by John Pinkney
The friends soon realised that the ghost wanted them gone. ‘It did everything it could to make life tough for us,’ Doris said. ‘Our phone calls were repeatedly cut off and at night the lights were always going off and on.
‘But the worst aspect was the bathroom. We’d constantly discover shaving cream spread around, and scattered powder with tiny fingerprints in it. One day we found the word “GET” written on the mirror. It looked as though someone had breathed on the glass then traced the letters with a figure. It proved almost impossible to remove the word - and that was the incident that drove us out, after only 12 days in the place.’
Hauntings of this kind are commonly believed to result from blind rage, expressed by people unaware that they have died. According to the theory proposed by some parapsychologists, a spirit that ‘wakes’ after death, in what it believes is still its own home, may react violently against newcomers - whom it understandably sees as unwelcome interlopers. Sometimes a so-called ‘rescue seance’ can solve this problem - removing the purported phantom from the premises by helping it progress to the next stage of existence.
Evicted, by a ‘Drowned Ghost’
I have received many letters over the years from people forced, by paranormal events, to flee their houses. A memorable report came from J. Millichamp of Darlinghurst, New South Wales:
Several years ago a group of us pooled our money to rent an old double-storeyed house. We were all thrilled to have found the place, with its big rooms and beautiful garden. But our enthusiasm waned somewhat when odd things began to happen.
The day after we moved in we noticed a horrible dead smell near a wall at the foot of a staircase. A friend went into an adjoining room and found the stench there also. At first we concluded that a mouse or possum must have died in the hollow wall. But after a few hours the smell suddenly vanished and never returned. Thinking about it later we wondered if the stench had somehow been sent there to greet us.
The following night we all went to a film. We returned to find every window and door wide open. All the showers and taps were running, the gas-jets on the stove were full on and the oven door was ajar. Nothing had been stolen.
From that time on, things got steadily worse. One night, from bed, I heard Liz, one of my friends, arrive home. After her footsteps had passed my door I heard following footsteps, along with two women’s voices, laughing. I assumed Liz had brought friends home with her. But when I broached the subject next morning she said she’d been alone.
That day, standing on the stairs, I felt someone brush past me, and glimpsed a figure from the corner of my eye. At that moment the temperature dropped, so sharply that I began to shiver violently.
The end came when I went to the rather quaint old bathroom for a shower. In the tub I saw what looked like the outline of a man’s body. I ran into the garden screaming and into the arms of the woman next door. When I told her what I’d seen she slowly shook her head. Then she informed me that a few years previously a man had slipped in the bath, hit his head and died. I decided I’d had enough, and moved out that very day.
The Vandalistic Visitor
A Melbourne correspondent, Terri Cahill, recalled a strangely congenial encounter with a phantom. It was what she discovered next morning that alarmed her:
…One night I put my eight-week-old daughter down to sleep in her coaster-wheeled bassinet. At about 3 am I woke for some reason and looked over at the bassinet which stood on my side of the bed. In the light from outside I could see the dark shape of a man - more like a shadow than a figure - looking down at my little girl.
You’d think that my protective motherly instincts would have prompted me to wake my husband - but astonishingly I felt peaceful and unafraid. After a few minutes spent staring at the figure I simply lay back and went to sleep again. When we woke next morning I told my husband what had happened, then got up to check on my daughter.
To my complete amazement I found that a wheel had been removed from the bassinet and was lying on the floor about 18 inches from the bed. To remove that wheel you’d have had to lift the entire bassinet and move the six-inch rod which fitted into the legs. I couldn’t imagine how this peculiar operation had been performed without waking us - or why it had been performed at all. This strange meeting in the small hours of the morning, and its aftermath, have remained sharp in my memory ever since. I know it was a ghost I saw - but I’ve never been able to decide whether its visit was friendly (as it first seemed) or contained an element of threat.
Foggy Intruder’s ‘Stinging Slaps’
During the 1990s an entire family in Perth Tasmania reported that they had endured attacks by a violent interloper seemingly shrouded in white fog. One of the victims, Michelle Wilkins, wrote to me describing the ordeal:
My mother came to breakfast one morning looking pale and upset. At first she refused to tell us what was wrong - but in the end she revealed that she’d experienced something terrible overnight. She’d woken up feeling bitterly cold. Just as she was getting up to find an extra blanket she saw a man, surrounded by white fog, standing in a corner of the bedroom.
‘She tried to scream, but her vocal cords seemed to be frozen. As she stood there staring she realised that only half of the man was visible. Then he started fading slowly away - and the temperature returned to normal.
‘This prompted my 15-year-old brother to admit he’d seen the ghost too. He said it was a white gleaming figure sitting on the end of his bed. He tried to leap out, with the idea of punching what he half-believed was a burglar, but he found he was totally paralysed. He was forced to lie there, unable to move his eyes from it. When it changed its angle slightly he was horrified to see that it had no facial features.
‘A few days later the apparition began to visit my room. I saw nothing at first, but I’d be woken by something invisible jumping on my bed. Then I’d feel a series of stinging slaps on my cheeks. One night I opened my eyes to find a ball of bright light floating in my room. As I lay there trying to work out what it could be, my blankets were ripped off and dumped on the floor.
