by Bob Curran
In 1919, the school was sold, 10 years after Ray Blackstone’s death. The buyer this time was the Reverend Charles Herbert Palmer, who believed he could “make a go” of it as a Christian boy’s school, but the heavy, sombre atmosphere of the old place often seemed to militate against this. In 1933, the school was packed up and moved to Manly, and to the house of William Bede Dalley, the Parliamentary Member for Sydney.
The house changed hands again. This time, he purchaser was Adolphus Gregory, who was a Senior Sales Manager with the Australian arm of Twentieth Century Fox, a man with a definite flair for the creative arts. He went to work on Studley Park, reshaping it and refurbishing in an art-deco style as befitted his temperament. The old students’ dining hall was turned into a mini-theaterette and, as a keen golfer, Gregory converted the lawn into a nine-hole course, which was later extended to 18 holes. The stables at the back of the house (which had been used as classrooms in the time of the school) became a kind of golf club for the media mogul and his friends. Even though the companionship was good, many visitors claimed that they often felt uneasy around the place—there was a sort of “uncomfortable” feeling around the building, which actually alarmed some of them. Some claimed to have seen a young boy “dripping wet” in some parts of the course, but nobody could explain who he was. Could it have been the unsettled spirit of Ray Blackstone? All the descriptions coincided, although very few of the visitors actually knew of the earlier tragedy. Even Gregory often admitted to feeling uneasy when in the building. This feeling of apprehension was confirmed in 1939 when Gregory’s son Noel died in the theaterette of advanced appendicitis. Gregory was devastated, and the paranormal activity around the house seemed to increase. Doors opened and closed of their own volition, voices were heard along the corridors, lights were found blazing after dark in rooms where there had been nobody present, electrical equipment only functioned intermittently for no reason, and strange and unidentified figures were seen “at a distance” in the grounds. In the end, Gregory could stand it no longer and moved away. He said the house “was far too creepy” and held too many difficult memories for him.
As World War II came to the Pacific, the property was taken over by the Australian Department of Defence and became the Eastern Command Training School for the training of the Armed Forces. Its accommodation was increased to house more than 280 staff attending the training courses there. One of the graduates from this facility was Lieutenant L.A. Cutler, who would go on to become a Governor of New South Wales. Nevertheless, even during the military occupation of the house, things were still not all that settled. Once again, electrical equipment only worked intermittently, odd voices were heard on field radios operating within the grounds, and strange footfalls were heard in rooms that were not being used at the time. Chairs were inexplicably pushed against cabinets and papers were strangely scattered around certain rooms. Many service personnel experienced the feeling that there was somebody walking behind them along some of the corridors, even when there was nobody there and personal possession, were moved—sometimes away across the house—for no reason.
But it was the cellar where Ray Blackstone’s body had been allegedly laid out, which evoked the most discomfort. Some of the service personnel—some of them hard-bitten servicemen—simply would not venture down there, because they had the feeling that they were being watched from the shadows. The cellar was used as a sort of general storeroom for various bits and pieces—pieces of equipment, storage crates, and so forth—and therefore was in reasonably constant use. But few people liked going down there—it was “creepy,” and there was always the sensation that somebody was “standing directly behind you.” Some people even declared that they could hear breathing in the dark. Again, there seemed to be wet footprints all around.
And there was that same melancholy sensation about the house that other people had experienced before. Although it did not directly interfere with the training, the place didn’t exactly make people feel happy and content, and many were glad when they graduated. At its peak, however, Studley Park could accommodate 250 trainees with an additional 250 under canvas in the main grounds of the house. Quite a lot of Army personnel to terrify!
In 1951, and with the War over, the Women’s Royal Australian Army Corps took over Studley Park as a training base. However, the experience was not a happy one, and the stories of ghosts and mysterious happenings increased. Many of the recruits felt uneasy in the place, and once again, many clocks within the building inexplicably showed different times and warning bells went off without reason—frightening some of the women there. There were unexplained cold pockets and some women claimed they heard voices calling at odd hours of the night. Indeed, by the beginning of 1952, the Army was considering closing the site down and moving the WRAAC Training Centre to Mildura. Approval was rapidly given, and in June 1952, the Centre moved, leaving Studley Park to its ghosts and voices.
In 2001, however, the house became the site for an Australian television psychology reality show entitled Scream Test. In this, four contestants were locked in the old house for a night and had to record their fears and experiences to the camera. Mid-way through the night, one of the contestants refused to take part any further. He had heard voices, he claimed, and had distinctly heard a baby cry from the corner of one of the rooms. The experience had terrified him, and he was leaving the show. Some time after—and following another series of television investigations—Studley Park became the centerpiece of the Camden Golf Club course.
There is one final twist: In 2010, workmen were doing some repairs on behalf of the Club and were fixing up loose slates on the house’s roof. As they worked they all experienced the same “creepy” feeling that others had talked about. They worked on, trying to make the 120 year-old roof watertight—then they made a chilling discovery. Under a slate, they found a hangman’s rope tied in a noose attached to one of the beams. There was no explanation for this, but the “creepy” feeling grew much stronger. The rope was removed and the feeling passed. The story appeared in the Camden Advertiser, and the ghostly tales concerning the house started once more, however, no explanation for the macabre find has ever been offered.
