It was a Saturday night and cold, with the smell of rain in the air. The young couple caught a tram out to Luna Park and as the tram clattered along St Kilda Road they could see occasional flashes of lightning across Port Philip Bay. They wondered if their journey would be in vain and if they would find the park closed, but when they alighted on the St Kilda esplanade Luna Park was a hive of activity. The sound of music and laughter wafted over them and thousands of sparkling coloured lights made the place look like fairyland, the brightness intensified by a moonless night and low clouds. Heather giggled with excitement and Roy gave her an encouraging hug as they entered the park through the mouth of the giant, smiling face. Inside the noise was like bedlam and the tempting smells of popcorn, hot dogs and ice cream swirled around them.
Heather was afraid of heights so they began the evening with rides on some of the less taxing attractions, working their way up to the big slide, the roller coaster and the towering Ferris wheel. The rain stayed away and excitement kept the cold at bay.
‘Come on, love, please, I really wanna have a go on the Ferris wheel,’ Roy pleaded. Heather hesitated for just a moment then, looking at the excited expression on her boyfriend’s face, she gave in. Roy got the tickets just as passengers were boarding the giant, graceful wheel. Within moments they were installed in a cage that slowly rose as the wheel rotated.
Roy put his arm around Heather’s shoulders and she soon forgot her nerves as the incredible vista revealed itself. Figures on the ground below shrank until they looked like ants, the lights of the city glittered in the distance and the sparkling waters of the bay seemed to stretch forever. Banks of heavy cloud rolled along the horizon, streaked with lightning, and the distant rumble of thunder echoed around them. The slow, smooth motion of the wheel made the couple feel as if they were magically flying together through the inky sky.
‘Blimey, this is great, eh?’ Roy whispered to Heather.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Heather whispered back.
At that moment a particularly bright flash of lightning lit the wheel, making the white-painted spokes and dangling cages appear like a giant skeleton. A crash of deafening thunder followed. Roy and Heather were temporarily blinded by the lightning, but when their eyes adjusted they both screamed and clung to each other for dear life — and good reason they had to do so, for suddenly, almost a 100 metres in the air and without any warning, they found themselves sharing their cage with a third person.
Sitting casually on the restraining bar of the cage, just a few centimetres from them, was a life-size male figure dressed in the costume of a court jester — a three-pointed hat (red, yellow and black, with a golden bell on each point), a tight jacket in the same colours, tight breeches (one leg red, the other black), a yellow codpiece and pointed yellow shoes, also trimmed with golden bells.
If the creature’s sudden arrival and its bizarre costume were not enough to terrify Roy and Heather then its face and form were. There was an ageless, sinuous strength to its body and its lean face wore a leering smile; its eyes smouldered, fixed on Roy and Heather, lips drawn back to reveal elongated, pointed teeth.
Another flash of lightning followed the first and lit the points of the creature’s teeth and the whites of its eyes, making them shine like incandescent stars. The creature leaned towards the terrified couple and they shrank back as its face loomed nearer and nearer theirs. At close range they could hear the tinkling of the bells on the hat and shoes. One bony, red-gloved hand reached out towards Heather and a long, thin finger caressed her cheek then was quickly withdrawn. The creature then leaned back so that most of its body was outside the cage. The bells on its hat jangled wildly in the wind and from its mouth came a devilish sound, half laugh and half howl, that seemed to make the air around the cage vibrate. Just as the sound reached a deafening crescendo the monstrous vision vanished. Where a split second before the colours of its gaudy costume had been dancing before their eyes and its eyes and teeth flashing there was nothing but air and velvety blackness.
‘What the hell was that?’ mumbled Roy.
‘I don’t know,’ said Heather, ‘and I don’t want to know!’
Roy’s masculine instincts took over from his fear. ‘We’ll be down in a sec, love, and boy am I gonna give the people who run this joint a piece of my mind. They shouldn’t allow that to happen to anyone!’
Heather’s more practical female instincts were also returning to her. She took Roy’s hand and looked up into his face. ‘I don’t think I’d bother if I was you, Roy.’
Heather and Roy made a pact to tell no one about their strange and horrifying experience and twenty years passed before, as husband and wife and clinging to one another as they had that night to ward off the echoes of their terror, they finally broke their silence.
‘I was so scared I nearly wet meself,’ Roy admitted.
Heather added: ‘I did actually.’
The figure Roy and Heather referred to as ‘The Joker’ was seen by others. A group of ten riders on the Scenic Railway roller coaster, who were already screaming with excitement, screamed in horror when it appeared on the track just in front of their car. In a split second the roller-coaster cars passed over (or through) the figure, without the impact and crash the riders all expected and feared.
When this group complained to the operators of the ride, they were told they must have imagined the figure; or that it had been a large seabird or a trick of the light, but the group remained unconvinced. So did the management of Luna Park, until another patron complained one afternoon about a week later that the Joker had pushed her child off one of the horses on the carousel.
‘It’s just not good enough!’ the angry woman shrieked. ‘It might be a bit of fun to have your staff dressed up like that … but that man’s behaviour was unacceptable. I paid good money for Betty to ride on the merry-go-round and we waited until the horse she liked best was free. I sat her on the horse, took her fairy floss to mind it and showed her how to hang onto the pole. She was as happy as Larry when the music started.
