Australia II
Here we look at more specific tales of haunted locations in Australia.
For Australian
ghost tours, email: enquiries@ghost-tours.com.au
You can also visit their "gravesite" at on the web at
www.ghost-tours.com.au
Lutwyche Cemetery
Lutwyche Cemetery ghosts are
presaged by the "smell of death;" singing white lights haunt Toowong Cemetery;
and apparitions dart across the roads in Bridgeman Downs Cemetery. However, Australia's
best documented ghost is known simply as the Ghost of the Outback. It has been seen scores
of times in a clearing near Corroboree Springs, which is about 100 miles from Alice
Springs. The short dark-featured spirit is thought to be a member of the Arunta Aboriginal
Tribe, which used the site for secret and occasionally fatal initiations.
Australian Post
(for a larger image, click on the smaller one to the left)
Fisher's Creek Ghost
There is or was a famous haunted tree in Australia. There in the shade of a tree beside a bridge the ghost of an early settler, Fred Fisher, was repeatedly seen, seemingly pointing to the nearby creek.
Fisher had disappeared in mysterious circumstances and investigations by the police eventually uncovered a corpse buried in the creek with its skull fractured. The body was that Fred Fisher and at the subsequent trial his one-time partner George Worrall confessed to the murder and was hanged for the crime. The murderer brought to justice by the intervention of a ghost! The place now known as Fisher's Ghost Creek.
Is it surprising that so many trees seem to be haunted? Of course, much depends on the credibility of testimony and one must not lose sight of the frailty of human memory, inaccurate observation and an
unconscious tendency to 'improve' a story. A dozen witnesses to an event will all give different accounts of that event, each convinced that their story is the correct one; although there can be no doubt that the event did occur. After all, whether or not human testimony is a type of evidence acceptable to science, it is what we build our lives on.
If hurried testimony can prove anything, it has proved beyond reasonable doubt that some trees are haunted.
There is overwhelming evidence for haunted chairs, haunted grandfather clocks, haunted pictures, haunted coffins, haunted stairways haunted chests, all items made from wood. Perhaps there is something
ethereal about wood that attracts and retains something of traumas.
New South Wales: Sydney
Sydney Quarantine Station
The Quarantine Station at
Sydney Harbour is haunted. Built in the middle of the last century on ancient Aboriginal burial
ground and still in use until 1972, there have been scores of reported paranormal
happenings there for well over a century.
The email below is one of them:
Email Contact Story:
As a technology journalist I do a fair bit of travelling. In 2001 I was
invited to interview two game developers for Breakfast TV and to attend
the game launch party. Whilst I can't remember the games title, but it
was a ghosty goblin type game and the launch was held at the infamous
quarantine station on the Sydney heads. After speeches and some food we
were taken on a tour of the place once it was dark. At the hospital site
several people felt something brush past them, even though there was
no-one next to them (evidentially this is quite common and many children
had died in this ward from smallpox).
Other spooky things happened but to my relief, not to me - that is until
we visited the mortuary. The mortuary is a small two room building with
the autopsy room small and accessible only via an obscure glass door. We
were taken in there and given a lecture by the parks ranger.. after this
we went back outside to take a look at the other room through a large
double sash window which had all the lab equipment and glassware in it.
One by one the various tech journos check out the view leaving me until
last - by then the group had started to move on so I thought I'd take a
quick look. As I leant into the window to get a closer look a face
popped up and stared right back at me - I can still remember my shock -
I exclaimed loudly and then as everyone turned to give me funny looks I
blushingly explained I'd triped up (I didnt want to make a fool of
myself).... I had another good look through the window and the lab was
empty...
After the tour finished we ended back up at the main venue where nibbles
were being served - I waited until the large crowd around the parks
ranger had dispersed and quietly asked him if the ghost in the lab was
polynesian - the ranger looked pretty shocked and said "why yes he was a
fijian"...
From Pat Pilcher -
Maitland Gaol (Sydney)
Here is a brief history of
Maitland Gaol. Maitland Gaol was opened in January 1849. It has
ho
used some of Australia's most notorious criminals, like serial
killer Ivan Milat, convicted drug trafficker George Savvas,
armed robber and escape artist Darcy Dugan, underworld identity
Jack Chow Hayes, and career criminal Edward James "Jockey" Smith.
The Anita Cobby, Leigh Lee and Janine Balding murderers, Ebony
Simpson's killer and David Eastman, who was responsible for
shooting Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester dead outside
his ACT home in 1989, have also served time there. Notorious
convicted murderer George Ward, just one of the many hanged
within the gaol, met his fate on October 20, 1848 before a crowd
of several hundred people. this is an example of some of the
stories written about Maitland Gaol.
