by John Pinkney
For weeks afterward I couldn’t work it out. Why had Eric appeared to me, a mere visitor? And why had he been so unmistakably angry? Eventually, back at home in Melbourne, I came up with a tentative explanation. Glen, I knew, was planning to sell the house in which he and his mother had lived for so long. Could it be that the ghost disapproved and had been trying to convey, to me of all people, that the sale should be cancelled?
Well, it was only speculation on my part, I’ll admit - but I thought it worthwhile to write to Glen and put my tentative conclusions to him. I suggested he walk around the house and convey mentally to the ghost that everything was OK and that he’d be taking his mother’s spirit to the new place with him. Shortly after that, the house found a buyer. I asked Glen whether he’d taken my advice and talked to the ghost. He smiled and said, ‘Yes, it was done.’
A Dead Aunt, Uncanny Dreams, and a Diary
Cases in which the spirits of dead people try, seemingly, to influence the thoughts of the living are common in paranormal literature. One of the strangest of the Australian incidents on my files was sent to me by Carole Lee Boord of Christies Beach, South Australia:
In the mid-1980s I suddenly (and quite uncharacteristically) started having a series of premonitions. One day, for example, a friend’s boat was stolen. I had a picture of it being kept at Alding Beach. I could see the boat in someone’s back yard, under trees, beside a hedge. My vision came true a week later: the only difference being that the boat was found one suburb away, at Sellicks Beach. During this unusual period I also correctly predicted two accidents, a false fire alarm at work and (on numerous occasions) the times at which the phone at home would ring.
Then came the strongest feeling of all. I sensed that a particular aunt (dead for several years) was trying to speak to me. This was odd in itself, because I’d only met her a few times when I was a child. Nevertheless I kept getting a mental picture of a book, which (irrationally) I simply ‘knew’ belonged to her. I could see that the book had a maroon cover with gold lettering and decorative illustrations…and I had the impression it was quite old.
Thoughts of this book kept popping into my mind for about a week. When I was visiting my father I told him about my odd experiences - finally mentioning the feeling that my aunt was sending me a message about a book. He looked hard at me for a moment, then went to an upstairs room and started to rummage through drawers.
Ten minutes later he returned, carrying the book I’d seen in my mind’s eye. It was complete with everything, from the maroon cover to the decorations and the gold lettering. My aunt’s name was on the flyleaf. She had kept it as a scrapbook, in which she jotted down thoughts from her favourite authors and philosophers. I knew as soon as I held the volume in my hands that she wanted me to read those thoughts - and be guided by them.
Fear in an Isolated Farmhouse
A shearer, decapitated by an exploding gas bottle, reportedly haunts a remote Queensland sheep station. Debbie Gray of Proserpine saw the entity several times. ‘We were living in an old shearer’s house on the property, about two hours’ drive from Winton,’ she told me. ‘The place was several kilometres from the main road, so we seldom had visitors.
‘One morning, at about one o’clock, my baby woke for her bottle and I got up to attend to her. Our only power came from generators which were turned off at night, so I had to rely on a torch and moonlight shining through the window. While I was heating the milk the screen door at the back squeaked open. I turned and saw the shadowy figure of a man, letting himself out.
‘I assumed it was my brother who was staying with us, so I wasn’t bothered. But at breakfast next morning my brother started questioning my husband Ian really closely. He wanted to know whether he’d been roaming around the house during the night. When Ian truthfully replied that he’d slept right through, my brother looked upset. He refused to say any more, but it was obvious, to me anyway, that he’d seen something he didn’t like.
‘Several nights later, while my eldest daughter and I were watching TV, we heard a car pull up and a door close. I assumed it was Ian, who’d been working late at the shed. But when we went to the door to greet him there was no car, no dust and no sign of a living soul.
‘If a car had come onto the property Ian would have spotted it from the shed. But when he arrived home two hours later he insisted he’d seen nothing. All the time we lived on that station we had the feeling someone, or something, was watching us. It wasn’t a comforting sensation - and we were glad to be finally able to return to Brisbane.
