by John Pinkney
The apparatus was at sea en route to Australia when the Yongala, unwarned, sailed into the cyclone’s eye and sank, drowning all aboard. The only body found was that of racehorse Moonshine, washed up on a beach at Gordon Creek near Townsville. For 47 years the Yongala lay unknown and unvisited on seafloor in the area of the Great Barrier Reef. Then, in 1958 George Konrad, a Cairns salvage contractor, spotted the ship, dived to her resting place and established her identity by finding the barnacled name on her bow.
Captain Bob Hallam often recalled the afternoon when, as a boy, he stood on the deck of his father’s trading ketch and watched the Yongala steam past on what would be her final voyage.
Hallam also insisted that 12 years later - in 1923 - he and a fishing companion clearly saw the vessel sailing past again - whereupon it inexplicably vanished.
The captain was a man of such credibility that the story of his ‘ghost ship’ sighting circulated through Queensland and beyond. The author George Farwell heard about Hallam’s experience, tracked him down and interviewed him for the Age. Farwell wrote, in part:
For years, men along the coast speculated about what had happened (to the Yongala). Some argued that she was top-heavy, and foundered in the cyclone. Others said she was light of ballast. But Captain Knight was one of the most experienced skippers in those waters, and it seemed unlikely that he would have taken an unseaworthy vessel to sea…There were even conflicting theories about where she lay.
Captain Hallam believes he knows the answers.
In 1923, twelve years (after Yongala disappeared) he was fishing with two other men off Holburn Island, which lies some two miles east of Bowen. They were trolling for mackerel, keeping out on the western side of the island. There are no other islands in the vicinity. As their launch passed the southern end of the island, he saw a ship standing out beyond the point. One of his companions saw it, too.
They agreed afterwards that she looked very old and rusty. She was almost bow on, but they could see foremast and funnel. The third man had not bothered to look up; after all, ships are nothing unusual in that region. They continued fishing up and down, keeping a lookout for the ship when she ran clear of the top end of the island. But she never appeared.
Thinking she must have dropped anchor, they cruised round to the eastern side of the island, wondering what the trouble was. There was nothing there. Only empty seas stretching away to the skyline. Hallam admits that it may have been some trick of the imagination; perhaps a hallucination. But if so, how had one of his friends seen it, too?
Another ten years passed. Once more he was fishing with a party off Holburn Island. Some miles to the east they spotted a heavy discoloration in the water, although charts indicated that it was very deep there. Nor was there mention of any shoal or reef. It was only then he realised that this was the exact spot where he had seen the mysterious rust-covered ship. On his return he reported what he had seen to the naval authorities. In such an important shipping lane it was essential that any submerged object be charted. But the naval vessel sent to investigate could find no trace…Some time later, a naval survey ship using Asdic and echo-sounding equipment did locate an ‘obstruction,’ lying in fifteen fathoms of water. Its nature has not yet been identified. Nor has there been any explanation of Hallam’s ‘hallucination.’
A long-sunken ship could hardly rise from the depths and sink again. Was it a material ship they saw? Why should it have so closely resembled the lines of the Yongala, or have appeared in that very place? Captain Hallam is a seaman. He does not pretend to know.
Drowned Woman’s Wraith
Over the past four centuries more than 7000 ships have perished in wild seas and on jagged rocks around Australia’s coastline. In the absence of anyone else to perform the task, early settlers routinely buried the corpses of sailors and passengers washed ashore. With the proliferation of ad hoc cemeteries came reports of lights floating near roughly marked graves, and of dune-roaming ghosts - accounts which persist into the present day.
At the beginning of the 21st century, local newspapers chronicled sightings of a ‘female apparition’ wearing a white flowing dress, in Norah Heads on the NSW central coast. Journalist Greig Berry, writing in the Newcastle Herald (5 May 2003), recalled the stir the phenomenon created:
Locals called (the apparition) the Ghost of Jenny Dixon, as many sightings of her were made at night along the stretch of beach known as Jenny Dixon. Stories came from locals and tourists alike. A doctor from Victoria told police he was about to pick up the woman in white but she vanished as he stopped beside her.