From my own personal experience, when I first entered the gaol I
"felt" many things. Firstly, I felt heavy, like something or
someone leaning on me. I was with a group but i felt compelled
to stray away from the group & started snapping my camera into
the dark recesses. The second thing I felt was breath on my face,
like someone standing in front of me. Tthe third thing I felt was
anguish, like someone being tortured. I have a friend who took 4
of us to the forbidden part of the gaol, the kitchen. This is
where a lot of people were killed at the hands of other inmates.
The vibe I got was very disturbing to me.
Many inmates hung
themselves as well though the most notorius hanging was that of
george savvas, who was under 24hr watch. Some say the guards
looked away others say they helped. No one really knows, as the
tapes " disappeared". Maitland Gaol is now used as the gaol
where home & away film there gaol scenes. I have added 2 links
where you will find more history on this now famous gaol
www.paranormalaustralia.com/hauntings/maitlandgaol.html -
www.maitlandgaol.com.au/default.aspx?pageIdentifier=&from=welcome
(see more of this story, including photographs, on the
NZ Ghosts forum)
Old Prince Henry Hospital (Near Sydney)
Prince Henry Hospital is an isolated complex sitting on five hundred acres of sand dunes in the Little Bay area outside Sydney. It was established in 1881 as the Coast Hospital and was built so far from the city of Sydney because it was intended as a treatment center for patients with contagious diseases.
After extensive renovations in the 1960s, the ghosts of former employees and patients began showing up.
In the Delaney Ward (B Block), walks the apparition of a former matron called Gracie. She was a neurotic woman who immediately washed herself after being touched or bumping into someone. She died in B Block under mysterious circumstances from a fall into an abandoned elevator shaft. But she still makes her rounds. Her apparition is regularly seen in B Block, and patients there report being taken care of by a nurse with an old-fashioned white veil. She tops off glasses of water, adjusts blankets, and has even placed bedpans under patients and removed them afterwards. Most patients do not realize she is a ghost, but the nurses are terrified of encountering her. Nurses report feeling her presence scrutinizing their work and monitoring their coffee breaks. When Gracie's ghost appears, the clocks in the area stop functioning, with their hands pointing at two o'clock for some reason.
Once, two nurses working the night shift left milk boiling on a stove, while they stepped into the hall for a few seconds to check on things. When they returned to the tearoom, they found the stove turned off, the boiling pot emptied in the sink, and all the cups and saucers and condiments put back on the shelves. No other staff members were on the floor, and no one could have entered the room without being seen. The clock had been reset to two o'clock.
The ghost of an aboriginal boy haunts the stairway of B Block and has been known to trip employees using the stairs. Sometimes the boy's giggling apparition is spotted sitting at the foot of the stairs. Other ghosts in the hospital include an unidentified man who walks the deserted halls at night. His sinister presence manifests as a moving shadow accompanied by heavy footsteps. When intravenous drips and medical equipment turn off mysteriously, nurses blame his presence.
Ghostly patients buzz nurses late at night from locked, unoccupied wards. Other ghosts are seen in the abandoned cemetery on the premises where over one thousand former patients and nurses who died at the hospital are buried.
REDFERN SYDNEY
In 1983 I was living in Sydney.
I lived in a Terraced house with 5 other people for
about a year in Wilson St, Redfern.
This house had a front door with and Arch window at the top of it.
We never used the Lounge just inside the front door but instead we used to sit
in the next room on a Sofa that was under the stair and when you sat on it and
looked to your side you could look directly through to the front door.
I have sat many times on this sofa and sometimes
from the corner of my eye I could see a person dressed in what to me looked like
a white long robe come floating through the door towards me.
It did not have any feet coming out of the bottom
of the robe, but the rest of the body, hands and head could be seen.
I have to admit I could not make out clearly if this figure was in fact a Man or
a Woman.
When I first started seeing it, it would catch my attention and as soon as I
turned and looked directly at it, it would disappear.
I had seen it quite often and sometimes I would try not to look at it, so as to
see how close it would get, then when I looked it was gone.
The closest I remember it coming was only about 8 feet away before I had to
look.
The total distance to the door from where I was sitting was about 15 feet I
would say.
As I never wanted put anyone else who was living in the house with me off living
there I never said anything about it.
At one time, one of the girls who lived there had
her father stay.
On the Sunday after he had left she said that he had
thought the house was Haunted.
I knew what I had been seeing but said to her, what? Why does he think that?
She said that on Saturday night when we were all out and he was home by himself,
he said while he was watching tv he said he felt someone touch him on the
shoulder.
I said “ Oh ok”
Nothing more was said about it.
