by John Pinkney
Announcer Alarmed - by a Brothel Ghost
For more than 50 years the Melbourne radio station 3UZ occupied a building formerly used as a brothel, at the top of Bourke Street. Staff members repeatedly claimed they had seen a transparent apparition, semi-human in shape, hovering in the studios. Some believed the ghost was a client who died while vigorously availing himself of an employee’s services.
Breakfast compere Brian Markovic experienced the haunting at about 11.45 one night, when his only companions in the building were an all-night announcer and a newsreader.
‘I was working back, preparing cartridges for the next day’s show,’ he told me. ‘Suddenly, from the old radio theatre, I heard someone playing the piano. Curious as to who it might be at that time of night, I wandered into the auditorium. To my surprise the place was in darkness. But the light from the doorway in which I was standing shone on to the piano.
‘No one was sitting at it - yet it was filling the theatre with the strains of an old-style tune I didn’t recognise. Frankly I was scared out of my wits. I knew the thing wasn’t a pianola and that there was no way it could be playing automatically. I got out of there, finished my work as fast as I could and went home.’
Phantom pianos feature in many Australian hauntings. During the 1980s numerous people who had walked past a derelict homestead near Campbelltown, Tasmania, reported hearing keyboard music emerging from the interior. A newspaper investigated the haunted homestead - and found neither a player nor a piano inside.
The two-storey house, its windows boarded and garden overgrown, was part of Wanstead Park, a property established in 1827 by the sheep breeder Richard Willis. The invisible musician was rumoured to be Marianne Willis, the family’s oldest daughter, who sought solace in music after her fiance was killed. She was buried in the family vault on a hill overlooking the homestead.
Vicious Phantom ‘Tried to Kill’
The now-defunct Melbourne station 3XY was sometimes a frightening place to work. Engineers, announcers and other staff members were convinced that an unfriendly ghost - with occasionally murderous intentions - was sharing their studios. Radio and TV performer Colin McEwan was one witness prepared publicly to say that the spirit had actually tried to kill him.
Colin was 3XY’s all-night announcer in the late 1950s, when the station was housed in the old Princess Theatre on Spring Street. ‘Back in those days,’ he told me, ‘we all had to work crammed into a tangle of attic rooms. At around two o’clock one morning I put on a clutch of records and commercials and stepped out onto the old rickety stairs for a breather.
‘From where I stood you could see down into the dark, empty stalls with the great stage looming behind. I’d leaned on the stair-rail often enough before. But that night I felt uneasy. Then I knew why.
‘Suddenly something cold and strong grabbed my shoulder and shoved. For a moment it seemed I’d go pitching down the stairs and break my neck.
‘But I grabbed the rail like grim death - and then what seemed like some kind of crazy ghost was gone. I talked to other members of the night staff. All said they’d had brushes with whatever the thing was. Several weeks later I saw another frightening thing happen. I was sitting in the studio with two other staff members when the engineer walked in with a flask of coffee. Without any warning, something - something invisible - hurled him against the wall, with coffee and blood splattering everywhere.
‘I formed the opinion at that time - and didn’t revise it much afterward - that something malevolent was at work in our studios. Something that wanted us out of there - or dead.’
Colin McEwan’s predecessor as all-night host was a 16- year-old announcer named Bert Newton. He too had a brush with a ghost - but it was a happier experience. ‘In those days,’ Bert told me, ‘there were so few commercials in the wee hours that I’d sometimes play both sides of an album without a break.
‘One very black morning I put on the first side of a record - then, feeling lonely, wandered down to see the engineer, who was the only other person in the building. When I reached the control room he was asleep: not surprisingly, I suppose, as he was studying law during the day. I didn’t like to wake him, so I wandered around for a while. I lost track of the time - and then I panicked. I realised that I’d been strolling for too long and the needle was probably scratching around on the record label.
‘I rushed back upstairs, ready to apologise to the listeners. But then, to my amazement I saw that someone had turned the record over. The needle was in the first track on the second side.
‘Naturally I thanked the engineer. But he denied having gone near the studio. The management confirmed to me next day that no one had been in the building at that hour. And security, even in those days, was too tight for an intruder to have entered. I’m sceptical about ghosts, but I’m forced to admit that something very weird happened that night.’
