by John Pinkney
Your letter was passed to the Survey School in Bendigo for reply. As they have not yet done so, I offer the following.
It is human nature to fear the unknown - whether it be supernatural or otherwise. Soldiers are not super human beings, they are simply average citizens trained to do a specific job. Their emotions are no different to yours and mine - and should not be expected to be. When confronting an enemy there is always an unknown element associated. Their training and task will ensure they show extreme bravery to suppress their fears and meet this enemy head-on.
In my experience dealing with the media, I know they tend to take journalistic licence to give a story some colour. We did not perceive nor experience any adverse effects from the story and therefore took no action - it did, after all, show that soldiers are no different to anyone else in the community and that, to us, is an important message in the battle to gain community acceptance.
The Army Survey establishment has undergone several changes at their Bendigo facilities. One of these is the relocation of Duty Staff. This is based on administrative requirements and not ghost stories. Thank you for your letter. I apologise for the delay in replying and trust this letter alleviates any concerns.
K.D. Boehme
Major
For Commander
Televisitants
The Rapping, Tapping Entity on National TV
When Ron and Margaret Berrell rented a holiday house in the quiet lakeside town of Budgewoi, New South Wales, they little suspected that it was already occupied - by an angry spirit. So ferocious was the haunting that it forced the family to flee the cottage. Before long the Phantom of Budgewoi became the subject of a telecast that sent shockwaves through the nation’s sittingrooms. It was by no means the first time, in the half-century history of Australian TV, that a ghost had publicly presented its unnerving calling card…
THE COASTAL TOWN OF BUDGEWOI is known principally for its bream-fishing - and for the violent entity whose actions created Australia-wide concern during the 1980s.
The ghost’s unhappy victims were Ron and Margaret Berrell and their 14-year-old son Craig. The trio’s trauma began when they moved into a holiday cottage while waiting for a new house to be built. The parents quickly learned that they had made the wrong rental choice. For weeks they were buffeted by such a devastating rampage of poltergeist activity that they packed up their possessions and quit the cottage.
Their effort was in vain. The phantom followed them.
Like most Australian families the Berrells had never been subjected to a haunting - and they were understandably shaken by the experience. Margaret, when I spoke to her, was weeping. ‘We can’t shake it off,’ she said. ‘From our first few hours in that place it took over our lives. Ornaments started flying around and there were massive bangings on the wall all the time. The racket woke the neighbours.
‘We’d never thought much about hauntings, but the only conclusion we could reach was that there was a ghost in the house. And when a neighbour said an elderly man had had a heart attack there two years earlier, it confirmed our fears. For two days before they found him he’d lain rapping on the wall for help. He died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.’
The distressed family moved to a caravan park. But (as occurs in a small percentage of such disturbances) the entity moved with them. Colin Mooney, an announcer with radio station 2GO, was the first member of the media to investigate the case: ‘People at the caravan park swear they saw gravel hurled around by something invisible. And inside the family’s caravan itself, pillows and ashtrays were being hurled around.’
The Berrells escaped again - this time to Margaret’s mother Joy Hyland. From what quickly became the new ground-zero Mrs Hyland reported, ‘The moment they came through the front door the house turned into a nightmare. Crockery is flying around and smashing. It’s turning on taps and slamming doors…it could kill us, that’s what I’m afraid of.’
News of the destructive entity reached the Nine network’s current affairs program, ‘Willesee’. Producers sent a reporter and camera crew to film at the seat of the haunting, inside the Budgewoi cottage. More than one million viewers heard the purported heart attack victim’s violent bangings and exhausted tappings.
At the request of Burrell family friends I contacted a medium who, we hoped, could exorcise the presence. The phantom thundered out its final message in the presence of the Channel 9 team. Next day the medium gently put an end to the terror and the noise.
Channel 7’s ‘Ghost of Honour’
In 1985 Channel 7 cameraman Geoff Stock and reporter Michael Beattie investigated a haunting at the Criterion hotel in Rockhampton, Queensland. Geoff’s camera captured a fog-shrouded face which days later would stare stonily into hundreds of thousands of Australian homes.
‘We were sceptical when the story was assigned to us,’ Michael told me. ‘None of us had the faintest expectation we’d capture anything paranormal on tape. I began by speaking to the publican Mark Gill and the former bar manager Peter Hudson who said he’d seen the apparition of a 19th century woman with hair in a bun walking the hotel’s corridors. For us, the shock came on our second day there. We were setting up wide shots in an upstairs room when Geoff suddenly exclaimed, “You’ll never believe what I can see.”
‘I peered with him through the Betacam’s viewfinder - and saw a glowing orange object, shaped like a human face, floating in the corner.
‘The thing had been invisible to my naked eye and our first thought was that it must be a flare caused by misplaced light. But Peter Hudson demolished that theory when he passed his hand through the object. It remained static, just like a hologram.’
The baffled crew took the tape back to BTQ7 Brisbane, where technicians minutely examined it. They concluded that the glow was unarguably shaped like a woman’s head, prompting the cameraman and reporter to concede that they might have seen a ghost. ‘It’s a bit bloody strange,’ Michael Beattie remarked. ‘The technicians told us that flares are normally composed of straight lines or dots. They’ve never been known to take the shape of a human head.’
