of Gubberamunda station, which bordered the town, gave a couple named Bonnor permission to build a weatherboard cottage on his land behind the Roma Hospital. Bonnor was a bush carpenter who worked for Lalor, but it was his wife who interested the local gossips. When she came into town Mrs Bonnor always wore the same severe, grey dress with an old grey shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her face was expressionless and if anyone spoke to her in the street she ignored them. One day the Bonnors disappeared without explanation to Lalor or anyone else. There was food in their cottage and Mrs Bonnor’s large grey cat was still there.
The cottage remained empty for a while then a saddler named Johnson rented it and moved in with his family. The cat slunk away into the bush. One of Johnson’s daughters, Matilda (‘Tilly’), became seriously ill and had an operation at the hospital. She came home swathed in bandages and was put to bed. Next morning she was agitated and told her mother that ‘the lady in grey’ had visited her during the night. The figure had stood at the foot of her bed and told her, in a persuasive voice, that the way for her to get well was to remove all her bandages. Mrs Johnson told Tilly she must have been dreaming, but later in the day the horrified mother found her daughter lying unconscious on her blood-soaked bed. The girl had ripped off all her bandages. Before the doctor arrived, Tilly died. The death certificate, curiously, shows the cause of death as pneumonia, which either puts paid to the story or more likely was a convenient way of sparing the distressed parents a public inquiry.
Great Australian Ghost Stories Page 20