‘While we were packing up, one of the station workers told us something I’m sure had been deliberately kept from us until then. He said a man had died in horrible circumstances in the quarters we were occupying. He’d had an accident with a gas bottle, which had exploded - ripping his head from his shoulders. His ghost had been seen around the property ever since.’
Sinister Sleepout Sealed
Members of a Western Australian farming family were advised to seal off a sleepout which had become a focus for alarming events. The haunting was described to me by Mrs Patricia Orchard of Kalannie:
‘We built our new extension room to accommodate friends and relatives who came to stay. It looked very pleasant and we were happy with it at first - but nothing worked out as we’d planned. Before long, we had to concede that nobody could enjoy a decent night’s sleep in that room. Now we’ve closed it off, and the only thing that goes in there these days is junk.
I was one of the first people to use the room, in the late 1980s. I was reading in bed by candlelight, as electricity hadn’t yet been extended. Suddenly I heard someone walking toward the sleepout. The footsteps stopped just short of the stairs, which led down to where I was. Then the candle went out - which was alarming, as there was absolutely no wind or draught that night.
I completely froze, knowing something very odd was happening. I called out, then checked, but no one was around. That was just the beginning of a chain of strange events. Several nights later I was woken by lights blazing through the curtains. Thinking a car had pulled up I went outside - only to find that the lights had gone and nothing was visible for miles around. This was no dream. Up to this time I’d kept everything to myself, but now I spoke to one of our shearers, who had also slept in the room. He said he’d had such an ordeal in there that he’d never go back.
After that I learned from my mother, my son and four or five others that they’d had similar experiences in the sleepout. I called in a Church of England minister. After an hour of listening and praying he advised me to seal the room, which I promptly did. But he wouldn’t offer any further explanation, leaving me to wonder whether some old tragedy was being re-enacted in the vicinity of our sleepout.’
According to one school of opinion, the spirits of people who have died suddenly and violently often seem unaware that their time on earth has ended. These confused entities can sometimes linger at the death scene, creating a broad range of ‘paranormal effects’, for periods varying from months to centuries. One long-term haunting of this kind occurred in the Church Street, Richmond, mansion built in the 19th century by Eureka Stockade leader Peter Lalor.
Lalor died on the premises in 1899, following a mysterious illness. His widow subsequently died of an unexplained fever. Shortly afterward Lalor’s daughter suicided by jumping from a balcony. His son - a doctor with a surgery downstairs - hanged himself.
Mrs Margaret Morton bought the Lalors’ house during the 1950s. She soon discovered that it was a magnet for supernatural events. One afternoon, while reading in a rocking chair, Mrs Morton’s sister felt a cold, invisible hand painfully grasp her ankle. The sisters, and visitors to the house, also reported seeing doors slamming shut without apparent cause, and a glass ‘dashing itself’ onto tiles without breaking. They claimed also to have heard the ringing of servant-bells which no longer existed. In Melbourne’s Sunday Age (15 January 1995) journalist Larry Schwartz wrote, ‘Mrs Morton’s sister suspected Lalor’s involv
ement in such occurrences.’
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Wardrobe Reflected a Dead Soldier’s Face
The haunting of the Towns family is largely forgotten today, but in the late 19th century it inspired discussion and argument throughout Australia.
Army captain Joseph Towns died at his Sydney house in October 1894. Six weeks after the funeral, he reappeared. Charles Lett, son-in-law of the dead man, was so shaken by the event that he sent a detailed description to the Society for Psychical Research in London:
‘…In the evening at about nine o’clock my wife, in company with a Miss Berthon, entered the room, in which the gaslight was burning. They were amazed to see, reflected as it were on the polished surface of the wardrobe, the image of Captain Towns. It was like an ordinary medallion portrait, but life-size. The captain’s face appeared wan and pale…and he wore a kind of grey flannel jacket in which he had been accustomed to sleep. Surprised and alarmed at what they saw, their first idea was that a portrait had been hung in the room, and that this was its reflection - but there was no picture of the kind.