‘We were all extremely frightened - but because we knew nothing about hauntings or exorcisms at that time, we had no idea of how to get rid of the ghost. Fortunately, however, it seemed gradually to lose interest in us, and the visits tapered off.
Two weeks later a neighbour told us something we hadn’t known about our house. An elderly man had died there and his grieving wife had kept the body for a week before telling anyone. The room in which the dead man had lain later became my bedroom.
Couple Dumped a Haunted Bed
An antique brass bed, plagued by poltergeist activity, became a talking-point among South Australians during the 1980s. After receiving a tipoff about the phenomenon I spoke to the bed’s former owner Mrs Wendy Rohrlach of Whyalla. She told me that recurring nightmares and visits from a ‘cone-shaped’ apparition had forced her to sell.
Several weeks after she disposed of the bed, Wendy met the previous owners in the street and tentatively enquired whether they had ever noticed anything unusual. After some hesitation the couple disclosed that they too had seen the cone-shaped figure and had been troubled by mattress-tugging, rattling and deeply unpleasant nightmares.
Wendy had given little thought to the supernatural before she bought the bed from an antique dealer in 1981. The first hints that something was wrong came when, on several occasions, she found the bedcovers ruffled, drawers opened, blinds pulled down and books moved. At first I thought our two-year-old, Prue, was doing it,’ she said. ‘Gradually, however, I began to wonder. I started taking notes of how I’d left the bedroom. And I shut the door to stop Prue getting in.
‘But things were still being disturbed. One day I left a book facedown on the bed. When I returned the book was closed and a corner was turned down. I never turn down corners on pages. During the eight months we owned the bed I had constant nightmares. They only stopped when we got rid of it. Our little daughter and the family cat both seemed aware there was someth
ing wrong in the vicinity of that bed. Prue would often run from the room, crying and pointing…and the cat several times bolted in terror.
‘One night I was wakened by a humming noise. When I looked I saw a white figure, shaped like a cone, just standing there. It was snowy, like an old black-and-white film.’
For weeks the humming, the nightmares and visits from the apparition continued. On one occasion Wendy was jolted awake by a dream that her daughter was in danger. ‘I rushed into her room and found her asleep in her cot with a lot of little pins sprinkled over the mattress. The only pins I had in the house were in my sewing basket which I kept high in a linen cupboard. I looked - and those pins were undisturbed.’
Several nights later the couple were wakened by particularly violent tuggings at the mattress. They decided at last to rid themselves of the bed. But even then, the disturbances continued. When Wendy rang a furniture dealer she had trouble making him understand she was talking about a brass bed - and ended by shouting those two words into the phone.
Immediately there was an enormous crash from the bedroom. The bed had collapsed.
THIS IS NOT THE ONLY ‘possessed bed’ report that I have received. In 1990 a particularly terrifying case (for which exorcism was the recommended solution) was described to me by J. Green of Greystones, New South Wales:
…The bed belongs to a friend of mine and I wish she’d have the courage to get rid of it. Her husband bought it from a deceased estate, as part of a suite.
The furniture was moved in during a major heatwave. Everyone was astonished that the room temperature immediately plunged to what seemed like Arctic levels. Several weeks after the furniture came into the house, the family learned that the suite’s previous owner had taken her own life while lying on the bed.
The bedroom is so cold that the door has to be kept permanently closed. On the rare occasions the door is open the family pets flinch away, fur on end, as they pass the room.
The problem is that my friend is frightened to throw the suite out. Whenever anyone talks about ghosts and getting rid of the bedroom setting the whole house goes chilly. She then walks to the bedroom door and says, “I’m sorry” - whereupon everything warms up again. Since her husband died and her children have left home my friend has ceased to sleep in that room. But she has to store clothes in the cupboards - and when she goes in there she becomes badly upset.
The haunting is affecting my friend’s health. None of this is fantasy. Everyone who goes to her house knows and fears that room.
SIMILARLY BIZARRE EVENTS, centring on a secondhand mattress, were described to me by Mrs A. Kelly of Holland Park, Queensland:
My husband and I had been married for only a few weeks and couldn’t afford anything new. So we did the next-best thing and went to an auction where we bought some old furniture, in good condition, and a double innerspring mattress which seemed to be as-new.
There was no trouble for several weeks; then one night my husband was woken by a terrible distant sobbing and screaming. Thinking it was me, having a nightmare, he shook me awake. But the horrible sound continued. It was definitely a woman’s voice and we could swear it was coming from inside the mattress, as if a radio or tape-player was hidden in there.
Next morning we almost managed to talk each other into believing we’d imagined it. But that night the crying woke us again. It frightened us out of our wits, to such an extent that we dragged the mattress outside, then slept on the divan.
I rang the charity that had held the auction, to discover where my job-lot of furniture and mattress had originated. They were from a deceased estate. I was never able to find out what the owner died of. However I had to conclude she was in some kind of terrible distress. But my husband wasn’t interested in theories. He doused the mattress in kerosene and burned it.