Another sighting of her was in the spring of 1990, when she spooked a group of teenagers camped on the beach. The spokesperson for the group said the woman was wearing a long white gown. There were several theories as to who (she) was. In 1950 two young sisters were bashed to death on a walking trip to the lighthouse. Their bodies were found in a swamp known as “the jungle.” Another story talks of a local teenager who was raped and murdered in the 1950s.
There was…the thought that she was the captain’s wife from the Esperanza - a brig wrecked on Bird Island in 1868. Ten of the crew died in horrific circumstances as the ship was pounded to pieces by the huge surf. The sole survivor, Peter Moss, was found on the beach…and told a tale of horror about watching the captain’s wife and young child being swept back and forth across the deck, screaming, before being washed over the side.
Of all the theories advanced to explain the Woman in White’s identity, the most compelling, in the minds of many locals, is that she is the tragic wife of the Esperanza’s captain - trudging the beaches in search of the daughter with whom she drowned, 137 years ago.
Haunted Lighthouses
Exhumed and Angry: Pine Islet’s Turbulent Ghost
In October 1927, builders on a remote Queensland island dug up an old grave to lay foundations for a lighthouse keeper’s cottage. The men little dreamed of the hideous haunting that would follow: a series of unnerving disturbances that persisted for more than half a century…
PINE ISLET, 130 KILOMETRES SOUTH-EAST OF MACKAY, was a peaceful place - until Queensland authorities decided to build a new cottage for the lighthouse keeper.
Pine, a narrow granite landmass only 800 metres long, offered few options to a prospective builder - and after much thought the contractor was forced to an uncomfortable conclusion. The only flat land on the island that would properly meet his needs was a 19th century gravesite. Reluctantly he sought the lighthouse authority’s permission to exhume the inhabitant’s long-buried body and relocate the grave. Brisbane bureaucrats acceded to the request - and in early November the builder and his men went carefully and respectfully to work.
The name on the headstone was that of Dorothea McKay, wife of an early lighthouse keeper. She had died of cancer in 1895. When the contractor and his men disturbed her resting place they were distressed to find that the cheap coffin had rotted away. All that remained in the pit were a collapsed skeleton, a few loose bones, a set of false teeth and a wedding ring. The workers collected the remains and associated items and buried them elsewhere on the islet. When their task was complete, they said a brief prayer. Apparently Dorothea was not impressed.
From the first day it was occupied the new cottage, built squarely on Dorothea’s grave, was a cauldron of unpleasant phenomena. The keeper and his wife were repeatedly woken at night by loud rappings in the walls and at the door. When they went to answer, no one was there. Often they heard a woman weeping, or at other times furiously muttering to herself. At intervals loud footsteps shook the cottage - and on several occasions they noticed the fleeting image of a female face at the window.
Large numbers of Australia’s isolated lighthouses are reputedly plagued by ghosts.
For more than 50 years the haunting made life tense, and sometimes miserable, for the keepers and their families. In a letter to the Lighthouses of Australia Bulletin (March 2000) one witness, Peter Braid, recalled:
Pine Islet was the fi
rst lighthouse we lived on [in 1974] and we had many encounters with the ghost over the two years we lived there…There was one room in particular in the house that she seemed to prefer and we were led to believe that it was over the top of her original grave site. Not long after they moved her grave the marble slab cracked from one end to the other and not long after that she made her first appearance. There are supposedly ghosts on quite a few of the Queensland lights, but we only had encounters with them on Pine and Booby islands.
In a further letter Peter’s sister Sharon Fielden added:
We lived in the ‘haunted house’ on Pine Islet…Every night my mother would close the doors of the cupboards throughout the house and in the morning they would all be open again. I’m not sure who started it, but they were known as coffin cupboards!
Peter and Sharon Braid had numerous brushes with Pine Islet’s tortured phantom (thought to be Dorothea McKay, died 1895). In this 1974 family snap they sit beside her relocated grave.