‘Whilst they were looking and wondering, my wife’s sister, Miss Towns, entered the room, and before any of the others had time to speak, she exclaimed, “Good gracious! Do you see papa?”
‘One of the housemaids, passing by, was called into the room. Immediately she cried, “Oh, Miss! The Master!” Thereafter the butler, the nurse and the Captain’s own servant were summoned. All recognised Captain Towns immediately. Finally, Mrs Towns was sent for and, seeing the apparition, she advanced towards it with one hand extended, as if to touch it. As she passed her hand over the panel of the wardrobe, the figure gradually faded away, and never reappeared.’
F.W. Myers, a co-founder of the Society for Psychical Research, described cases of this kind as ‘collective apparitions’: entities witnessed, within a brief timespan, by more than one person. In his book Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death Myers surmised that a ghost might be ‘a manifestation of persistent personal energy that continues to take visible form after the person has died’.
More than a century after the Captain Towns incident a Canadian TV director, Noel Wolpert, began collecting reports of ghosts whose images had appeared in mirrors and shiny surfaces. ‘My most disturbing report concerns a full-length looking-glass that stood in the corner of a room in Bristol where three sisters were murdered,’ he said. ‘The family moved from the house and the mirror ended in an antique shop. Customers, who knew nothing of the killings, claimed they had seen agonised faces in the glass. The mirror was consigned to a tip.’
Wolpert also chronicled what he believed was a ‘mirror-haunting’ in the South Australian suburb of Inglewood. It occurred after company director Hague Showell and his wife Marg moved with their children into a three-level brick house. ‘We rented the place from a man who was transferred overseas,’ Marg Showell told me. ‘At first it seemed an ideal environment for kids, but soon we realised something was badly wrong.
‘Our year-old baby Samuel was terrified of his bedroom mirror. He’d sit in his cot flinching from it and screaming. He behaved as if he’d seen something in the glass that frightened him. Of course we moved the mirror to another room. From then on we experienced a mass of problems in the house, from strange swishing noises on the stairs to footsteps when no intruder was visible. My husband and I kept looking for natural explanations, but occasionally we’d wonder whether that mirror was somehow to blame.
‘One night I went into the nursery to check on Samuel. To my horror a tall solidly built man was standing looking down at my baby, with one hand on the cot. I screamed and he vanished. Next morning our oldest son Michael said he’d woken early to see a man with a misty face peering around his bedroom door. Whether or not the mirror might be connected to all this, we had no idea. We knew only that it was imperative we escape that house. I felt as though the happenings there had aged me a year in a few weeks.’
* * *
Haunted Inns
The Telephone Installer – and the Terror in Room 12a
In April 2000 a team of Telstra contractors installed new telephones in the Imperial Hotel, an historic 19th century hostelry in Ravenswood, northern Queensland. One of the men slept on the premises overnight. In the black early morning hours he was abruptly awakened, by a phenomenon he will never forget…
WHEN DUANE AND GINA DAVIES became the owners of Ravenswood’s Imperial Hotel they knew little of its uncanny reputation. But it took them less than a week to realise that they were living on haunted premises. The first in a series of abnormal events occurred when paintings went missing from the walls - subsequently turning up in rooms to which only the couple had keys. Before long crockery, clocks, tools and clothing began similarly to vanish and reappear. To students of the paranormal, phenomena of this kind are known as ‘apports’.
Guests and staff warned the Davies that they might eventually be confronted by one of the hotel’s frequently reported trio of ghosts: an elderly woman with a stick, a man with a flowing beard, and a younger long-haired male dressed in white. Duane saw nothing, but his wife, on her tenth day in the Imperial, encountered the young man, semi-transparent and lingering, seemingly in deep thought, in a corridor. He was outside Room 12a.