‘Then that monster appeared beside her. I don’t know where he came from. I didn’t see him arrive. He must have been behind the machinery in the middle. I saw him lurch towards Betty and jam his face right into hers. Betty screamed and I leaped onto the merry-go-round to grab her … then he shoved her right off the horse. Luckily I caught her as she fell. The thing swung his leg over her horse as the merry-go-round started to move. He gave us this horrible smile and waved as he rode off … and above the music I swear the bastard was laughing at us!’
The woman described how her daughter was hysterical, the fairy floss lay in the dust and her own anger was making her tremble. She waited until the carousel made its first full rotation, intending to take a swipe at the ‘bastard’ with her handbag as he came past, but when the distinctive horse her daughter had chosen came by again, gently rising and falling in time to the music, it was riderless.
Stories about the Joker leaked out and the management of the park responded with ‘no comment’, afraid that the publicity would drive business away rather than attract it. They hoped the stories would be quickly forgotten and their hopes were fulfilled. The Luna Park ghost (if that it was) had a very short career. The last report came barely a year after the first and all has been silence since. The giant, grinning face still welcomes visitors, the lights still dazzle, the music and the shrieks of delighted children still ring through the complex, but the Joker seems to have departed. Might he, I wonder, have transported himself to Hollywood, to act as an unpaid consultant to the parade of notable actors who have portrayed his character so memorably in film and on television?
34.
The Ghosts of Garth and Graham’s Castle
For who can wonder that man should feel a vague belief in tales of disembodied spirits wandering those places which they once dearly affected, when he himself, scarcely less separated from his old world than they, is for ever lingering upon past emotions and by-gone times, and hovering
, the ghost of his former self, about the places and people that warmed his heart of old?
Master Humphrey’s Clock, Charles Dickens
Near the village of Avoca in the Fingal Valley in Tasmania stand the ruins of a house called Garth. What began as an imposing, two-storey residence 160 years ago is now reduced to a few crumbling fragments of wall, a broken chimney and a scatter of rubble. On bright summer days when the sun warms the smooth blocks of sandstone there is little evidence to support the building’s grim reputation, but when winter shrouds the valley a gloomier place would be hard to imagine.
If you’re hardy (or foolhardy) enough to spend a night there you may see and hear things that make you forget the cold and discomfort. If you hear a moaning sound it will probably be the wind whistling around the ruined walls; a shriek will almost certainly be the call of a startled owl and strange shapes on the frosty ground nothing more that the shadows of clouds scudding across the moon — or it might be the ghosts of Garth, for this stark old ruin is all that remains of what is still called Tasmania’s most haunted house.
Truth and fiction are so entwined in the story of Garth that it is hard to separate them. The few historical facts that survive about the property conflict with the popular stories but are just as tragic and disturbing. According to the popular version, the land on which the house stands was granted in the 1830s to a young Englishman who had left his fiancée behind in England. The plan was for him to establish himself, then for her to join him. Using convict labour the young man set about building a house worthy of his future bride but, when the building was only partially completed, he became impatient and took ship for England to fetch her. When he arrived he discovered that during his absence the young lady’s feelings towards him had not grown fonder. Quite the opposite: she had married someone else and had not bothered to let him know.
In despair the betrayed lover returned to Van Diemen’s Land and to Avoca. The hopes and dreams that had sustained him through the years of hardship were dashed and the house he had built with such loving care now seemed as barren and gloomy as his future. In a fit of anguish the young man hanged himself in the courtyard of the unfinished house. His ghost, it is said, still wanders the property bemoaning his fate.
Sometime later (so the story goes) the building was occupied by a family with a small daughter and a convict nursemaid. The nursemaid was strict and fond of scolding her charge until one day the child threw herself into a well to escape. The nursemaid dived in to rescue the little girl but both drowned. Thereafter the ghost of the little girl joined the betrayed lover in stalking the blighted rooms of Garth.
The house stood unoccupied for decades and stories of the ghosts accumulated. Locals reported seeing the young man (his head twisted and livid rope burns scarring his throat) and the little girl, dressed in a lace-trimmed pinafore and waving to passers-by from the empty windows of the house. Heartrending screams were heard echoing through the building and the hoof beats of unseen horses rang on the hard ground in front of the house and from within the courtyard. Animals which had apparently wandered up to the house innocently were reported as racing away lathered with fear as if all the hounds in hell were nipping at their heels. When developed, a photograph taken at Garth by curious visitors with their trusty Box Brownie showed the shadowy figure of the little girl smiling shyly beside the person who was being photographed. Whispers spread like wildfire that the property was cursed and it was said that anyone who disturbed the stones at Garth would meet a dreadful end.
The true history of the property is quite different. The earliest maps still in existence show the land belonging to a Charles Peters and his wife Susannah. Devotees of the story of the betrayed lover claim that Peters took over the partially completed house after the young man’s suicide, but local historians doubt there was a previous owner. Charles and Susannah Peters named their house Garth after their family home in Scotland, and if they shared it with the ghost of a previous owner they left no record of it.