In the annals of paranormal research there are numerous examples of emotions ‘imprinting’ themselves upon inanimate objects. A fascinating manifestation of the syndrome was investigated in the 1970s by an ESP study group in Oslo. Patients at a large hospital complained that whenever they sat in a certain chair in the TV viewing room they experienced extreme discomfort and sometimes felt painfully cold.
Knowing that this had been the chair favoured by a woman recently deceased the investigators began by checking the possibility that the patients’ symptoms were psychosomatic. But then they tried sitting in the chair themselves. All experienced sharp pains in the back and chest - and three reported that the temperature* dropped so sharply it was like sitting on ice. A lingering manifestation of the woman who had died? Conceivably, because the investigators could find no physical explanation. (*An often-proposed theory about the deep chills experienced in some hauntings is that the entity is drawing energy, in the form of warmth, from the atmosphere.)
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Cricketers Cringe from the Woman-in-the-Well
On 21 June 2005, members of Australia’s cricket team were startled by the purported ‘rumblings’ of a hostile phantom, believed to emerge from an ancient well beneath their rooms. Their reaction mirrored that of three West Indies cricketers who had fled the premises in 2002.
According to the Independent and the Guardian the Australians encountered the turbulent entity while staying at Durham’s Lumley Castle Hotel. All-rounder Shane Watson was so disturbed by events that he moved to colleague Brett Lee’s room, the papers said.
The Independent reported, ‘Belinda Dennett, Australia’s media officer, also had a night she will never forget. “My phone went off in the middle of the night and I looked out of the window,” she said. “I knew I had closed the blinds, but they were open and I saw a procession of brilliantly white people walking past. It was amazing, very scary. Then I went to bed and the blind went up, and there was someone looking in through the window. I know I wasn’t dreaming because I wrote down a message from my phone and the time.”’
Chief among the beings believed to haunt the castle is the ghost of Lord Lumley’s wife, who was murdered and thrown down a well. Her spirit is said to rise via the well at night, causing rumblings in darkened rooms.
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Messages from the Dead
Saved - By an Unearthly Voice
Three months after her father’s funeral, a young woman, driving on a rural Queensland road, heard him scream a warning from the back seat. Reflexively she slammed on the brakes, thus sparing herself from almost certain death at a crossroads ahead. Like many Australians - and other witnesses worldwide - she believes her life was saved by a ‘psychic shout’: a warning of imminent danger thought by some to emanate from beyond the grave…
WHEN SHE HEARD THE ‘UNMISTAKABLE VOICE’ of her dead father bellowing at her from the back of the car, Barb Scott had no time to think logically. Instinct took over, as she stamped on the brakes of the family sedan and swung it to the gravelled edge of the Queensland country road on which she had been travelling.
‘It was lucky I did,’ she subsequently told me. ‘A couple of seconds after I stopped, another car - travelling at insane speed - hurtled across the intersection I’d been entering. It would certainly have killed me if I hadn’t stopped. Finding it hard to breathe I adjusted the mirror to see who (impossibly, I knew) could really have been sitting in the back. Nobody was there - not visibly anyway - but the incident convinced me that my dad was still close by and looking after me.’
Barb’s experience, three months after her father died of a heart attack, was the first of two apparently paranormal contacts. ‘Several days after the car episode I dreamed I visited Dad’s house to ensure everything was being looked after. I saw him standing in a doorway, smiling. The shock was so intense that - in my dream - I fainted. As I struggled from sleep, I remembered Dad taking my right hand, to help me up. By this time I was wide awake - and aware of a strange numb feeling in my hand.
‘Although it had been under the blankets it was icy cold - and stayed that way for several minutes. That dream (if it was a dream) left me with the conviction that m
y father had actually reached out and touched me. I’ve sensed ever since that he is always nearby.’
This account is far from being unique. Over the years I have spoken or corresponded with scores of sincere and intelligent people who say they have been forced to the conclusion that a dead relative or friend somehow intruded, benignly, into their lives. A particularly intriguing reminiscence was offered to me by Darrel Pick, who believed his mother returned from the dead to prevent him from becoming a paraplegic:
At the time I was working as a security guard in a North Adelaide factory. One night I slipped and fell down a steel staircase. I tried to tough out my injuries and keep going - but after several weeks of agonising back pain I collapsed and was taken to North Adelaide Hospital. By that time I was completely numb down the right side - and after CAT scans and other investigations the surgeon warned that I might end up paralysed.
It was then that thoughts of my dead mother began pouring into my mind. I started having dreams in which she said she could heal me if I kept an open mind.
On the night before my operation a brilliant white light filled the hospital ward. I felt a warm tingling from head to toe and powerfully sensed my mother’s presence in the room.
Next day the doctors went to work on a disc at the base of my spine. It had fragmented, dragging the spinal cord and nervous system with it. After the operation the surgeon told me I’d been a sneeze away from having no bodily functions below the waist. He said he’d never seen anything heal so swiftly or perfectly. When I thanked him he refused credit, saying, ‘I don’t believe it was me. Something else was at work. Someone up there likes you.’
The Teenage Boy and