In April 2000 a team of Telstra technicians visited the Imperial to upgrade its phone system. One member of the group booked in for the night and was allotted Room 12a. In Queensland’s Sunday Mail (4 June 2000) Duane Davies described what befell the man:
He woke in the middle of the night and felt like something was nudging his ear. When he opened his eyes this spectre was hovering above him. He told me the apparition kept playing with his tie - that’s what everybody says when they see this one.
The ghost didn’t register that he was there. The bloke reckons he was so afraid he locked up with fear and couldn’t move. He just sat there for three or four minutes, then it just dissipated.
Many local residents believe that Room 12a’s phantom is the spirit of a young miner who died during the cave-in of a shaft which once wound beneath the hotel. And the haunting continues. In May 2005 I spoke to the Imperial’s latest owner, Rae Hampson. ‘Three of the rooms here seem to be the focus of the activity,’ she told me. ‘There’s Room 12a of course - my cat goes ballistic if I so much as open the door. Then there’s Room 16 where apparitions have also been reported - and Room 7, in which people say they’ve smelt an aroma like someone smoking a pipe. In my time here there’s also been an image in a mirror - a red-haired woman walking up and down. You can see her reflected and sometimes hear her footsteps. I tend to think it’s an old lady who died in the hotel: a former owner named Tess Delaney.’
Ravenswood’s rogue spirits do not confine themselves to the Imperial Hotel. The once-booming gold settlement, dominated by tall chimneys and headframes from old mine workings, is reputed to be more deeply haunted than any other Australian town. Phantoms have been reported everywhere, from the cemetery and the abandoned bakery to the local Catholic Church, said to be touched by the spirit of a one-legged priest whose cane is allegedly heard tapping on the wooden floors. (See panel on page 205.)
At its commercial peak Ravenswood’s population was 5000. By 2005 that had shrunk to 400.
Or a possible 430 - if you count the ghosts.
Photograph of a Phantom
On 2 April 1984 a Melbourne clergyman, Reverend Tony Russell, led a group of investigators to the Clarkefield Hotel in rural Victoria. The previous month an invisible entity had allegedly injured the publican so severely he was admitted to hospital. Russell and his team hoped to gather photographic and audio evidence that a spectre or spectres existed. They were successful.
The bluestone Clarkefield inn, built in 1857, had been haunted for at least a century. According to newspaper reports and to local lore, a multiplicity of discarnate spirits dwelled on the premises. Research into the hotel’s history showed that late in the 19th century a guest murdered his retarded eight-year-old daught
er, dumping her corpse in a well behind the stables. Several years earlier, when the building was a Cobb and Co coachstop, bushrangers had robbed five guards of a gold shipment then killed them in an upstairs room. Also among the dead was a Chinese miner, found hanged after a brawl.
In March 1984 - only four days after he took charge of the Clarkefield hotel - publican Frank Nelson experienced his own brutal encounter with the unknown. An exceedingly unusual report published on the front page of Melbourne’s Herald newspaper pictured Frank, his leg encased in thick plaster, describing how a ‘violent ghost’ had hurled him down a steep stairwell. When I subsequently spoke to 48-year-old Frank at the hotel he was still clearly shaken:
‘I never had the faintest belief in ghosts till I moved into this place. But I had a fairly abrupt change of mind at about three o’clock on the morning of March 11. My wife Sharon and I were asleep upstairs when we were woken by noises in the front bar. We could hear people walking around - and bottles and glasses being rattled. Imagining we had intruders I tiptoed to the top of the landing and started down.
‘Suddenly, from the top of the stairway I felt a blast of icy-cold air. Next, I was shoved in the back, with colossal force. I grabbed the banister, but the rail seemed to be gone. When I hit the deck I turned to see who had pushed me. I couldn’t believe it. There was no one there. The stairs were completely empty.’ (Similar descriptions of stairwell attacks can be found in the files of psychical research societies in many countries. For a comparable Australian case see Colin McEwan’s account of his ordeal in the Princess Theatre: Wraiths that Haunt Radio.)