In the early 1980s, the haunting abruptly ended. Pine Islet’s beacon had been automated - and the last keeper, Darrell Roche, was preparing to leave. ‘The last time the ghost came was about 18 months ago,’ he said. ‘There was no knock on the door - only footsteps through the cottage into the lounge room. There she stopped - above her original grave - and we’ve heard nothing from her since.’
It’s tempting to surmise that Dorothea McKay had felt able at last to return to the burial place in which she had once peacefully lain.
Glass-Shattering Spectres
Entities that assume the form of floating faces, and create noises resembling shattering glass, have disturbed keepers of Victoria’s Wilsons Promontory lighthouse since the early 1870s. The remote beacon, standing on a bleak rocky outcrop, is now solar-powered and automated - but the high-tech equipment has done nothing to discourage the old structure’s unofficial residents.
Particularly sensitive to the haunting were former CSIRO plant scientist Keith Chapman and his wife Gill, who looked after the light from 2001 to 2004, guiding more than 3000 ships past the Prom’s jagged rocks and islands. From their first night on duty the middle-aged couple were beset by uncanny phenomena. Reporter Danny Buttler, who interviewed the pair for the Herald Sun (11 September 2004), wrote:
The couple knew they were well-suited to the job long before they arrived at the lighthouse. Even the spectre of ghosts has not been enough to dim (their) enthusiasm.
Several incidents have left the Chapmans convinced lighthouse keepers of old have returned to pay them a visit. ‘It was the first night we’d been here by ourselves,’ Gill says. ‘We heard this door open and shut, we checked it and went back to bed but a few minutes later it did it again. Then we heard this great shattering of glass. We went out to look at what had smashed but we never found anything broken.
On other occasions, in the company of guests, the pair have heard breaking glass or witnessed other unexplained phenomena. ‘People have seen shadows going across the windows, but no one has felt threatened by it,’ Keith says.
Island’s Secret Ghost
For 80 years, successive keepers of the lighthouse on tiny Lady Elliot Island managed to keep a disquieting secret. Their workplace - the southernmost speck of coral on Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef - was troubled by what most witnesses agreed was a tormented spirit.
The beacon’s guardians were in little doubt about the earthly identity of their island ghost, which appeared as a woman shimmeringly dressed in white. But a deep conservatism, born of the isolation in which the men lived, and the belief that certain topics were unsuitable for discussion, stilled their tongues.
First to break the taboo was young Margaret Brumpton, daughter of lighthouse keeper Arthur Brumpton. Margaret’s life on the 43-hectare cay, with its vast underwater coral gardens, coconut palms and brilliantly coloured tropical birds, was an idyll other teenagers would have envied.
But shortly after her 15th birthday, a shadow fell. ‘I was climbing the lighthouse stairs when I felt something close to me,’ she later recalled. ‘I was filled with the terrible knowledge that it - whatever it was - wanted to push me down those stairs.’ Margaret fled from the lighthouse, to tell her parents. They tried to persuade her that she had imagined the experience.
Not until a decade later did Arthur Brumpton concede that he had misled his daughter. ‘I was well acquainted with the ghost myself,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t want to frighten the family by admitting to it.’ Along with others on Lady Elliot Island, Mr Brumpton had seen the woman-in-white half-walking, half-floating between the lighthouse and the keeper’s cottage. Like Margaret he had also encountered her on the lighthouse stairs. Always she wore the same white shimmering gown, in an early 20th century style.
Arthur Brumpton confided his experiences to the captain of a supply ship. Intrigued, the captain went to his cabin to retrieve an official album containing photographs of keepers and their wives who had served on Lady Elliot Island. Mr Brumpton immediately recognised one of the women, Susannah McKee, as the apparition he had encountered on the lighthouse stairway.