Tragedy struck the Peters family on Friday, 18 September 1840 while Charles and Susannah were entertaining a friend in the parlour. Their little daughter, Anne, aged two and a half, came to the parlour door screaming hysterically, her clothes and hair on fire. She had apparently been watching the cook making jam in the kitchen and had stood too close to the stove. The child was terribly burned and, although her parents anointed her burns with oil and lime water and the local doctor did what he could to relieve her suffering, poor little Anne died two days later. The details of this tragic event are preserved in the coroner’s report and the evidence of the distraught father and guest dutifully recorded and dated. Anne Peters was buried near the house and her grave remains visible to this day.
The Peters retained ownership of Garth but moved to the nearby town of Fingal after their daughter’s death. The house remained empty until 1851, when they leased it to James and Charlotte Grant, but five months after the tenants moved in the house was completely gutted by fire. No one lived at Garth after that — except the spirits.
Sceptics in the district will tell you that the stories of ghosts were invented to keep trespassers out of the ruined house. Believers will tell you that the ghosts had exactly that effect and that they would not spend a night at Garth for a million dollars. Perhaps the young man who supposedly hanged himself there never existed, or maybe time simply erased records of him. Perhaps the little girl whose ghost likes to be photographed did not die in the well, although the remains of a well are still there. Could it be the ghost of little Anne Peters? Only the old house knows the truth and it keeps its secrets to itself.
The distinction of bearing the title ‘South Australia’s most haunted house’ goes to a building that is also no longer there. Unlike Garth there are not even a few stones left to help us remember a house known in its day as Graham’s Castle.
A wealthy Englishman named John Richmond arrived in Adelaide in 1838 with this wife, four children, fourteen servants and the servants’ families. To accommodate such a large retinue, Richmond purchased fifty-two acres (twenty hectares) of land facing Prospect Road in what was then called Prospect Village, four kilometres north of the Adelaide GPO. In the centre of it he built a large house and surrounded it with gardens and orchards, but the Richmonds remained less than ten years in what they called Prospect House. In 1846 the property was bought by an enterprising bachelor named John Benjamin Graham. From that time the house was known locally as Graham’s Castle.
There’s some doubt as to whether the house reached its final form during Richmond’s or Graham’s time, but whichever of these men was responsible for choosing its design had more money than taste. Prospect House or Graham’s Castle was an architectural monstrosity — a stark white limestone box topped with a crenellated parapet that made it look like a bad copy of an English castle. A massive front door with two cast-iron lion’s head knockers (why two?) and a high stone wall topped with broken glass encircling the property made it about as warm and inviting as a mausoleum.
Graham came to Adelaide as an undistinguished migrant, took a job as a shop assistant in an ironmonger’s, soon owned the business then mortgaged it to buy shares in the new Burra copper mine. Within a few years he was a millionaire. During his time at Prospect House Graham was not exactly a recluse, but his stern character and Spartan lifestyle suited the house. He visited Europe in 1848, where he acquired a genuine castle near Heidelberg in Germany and a severe English wife.
Graham sold Prospect House in 1853 to a brewer named Clark, who in turn sold it to Nathaniel Oldham and it was during the latter’s time that the house began to gain its reputation for being haunted. The ghost of a woman dressed entirely in black was often seen on the stairs and, seventy years later, Oldham’s sons could still vividly recall their separate encounters with her. Some people suggested it was Mrs Graham and that she had been murdered in the house by Mr Graham, but as both ended their days peacefully in their German schloss that theory is easily disproved.
; Another ghost, this time a lady fashionably dressed in white satin began to visit the house. Occupants would hear a coach approaching on the gravel driveway and then the white figure would appear at a window tapping on the glass and motioning to be let in. She would then suddenly disappear, leaving her audience aghast. Moments later, delicate footsteps would be heard mounting the empty stairs. A third spectre, reputed to be the ghost of a servant who hanged himself in his bedroom, caused general panic whenever he appeared on the parapet walk; he was immaculately dressed but headless.
As well as these phantom figures the old house was plagued by strange noises: bumps and creaks, mysterious tapping, groans and terrifying shrieks that hauled sleepers from their beds. Neighbours always avoided the house at night, taking long detours rather than pass its gloomy gates.
Not surprisingly, the house changed hands many times during the remaining years of the nineteenth century, a succession of owners driven out by the ghosts or the difficulty of getting servants to stay. For a while it was leased by North Adelaide Grammar and used as a dormitory for an overflow of boarders, but the combination of its ugliness and lurid reputation meant the house finally lay vacant. Decay set in and by 1912 the old house was fit only for demolition.
Neither the residents of Prospect or of Fingal in Tasmania regretted the passing of these notorious old houses, but maybe the spirits that occupied them did.
35.
Keepers of the Flame
Down in the south, by the waste without sail on it,
Far from the zone of the blossom and tree,
Lieth, with winter and whirlwind and wail on it,
Ghost of a land by the ghost of a sea.
Beyond Kerguelen, Henry Kendall (Australian poet 1839–1882)
Great Australian Ghost Stories Page 23