Michael Beattie saw his first phantom when he was 15. ‘I was attending a boys’ school in Buckinghamshire,’ he recalled. ‘One afternoon a friend and I walked through the woods to visit a nearby girls’ school, which occupied an old mansion. On the way we heard hooves thundering. We stepped back into the bushes and watched an antique carriage, drawn by two horses, pounding past. The carriage, which we took to be real, clattered onto an old bridge - then, to our amazement, simply vanished. Later we learned that that bridge had once been the main entrance to the house.’
In TV’s pioneering days a spirit reputedly haunted Channel 7 Brisbane’s transmitting tower on Mount Coottha. Newsreader Nev Roberts told the Courier Mail that he remembered a technician, white-faced and trembling, coming into the studio in the 1970s to say he had seen a phantom figure dressed in overalls walking on the tower. The apparition was thought to be that of a workman who fell to his death when the tower was being built.
Chilling Case of the Killer and the Crucifix
‘The Mike Walsh Show’ is still remembered as one of Australian TV’s most successful programs. But equally strong, in the minds of many who worked for the production, is the time it was touched by the cold breath of the paranormal. The events that set the television community talking centred on one of Mike Walsh’s production assistants, whom Channel 9 management asked me to identify only as ‘Meg’.
At the station’s Willoughby studios Meg described to me how numerous witnesses had seen the image of a black crucifix appear on her ballgown - a sign which proved to be an omen of attempted murder. She said:
‘Shortly after I joined Mike’s staff I was invited to a dance. As a surprise my mother bought me a very expensive white gown. I was thrilled with the present - and all the family gathered round to admire it. But then, only a few minutes before my escort arrived, I was shattered to find something I hadn’t noticed before.
/> ‘The gown had a black mark on it, just above the waistline. We thought at first it was a drop of ink on the material. But when we looked closer we were stunned to see it was a perfect image of a crucifix. Mum and I and my sisters were very puzzled. We worked hard with spot remover, but we couldn’t get the image off.
‘Anyway, the dance was a great success - until about 11 that night, when I excused myself to go to the toilet. The bulb in the passage had apparently burned out and there was a man lurking in the half-darkness. It later turned out that he was an ex-mental hospital inmate.
‘He leaped out of the shadows and stabbed me over and over with a knife. I screamed, people came running and he managed to get away. The knife had torn into me so deeply that I was in hospital close to death for several weeks. But what rocked me and my whole family was that crucifix.
‘The place where it appeared on the dress was exactly the spot where the man had repeatedly stabbed me.
‘I’m not religious. I’ve never worked out how that crucifix appeared or what it meant. But I can only think that something, somewhere was protecting me against harm…that my time to die had not yet come, and that the mark appeared there to save me.’
Wraiths that Haunt Radio
Ambushed - by a Dead Broadcaster
On a mild spring night in 1982, announcer David Mann arrived at 3AW’s studios in Melbourne to prepare for his midnight shift. While he was strolling down a brightly lit corridor in the largely deserted building, something happened that shook him to the core of his being. The event gave Mann his first inkling that a presence occupied the premises…
YOUNG DAVID MANN HAD always been a radio enthusiast. The highlight of his job at 3AW was to present Saturday’s midnight-to-dawn session: a show he prepared meticulously. By the end of each week the top drawer of his office desk would reliably be crammed with scrawled jokes, oddities from the press and interview questions for anyone prepared to go on-air rather than to a party or to bed.
In March 2005 I sat with David, now 3AW’s marketing manager, as he recalled the unexpected episode that one night preceded his program. It was an event that made him question his beliefs about the nature of the universe.
‘Back in those days 3AW was still in its old La Trobe Street building. When I arrived on that Saturday night it was just after 11. The only other people on the premises were the duty announcer, a couple of technicians and a security man. Everything was pretty quiet.
‘I went up to the office area first, to get material I’d written for the show. As I approached my office I noticed a kind of mist coming from an alcove right at the end of the corridor. It looked at first as if someone was operating an extinguisher and my immediate thought was, “Oh no - there’s a fire and they’re trying to put it out.” But I quickly realised there was no extinguisher and no fire.
‘The alcove was empty except for that mist. I saw now it was in a vague shape - the shape of a man, quite plump. Obviously someone was playing a practical joke on me. I yelled out something like, “Hey - what’s going on?”
‘But there was no answer. Nobody in the corridor. Just this foggy shape. I had a good look around to see if there might be any source of illumination beside the normal lighting. But there wasn’t. Then, still hoping it was a joke, I theorised that a projector might be hidden somewhere and producing that image. But I soon realised that projection would have been physically impossible. The mist was in a recess and an operator would have had to beam the film around a corner.
‘By this time I was going through a mixture of emotions. I sensed that something quite enormous and unexplained was happening. I’d have expected I’d be scared. But strangely enough I wasn’t frightened at all. Weird though everything was, I felt amazingly peaceful and relaxed. I’ve never really understood why that should be. I can remember thinking, standing there, “This isn’t bad…there’s nothing wrong.”