Today Studley Park appears on a number of Websites as “Australia’s most haunted building.” There have also been several television series made there, including a program for Unreel Films, which recorded some interesting data. Their sound equipment certainly picked up some evidence, which suggested the voices associated with some of the rooms, but instead of the tones of either Ray Blackstone or Noel Gregory (the ghosts most commonly connected with the Park) they picked up the voice of a young girl. A medium, Debbie Malone, named the phantom as “Amelia” an 8-year-old girl who had been raped and brutalized in the room in which the sounds were heard, but could gather no more details. No record of such a person living at Studley Park exists. But who is to say that there are not more ghosts drifting about the building than those we already know about?
Can a building take on some of the senses of those who had built it and lived there? Does the feeling of oppression—the melancholy and dismal feelings—result, perhaps, from the frustrated dreams of William Payne who originally constructed Studley Park, or from the horror and grief following the tragic deaths of Ray Blackstone and Noel Gregory? Have some of these emotions been somehow absorbed into the very framework of the house? Perhaps some of the answers can only be found within the echoing rooms of what is, for some, Australia’s most haunted house.
Wadi Rum (Southern Jordan)
“The swarm of jinn is passing,
And it whirls hissing,
Old conifers, stirred by their flight,
Crackle like burning pine.”
—Victor Hugo, Les Djinns
Perhaps our human world—the one that we perceive on a daily basis—somehow overlays another more shadowy type of reality, which somehow seeps through into our own at times, making us feel uncomfortable and ill at ease. This is an underlying tenet of the philosophy of certa
in Arab peoples—particularly that of the Bedouin—who believe that the spirit world is ever present, existing close to our own world, and always ready to make its presence known. Such intrusions are everywhere and the wise person has to be on his or her guard and recognize them when they occur.
In the deserts of Southern Jordan, the wind blows endlessly across vacant spaces stirring up tiny whirlwinds of sand and dust. According to the Bedouin peoples, these are manifestations of the djinn, forces from another world manifesting themselves in ours. The terms djinn or djinii are, according to those who know of such things, blanket ones, covering at least five major categories of spirits—jann, jinn, efreet, shaitan, and marid—although all of these are interchangeable, if required. They are creatures of pre-Islamic antiquity, which were later incorporated into Arabic religious teaching and are mentioned in the Holy Qur’an. Early Arabic works, such as Abou el-Hasan Ali al-Masudi’s (896–956) Meadows of Gold, detail the distinction in orders of djinn and states that they were created contemporaneously with Adam and Eve. They are supposedly beings of air and smoke, having been forged by Allah from the semoum (simmum), the burning wind that blows across the desert places. Some thinkers have suggested that they are beings that are something between ghosts (ancestral spirits) and demons (things that have actually never been born), but there is no strict definition for them. A little less than angels, but slightly more than man, the djinn are envious of humankind who usurped their place in Allah’s favor, and often seek to do them harm. For this reason, they have been banished to remote, desert places, far away from human settlements and cities where they can do little harm. In such places such as isolated graveyards, ancient ruins, and in deep and inaccessible caves (such as the Majlis al-Jinn—the Congress of the Spirits—a mysterious cave system in the Sultanate of Oman), they gather to plot the downfall of humankind. In ancient times, the djinn supposedly built cities in isolated locations where they could gather, and some of the remnants of these places still exist. Such a place is Wadi Rum in the southern Jordanian desert.
The desert lands to the east of the Gulf port of Aqaba are perhaps the most mysterious in the Middle East. A largely empty place and now occupied by Bedouin tribes, it has been the home of some passing but extremely ancient civilizations. One of these was the mysterious Nabatean culture that flourished between AD 37–100) and whose enigmatic trade-capital of Petra on the edge of Wadi Araba still stands as a tourist attraction to this day. But arguably, the most eerie and terrifying of all the places in the eastern deserts is Wadi Rum, a remote valley that boasts a spectacular rock outcropping lying about 60 kilometers to the east of Aqaba. Also known as The Valley of the Moon, this depression, with its spectacular rock formations, is the largest wadi in all of Jordan. It is thought that the name “Rum” comes from ancient Aramaic and means “high or elevated.” The highest part of the wadi is Mount Um Dami, which rises 1,800 feet above sea level. One section of the wadi, favored by rock-climbers, is the towering Jebel Rum, which is said to be one of the highest (if not the highest) peak in all of Jordan.
Wadi Rum has a long history of human occupation dating back to prehistoric times. The Khaz’ali Canyon contains ancient rock paintings that date back to possibly the 3rd or 4th centuries and perhaps even earlier. Many of these seem to show humans, camels, and antelopes, and mixed in among them are snatches of a strange written language that it is almost impossible to read. This, say the Bedouin of the area, is the tongue of the djinn themselves. It is clear, however, that Wadi Rum has been some sort of central location for many ancient cultures and that it has been a site of ancient veneration throughout the years.