Eventually most of the lighthouse workers began to abandon their code of secrecy. Not only had the old repressive climate changed, making it acceptable to debate such matters, but the spectre had suddenly become more aggressive (the result, some believed, of automation in the lighthouse). Everyone - staff and visitors - were convinced they knew the spectre’s identity. A manager, Steve Heath, expressed the general view. ‘Most people here believe the ghost could be Susannah McKee, the wife of a keeper,’ he said. ‘She drowned herself by jumping off the jetty - and visitors and staff are still seeing her and feeling her presence.’
According to historians, Susannah was born in Ballyganaway, Ireland. She married Tom McKee and bore him four sons, subsequently accompanying him, with the youngest boy, to Lady Elliot. To a woman accustomed to the soft light of her homeland, the harsh glare of tropical Queensland was barely endurable. She felt oppressed by the bleak ruggedness of the island and the discomforts of her life there. Food supplies, brought by ship, were invariably late. Meat and fruit rotted within days of arrival. The hut in which she and her family existed was jerrybuilt and windswept. When it was time for her youngest son to leave for boarding school in Rockhampton, Susannah, tortured by loneliness, decided to end her life. On 23 April 1907 she donned her best clothes, walked out onto the antique guano-loading jetty below the lighthouse and jumped into the sea. Her clothes were heavy and she had never learned to swim.
Tom McKee was promptly dogged by accusations that he had pushed his wife into the water. But nothing could be proved - and he did all in his power to present the appearance (or reality) of grief. He buried Susannah on a hilltop in the centre of the island - placing her beside a grave occupied by Phoebe Phillips, a lighthouseman’s daughter who had died of pneumonia 13 years earlier.
Susannah did not rest quietly. Her ‘turbulent spirit’, as one historian described it, would appear to countless island visitors and staff through the 20th century and beyond. The disturbances became particularly intense in 1987, shortly after the lighthouse was automated. The trouble began soon after the outgoing keeper handed over three cottages to Tali Birkmanis, the new resort’s operations manager. Birkmanis, who had heard little about the ghost, was shocked by what happened next.
He assigned one of the cottages to a resort groundsman, Jeff Raynor, and chef Chris Lister. After arranging their furniture the two men enjoyed a brief rest on a tractor parked outside the unoccupied building. Without warning an empty plastic icecream container exploded from the front door and landed at their feet. Several nights later, ‘something powerful’ hurled Jeff from his bed and onto the floor. Bruised and unnerved he slept, from that time, on the verandah. But this precaution failed to prevent further alarms. Several nights later he woke suddenly to see the transparent figure of a woman standing in the cottage doorway.
The arrival of visitors seemed to spark Susannah into a frenzy of poltergeist act
ivity. Contractors engaged to repaint the cottages complained that their scaffolding shook violently every time they ascended it. When they stepped down the shaking stopped. In the locked, empty generator room, stored kerosene tins were heard crashing about. The generators then stopped abruptly, pitching the resort into darkness. But before anyone could open the door, they started again. (Similar phenomena in sealed rooms have been described by staff at Victoria’s Clarkefield Hotel and Brisbane’s Plough Inn. See Haunted Inns, page 195.)
The white-clad woman has also been seen peering from windows in the cottages and striding across the island’s small airstrip. Sometimes she is accompanied by a younger female. Theorists wonder whether the new companion could be the phantom of Phoebe Phillips, whose grave lies beside Susannah’s.
The ghost of Susannah McKee has at last made its presence dramatically known to a larger audience than it commanded before. The entity must arguably be one of the few apparitions in history to have become the subject of a long-running campaign of denial and evasion. Tony Walsh, author of Lady Elliot: First Island of the Great Barrier Reef, described the disavowal of the unhappy phantom as ‘a conspiracy of silence’.
He said, ‘The lighthouse keepers all knew about it, but they didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t until the lighthouse went automatic that the secret got out.’
Wet Bootprints on the Stairs
On rare occasions, paranormal entities may leave physical traces behind them. A case that particularly intrigued psychic investigators centred on the lighthouse built in 1872 at Wollongong Boat Harbour, New South Wales. For many years staff had reported hearing slow, sometimes shuffling footsteps on the stairs. The sounds resonated late at night, when the building was securely locked.