Sometime later we had a friend come to stay, I came
home from work one afternoon and found him sitting on the Sofa reading a book.
I sat down beside him, said Hi and all, then turned on the tv while he carried
on reading his book.
I was sitting back and he was sitting up and forward, not against the wall like
myself.
Suddenly he looked up fast past me and strait towards the front door.
I thought to myself “ hello”.
I said to him, what’s up?
He said “ I have been sitting here all day and sometimes I swear I”, at this
point I interrupted him and said, “ Don’t tell me, you see someone in a White
robe come floating through the door”!
He looked at me in surprise and said “yes”!
I said “ Well that confirms it because I have seen the same thing on several
occasions but have said nothing, but now that someone else has seen the same
thing I know now I’ve not been seeing things”!
We talked about what we had seen between us and I
then told him about what the girl’s father had said and well I think he also
felt that that must have been connected to what we had seen as well
This was the only type experience I had had in this house and it never bothered
me in anyway as this house always had a nice feeling about it.
We never looked into who this might have been.
John
The Criterion Queensland
An apparition at a Queensland pub is driving patrons and staff to drink.
The ghost at the Criterion (didn't wait long to make her presence felt. When Leigh and Carolyn Turnbull arrived in Rockhampton, in May of 1991. On their first night as managers of the pub, Carolyn
Turnbull says, "I looked over at the end of the bed and there she was, standing there, not looking at me, but looking at Leigh. It was a woman's shape." When Leigh Stirred, she says, "the form disappeared, she just faded away."
The Criterion ghost, which local legend identifies as the shape of a young, unnamed chambermaid who committed suicide in the hotel's staff quarters in the late 1890's after being jilted by her stablehand lover. The Turnbulls sighting was not the spectres first reported appearance. In December 1986, a barman at the hotel was locking up the laundry when he was chilled to the bone. "I saw a woman standing in front of me, the odd thing was I could see right through her. I don't know how long we looked at each other, but it seemed like a lifetime. Then she walked around the corner and dissapeared."
Two chambermaids often complained of creases appearing in freshly made beds when no-one else was in the rooms. Guests and other staff have also reported lights inexplicably switching on and off, and beds shuddering and shaking.
It was in the kitchen that the ghost allegedly made another appearance in May 1993. Late at night, Carolyn Turnbull was impaling a breakfast order - On a spike when the ghost ''(quite slender, quite tall," materialised near the doorway leading into the back of the kitchen. Though she says she was unafraid, Carolyn closed the back door and walked to the main part of the hotel. "By the time she got to the back of the kitchen and turned around, her whole back was wet. she was going out the back passageway and up the stairs. She gave the impression this was very much her territory."
A visitor to the hotel's main bar two months later rekindled the ghostly tale. "He was a gentleman they'd never seen before and haven't seen since," says Carolyn of the dark-haired man in his late 20s or early 30s, dressed as if from a county town. "He was having a beer, and then he began telling me what the ghost looked like, exactly as I had seen her, in the period costume and long hair, on that night. I was quite taken aback." Carolyn says she had not described the ghost to anyone. Could the mystery patron have also been a ghost, perhaps the spirit of the stablehand who caused the woman to suicide?
The Ghosts of the Past Port Arthur
On April 28, 1996, the
relative quiet of Port Arthur in the Tasman Peninsula -- roughly 90 minutes
by car from the city centre of Hobart in the southern Australian island
state of Tasmania -- was broken by gunfire. Before day's end, 35
lay dead on the historic grounds of Port Arthur. A Tasmanian named Martin
Bryant had etched a trail of blood, firing at shopkeepers, shop assistants,
tourists, and whoever else came in his way...
Once again, the soil of
Port Arthur was bloodied -- now, in contemporary times, and by a deranged
gunman.
From the 1830s to the 1870s, this was the place they called
"Hell on earth", where the recidivist convicts of a past era lived
and died.
Convict chain gangs
In 1830 Port Arthur was
a timber station, but hardly three years later, because it was hemmed in by
the sea and access by land was solely through a tiny isthmus at Eaglehawk
Nest, it became a prison settlement where the worst of the convicts were
thrown, sentenced to work in chain gangs. Flogging became a way
of life -- 100 lashes being the normal punishment for, for instance,
attempts to escape the penal settlement.
The prison closed in
1877, and in the next two decades the penitentiary and the church were
gutted by fire. An attempt was made to erase its convict past by renaming
the town Carnarvon, but by 1927 the town was again called Port Arthur.
Well-ordered tours
Eventually, the
erstwhile convict settlement became a site of significance in the history,
not only of Tasmania, but of Australia as a whole. It has become one of
Tasmania's most prominent tourist destinations.