The 3XY phantom was still, seemingly, at work during the 1980s. Melbourne newspapers reported that a ‘mysterious moaning’ had bemused the breakfast show’s 130,000 listeners. Engineers studied the tape, but could offer no explanation for the sounds.
(A fuller description of the Princess Theatre haunting appears later in this book.)
‘Poltergeist’ Caused Radio Mayhem
Two studio clocks mysteriously stopped when a woman, claiming to possess psychic powers, phoned radio station 4WK in Toowoomba, Queensland. Seconds after the self- styled clairvoyant had called a second time, the station’s telephones malfunctioned.
The caller, who identified herself only as ‘Sheila’, made a series of extravagant claims. On-air she told the talkback announcer Stuart Robertson that ‘a race of grey aliens’ had endowed her with extrasensory abilities. It would be her task, along with hundreds of other people, to prepare the world for their arrival.
Robertson spoke to Sheila for 20 minutes: much longer than most talkback exchanges. ‘Everything she told me sounded crazy,’ he said. ‘But something odd was going on, because the business of the clocks and the phones baffled everyone here.
‘It was only after Sheila had hung up from her first call that I noticed my studio clock had stopped at 11.52. I then realised I’d lost track of time during the interview. Assuming the midday news was due any minute I mentioned the stopped clock on-air, hoping someone would respond. A technician hurried in with a battery-powered replacement, but the instant he placed the new clock in front of me, it also stopped. That was a hell of a coincidence, because I’d never known any timepiece at this station to break down before.’
Staff members were alarmed by the woman’s subsequent call. ‘This time she rang to speak to one of our executives,’ Robertson said. ‘During the conversation, lights on the switchboard blinked on and off and there were strange clicking noises and interference.’
The twin mysteries of Sheila’s identity - and of how her telephone communications twice coincided with inexplicable events - have never been solved. Undoubtedly the phenomena at 4WK bore a strong resemblance to poltergeist activity, which, in numerous cases, is believed to emanate from a living person’s unconscious mind.
ANOTHER QUEENSLAND call sign plagued by paranormal events was 4AK - which had inherited its ghost from the building’s previous occupants. From the day, in 1979, that the station began transmitting from the Toowoomba Chronicle’s old premises in Margaret Street, staff complained of uncanny interruptions to their work. Announcers, in particular, were thrown off balance during broadcasts by loud tappings on the walls, windows abruptly opening and lights clicking off and on. Chronicle journalists conceded that the phantom, thought to be a long-dead printer, had haunted the premises for longer than anyone could remember.
This wasn’t good enough for 4AK’s then-manager Jim Sweeney, who acidly asserted, ‘I wish the Chronicle people would come and collect him…he’s their ghost after all.’
Puzzle of the Perfumed Entity
For his first eight months on-air at Adelaide station 5KA, Peter Benn said nothing about the events
that were making his 12-to-dawn shift a nightmare. But so intrusive did the haunting become that he finally took the problem to management.
He learned that the old deconsecrated church which housed 5KA’s studios had long been the refuge of a ghost. Benn’s story leaked to a newspaper, prompting previous announcers to describe similar problems.
‘Like radio stations everywhere we have strong security overnight,’ Peter Benn told me. ‘I’m alone in the building and there’s no way anyone can enter without my knowledge. That’s why everything that’s happening is so bizarre - there can’t be any logical explanation.
‘One night a moaning sound came from an adjoining room - followed by a noise that resembled a bottle rolling on a concrete floor. When I went to investigate, nobody - and nothing - was there. Another night, after coming back from the loo, I found that my logbook (which, naturally, I always keep open during a shift) was closed…with my pen placed neatly beside it.
‘I’ve also heard whistling right behind me when I was alone in the building - and the heavy studio door has opened and closed of its own accord. But the strangest thing is the smell of perfume that sometimes accompanies these happenings. If this is a ghost I’d tend to believe it’s a woman.’
Benn was impatient of sceptics who suggested his experiences resulted from drowsiness or small-hours hallucinations. ‘I’m a clear-headed observer with no preconceived ideas - and these things are happening,’ he said.