There is no doubt that the wadi is a mystical place. Local fugara (Bedouin healers and sorcerers) and muquarribun (the Ghost Priests of an ancient Arabic tradition) claim that magics and forces from the dawn of time still resonate there, but what are its origins? While geologists may come up with a number of answers citing the age of rocks and the geographical strata of the surrounding desert, the Bedouin holy men know better. Wadi Rum, they say, is the site of a once great city built by the djinn from which they could control the land all the way west to the Gulf of Aqaba. From here, a number of djinn caliphs ruled through their witchcraft and magic conquering the early settlements of the frail humans nearby and enslaving them.
Their reign was ended by a powerful king of Israel who knew the incantations to defeat them. His name was Solomon, the wisest and most powerful of all Israelite monarchs, and he knew enough of their lore to bend the djinn to his will and force them to help build the Temple in Jerusalem. He destroyed their monsterous city with fire, leaving only the shattered remains that mark Wadi Rum. However, he wasn’t able to destroy their influence entirely, and their baleful powers still linger on there. The djinn, scattered to the lonely desert places before Solomon’s wrath, still consider the wadi to be their spiritual home, and will return there from time to time. It is then that the wadi is at its most dangerous, and humans should consider staying away. At least this is what the local Bedouin holy men say.
Because of its great and primal power, the wadi is also sacred to the Muquarribun. There are things hidden there, they say, which have been left over by the djinn from the very formation of the world. For instance, somewhere among the rock formations there is said to be a number of scrolls, known as the Whispers of Angels encased in brass cylinders, which contain certain Words of Power, known only to the djinn, which relate specifically to the formation of the Universe. These are words that Allah used to create things and which were written down by a category of djinn who overheard them. Yet, even if they were found they would be of no use to Mankind, as they are written in some form of prehistoric language. Even if they were to be translated, the knowledge contained therein is so powerful that it would almost certainly destroy the reader’s mind and leave him or her a gibbering wreck. The only person who could read it, according to lore, is a great magician, well skilled in magic arts and with his head enclosed in a circlet of iron (curiously enough the same is said of some Icelandic and Scottish grimoires such as The Red Book of Appin). It is, however, best not to try to read these scrolls at all. According to tradition, the Ghost Priests frequently visit the site to converse with the djinn and learn further secrets from them—the wadi is often seen as the source of their power.
And, of course, such a significant geographical desert site features in Western literature as well. It is said that the wadi inspired the great Englishman, T.E. Lawrence to write his celebrated book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (although Wadi Rum does not actually feature in the work). Indeed, as a British army officer, Lawrence was based at Wadi Rum during the Arab Revolt of 1916–17 and apparently found it a strangely eerie place. The main literary influence of the legends concerning Wadi Rum, however, has been on a much darker corpus of writing. This was reputedly the site of Irem, City of the Pillars, in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft. This legendary and monstrous literary city mirrored many of the characteristics of the djinn-built metropolis at Wadi Rum. In Lovecraft’s fiction, it is constructed by supernatural and terrible forces, such as the djinn themselves. It is unseen by many humans—“the nameless city that no man knoweth”—as are the traces of the ancient edifice at Wadi Rum. Both of these places were believed to contain a repository of abominable knowledge that would drive humans mad. Lovecraft’s mad Arab soothsayer, Abdul Alhazerad, traveled to it in order to learn great mysteries there, in the same way that the Bedouin fugara and Muquarribun still travel to the wadi in order to increase their powers.
And there are those among such travelers who say that the djinn-city still exists invisibly in the desert, and that the sounds of the djinn who may still dwell there can be heard, howling. Of course, such sounds might be credited to the desert wind, echoing through the crannies and gullies of the place, but those who have heard “the call of the djinn” claim that there is an eerie, supernatural quality to the sound that cannot be fully explained away by attributing it to the natural elements.
; “The sound was made even more terrifying,” wrote correspondent Jan Vogel on an Internet travel site in 2005, “by the silence of the desert all around. It had the mournful wail of some lost soul, and I could well understand how the local Bedouin would claim it to be the cry of some supernatural desert being wandering through the waste.”
Writing in his blog in 2007, Gavin from Glasgow describes the sound “… like a distant Greek Orthodox choir. If I was superstitious and hadn’t benefitted from a sound scientific training, I would have thought it was the sound of devils shrieking in the darkness.” To the local Bedouin, the idea of simple wind sounds is much too simplistic. For them, the sounds are indeed the voices of devils that still dwell there invisibly and often cry out to passers-by, seeking to draw them into their world. For them, the wadi is a place to be largely avoided and even many from the nearby settlement of Rum village will not go there, especially after nightfall!
So what lurks out there in the trackless Jordanian waste? Are there indeed the invisible remnants of a primal lost city, inhabited by ancient but powerful forces that have dwelt there since the dawn of time itself? And do they still have some sort of contact with the local witches and Ghost Priests who dwell close by? Perhaps the only way to find out is to go there. But it is probably best not to go at night or when the desert wind stirs the sands! Who knows what might well be lurking in the emptiness?
Warleggan (Bodmin Moor, England)