‘By this time I was overwhelmed by curiosity more than anything else. What was the thing? I decided to find out, so I put my hand into the mist to see what it felt like. It was warm to the touch. But my action must have disturbed it in some way because after a couple more seconds it disappeared.
‘Despite the overall gentleness of this experience it left me pretty shaken. All I wanted was to get back to normality - and if possible to find a sensible, down-to- earth explanation for everything. I still had to get the notes for the program. I walked the few steps back to my office. Like every other office in the building it was always kept locked at nights and weekends. But my door, on this night, was standing ajar.
‘I felt a really strong desire to share this experience with my listeners. But after some thought I said nothing, deciding I’d be much wiser to try to work out what had actually happened. When I got back to the studios on Monday I was still keeping everything bottled up. But in the end I simply had to share it with someone.
‘I took the punt of confiding to one of my bosses, Bob Quinn, who was then the station’s operations manager. Bob (I called him Mr Quinn in those days) was an approachable person who was liked and respected by everyone. Good-natured though he was, however, I was still a bit nervous about how he might respond to a story about a mist in a corridor. So I began to broach the subject in a very roundabout way.
‘To my surprise Bob simply held up his hand to interrupt, and told me, “I understand what you’re saying, David. We had someone die on air here years ago. A lovely bloke. It’s believed that the spirit of that person is still at the station. Just leave it at that.”
‘I subsequently learned that the man was Jim Archer, a popular newsreader, who died at the microphone of a heart attack back in 3AW’s past. He was plump, like the image I saw. Dennis Gibbons, an announcer colleague, validated my experience. He said he’d never seen the apparition himself but had spoken to other station staff who had.
‘And me? Well, I’ve always been a reluctant witness. Even today, if you could prove to me that what I saw and felt that night was something perfectly ordinary and explicable, I’d be quite relieved, really. But until that proof comes along I’ll rely on the evidence of my own senses - and say that just once in my life I did see something that defied normal understanding.’
Many hauntings are linked to people who died in a state of shock. Parapsychologists theorise that the spirits of such victims may linger at the scene of the fatal trauma, too disturbed to move quietly on. A radio professional who suffered a cardiac arrest mid-broadcast would quite easily fit this category.
Did a Radio Star Write ‘Gags from the Grave’?
On 14 October 1959 the celebrated radio and TV quizmaster Jack Davey died after a long fight with cancer. Millions of Australians mourned him. After Davey’s city-stopping funeral - the biggest in Sydney’s history - uncanny events began to occur.
Central to the drama was Keith Smith, creator-compere of the high-rating TV programs ‘Pied Piper’ and ‘A Word from Children’.
Smith, who for 10 years had been Davey’s principal scriptwriter, said, ‘I believe it’s possible Jack has made repeated contact with me. The first hint that something strange was going on was when I was on tour. One wet night, while we were marooned in a hotel in Dungog, New South Wales, I read a magazine article about automatic writing. The author claimed that if you held a pencil to a paper for a while and concentrated, you’d start getting messages from spirits.
‘My assistant Pam Gildea, who’d been one of Jack’s offsiders, suggested we kill time by following the article’s instructions. At first the pen refused to move. But the moment I touched Pam’s hand with my finger the pen started up at once - and all kinds of messages, from foreign tongues to music, started coming through.
‘The following week, in Taree, we tried it again. This time the pen immediately wrote “HI HO!” - Jack’s famous trademark. We were shocked, because the handwriting was unmistakably his. A bit uneasy, but very curious, we began to ask questions. The pen skated across the paper at terrific speed while “Jack” described how he had died in St
Vincent’s Hospital.
‘He told us how he’d tried to speak to his friends around the bed, but they were crying and took no notice. Suddenly he found himself looking down - and realised he was “out of register” with his own body. Next, he was floating near the hospital ceiling, while a silver cord, attaching him to his body below, slowly frayed.
‘In the end, two dead friends appeared to Jack and said they were taking him away. One was Mike Connors, the morning announcer. The other was the comedian George Blackshaw.
‘Frankly, Pam and I were thunderstruck by the messages that kept coming. But we were both sceptical enough to want to submit the “person” writing to every possible test…’
In his programs, Davey had always proved himself a master of creating on-the-spot limericks, in response to challenges from audience members. Keith Smith recalled, ‘I urged whoever was controlling the pen to complete a limerick whose first line I’d invented. My line was, “There once was a lovesick flea.” Jack’s handwriting immediately began flashing across the paper. The first of “Jack’s” lines read, “Fell in love with a lovesick bee.”
‘But then - in exactly the same way Jack had operated during our years together - the pen moved back and substituted “tone-deaf” for “lovesick”. The final limerick, completed in about 30 seconds, read:
There once was a lovesick flea
Fell in love with a tone-deaf bee.
As the night went along,
He sang her a song -
But she thought it was just repartee.
‘Pam and I had many conversations with the entity that claimed to be Jack Davey. At one stage the controller of the pen said his greatest regret in life was that he hadn’t taken enough time to really understand people. Whether we really were talking to Jack, I’ll never know.’