Today, the spirits of
the long past and the recent past seem to steep the 40 hectares of the Port
Arthur Historic Site as visitors trudge its paths and view stabilised ruins
and carefully restored buildings, experiencing how once -- or twice -- it
must have been when Port Arthur was a hell on earth.
There are guided tours
of the area, which is a good way to cover the site in an orderly fashion. As
well, there is the Historic Ghost Tour which is held after nightfall when
the dark covers the land and the ghosts of the past may just be about.
Lucky Saddle
One of the most eerie tales of the turf surrounds the Australian saddle taken to America by Phar Lap's jockey, Billy Elliot, in 1932.
The saddle, with a kangaroo and lizard hide skin was a novelty in California, where cowhide saddles were the norm.
It was also much admired by a young American rider, George Woolf. Woolf was at Agua Caliente the day Phar Lap scored his historic international victory in 1932 in the Elliot saddle and became friends with the Australian. Eiliot gave the saddle to Woolf as a parting gift when he left for Australia. The Phar Lap saddle was larger than the average American one and Woolf, only the second rider in America to inherit the nickname as "The Iceman," won most of his country's major races using it. It was, Woolf was often heard to say, his good-luck charm.
In January 1946, Woolf was riding at Santa Anita only a few miles from where Phar Lap had died 14 years before. After three wins on the day using his Australian saddle, he was asked to ride a horse called Please Me in a lowly graded race. Woolf agreed, reluctantly, because the light weight the horse was to carry meant using a tiny, uncomfortable saddle rather than his usual one. Please Me balked suddenly at the first turn in the race and threw Woolf over his head into the Santa Anita running rail. One of America's most famous riders died in hospital the next day without recovering consciousness. Still hanging from a peg in the deserted jockeys' room was his Australian "good-luck" charm. It was never used again.
The Christchurch Press 17th November 2000
Baby Ghost
A woman
named Mrs. Andrews was visiting the grave of her daughter in a cemetery
in Queensland, Australia in 1946 or 1947. Her daughter Joyce had died
about a year earlier, in 1945, at the age of 17. Mrs.
Andrews saw
nothing unusual when she took this photo of Joyce's gravemarker.
When the film was
developed, Mrs. Andrews was astonished to see the image of a small child
sitting happily at her daughter's grave. The ghost child seem to be
aware of Mrs. Andrews since he or she is looking directly into the
camera.
Is is possibly a double exposure? Mrs. Andrews said there were no such
children nearby when she took the photograph and, moreover, did not
recognize the child at all – it was no one she would have taken a
picture of. She remarked that she did not believe it was the ghost of
her daughter as a child. Investigating this
case, Australian paranormal researcher Tony Healy visited the cemetery
in the late 1990s. Near Joyce's grave he found the graves of two infant
girls.
Haunted Hearse
Email Subject: I think I have a ghost but I'm not quite sure
Date: Monday, 22 November 2004 6:41 p.m.
My parents bought this house in Khandallah during the 1980s. The date of it being built was about 1954 and the land was originally a dairy farm. My parents first noticed the smell a few months after moving in. A smell of
burnt, yet somewhat, rotten rubbish/meat coming through the floor in the kitchen despite many attempts to clean with harsh, yet pleasant smelling, cleaning agents. We have had people come to look under the house for some
trace of rubbish of dead animal but nothing has been found.
Each of us (Mum, dad and myself) can sometimes hear a high pitched giggle or someone speaking or calling our names, but not at the same time. My cats act
most oddly. For no reason, they start meowing and hissing at air and stare into space, as if they’re mesmerized by something very frightening.
Other abnormal things have been happening. Once my half-sister was baby sitting me and suddenly she heard a noise similar to that of a gun being fired. She called the police but there was no sign of any gunpowder or
bullets or even a prowler. Another time was when my mother was woken up by footsteps (our deck is just outside her window and the steps leading down, a
good 10m away), she turned on the light and the footsteps immediately ceased but no one was there. There have been many times when all of us have sitting
the living room and hear footsteps, particularly at night Many times I have felt someone breathe on me when I go to bed. This has also happened to my mother. Lights have come on and gone off as with the TV (which is brand new) and the back door (entering and leaving the kitchen) wide open after it being locked.
Many people visiting have smelled the smell (which comes and goes) and have left feeling very depressed and angry. We once had a vicar over who said “there’s something not right with this house”, as soon as she walked in.
This happens when we go out. It’s as if something has been lifted and we feel happy, but the negative feeling(s) return once we enter the kitchen.
Thank you for reading this and I hope you can help me find out what’s wrong
with my home.
From Tim Barber - http://www.destinytours.com.au