Haunted radio stations are an international phenomenon. Some parapsychologists surmise that the curious concentration of wraiths in radio is somehow associated with electronic equipment, which may (to quote one theorist) ‘draw discarnate entities like moths to a light’. But this notion stands little scrutiny. If it were correct, television channels and organisations with large concentrations of computers would also be troubled. And that, overall, is not happening.
* * *
The Manager Who Refused to Retire
In 1986 an announcer at a Queensland regional station sent me a letter complaining about the manager - who happened to be dead.
‘I disbelieved in the supernatural until I started work in this town,’ he said. ‘After I’d worked here several days I was told about the old manager, how he died and how, supposedly, he looks after the station.
‘It wasn’t long before I saw things happening for myself. One morning I watched the breakfast announcer come into a room where staff notices were pinned on a board. There was no air-conditioning and no open doors or windows - but to my amazement the notices were suddenly hurled about as though in a hurricane.
‘Another time the night announcer was doing a request show. When he went to the library to collect the required records he found they were already poking out of the stacks. On the way back to the studio he heard a muffled voice addressing him.
‘Then there was my own experience. At about 12.30 one morning, another DJ and I saw an intercom light switch on in a studio. As not even a telephone company can turn on such a light from outside, we searched the station.
‘Everything was locked and the building was empty. I went into the studio and picked up the phone - and I swear on the Bible that I heard a click. Next day the other announcers said the old man was just testing me out.’
* * *
Phantoms of the Bush
A Silent Horseman’s Sinister Secret
WHEN a young farmworker vanished overnight in central New South Wales, police and volunteers unsuccessfully searched for him across vast tracts of scrubland and plains. After three dispiriting weeks they unwillingly abandoned their attempts at rescue. Experienced bushmen predicted that the missing man was unlikely ever to be found. They were wrong. The mystery was finally solved - thanks to a series of disturbing events…
JAN SLATER WAS only eight when she first heard about the missing farmhand and the bizarre role her father and grandfather had played in finding his body. The story - factual, circumstantial, but profoundly strange - was already a legend in the New South Wales country district where she was growing up. Fascinated by its uncanny details, she would beg her father to describe again and again what had happened and what he had seen.
Decades later, while living in Mt Pritchard, NSW, she described the real-life (and real-death) drama to me:
‘It happened in the 1940s. A worker had gone missing from a local farm - and despite an enormous search over about 20 days, neither the police nor volunteers could find a trace of him. While all this was going on, my dad and Grandpa were droving sheep near Condobolin and were obliged to camp out for several nights. The weather after sunset was unseasonably cold so the two of them habitually huddled close to their campfire.
‘One night, as they were sitting sipping hot tea, a man rode by on a horse. As was the country custom my dad called out hello and offered the chap a cuppa - but he rode on without a word.
‘My father and grandfather thought his behaviour was a little odd, but didn’t spend much time puzzling over it. The following night, however, the man rode by again - ignoring their greetings a second time. Because people just didn’t behave so rudely in the bush, my grandfather suspected something must be very wrong.
‘Subsequently, when the horseman seemingly snubbed them a third time, Grandpa and Dad decided to quietly follow him to his camp, to see what the trouble was. However, after a couple of miles the rider and his horse suddenly disappeared.
‘Dad and Grandpa were baffled. It didn’t seem possible for the horseman to have simply vanished in that open terrain. They searched the area - and finally found a drover and his horse lying dead in a deep mineshaft. This was the man rescuers had been seeking for weeks.
‘The police said the man must have been riding at night and fallen down the shaft, along with his horse. Until that moment, my dad and grandfather had thought their mysterious rider was a solid human being. Now they concluded they’d been looking at the ghost of a man who was mutely begging for his body to be found - and properly buried.’
Ghost Sent a Killer to the Gallows
Condobolin’s silent horseman was not the only spectre to have directed searchers to a bush grave. On a warm spring evening in October 1826 the phantom of what later would be identified as a murder victim reportedly materialised beside a farm fence. The entity gestured toward a small creek which wound across the paddocks. As a frightened witness watched, the figure slowly disappeared from view, apparently following the creek’s course.
Aided by Aboriginal trackers, policemen the following day found a marshy trench in which the brutally battered corpse of a missing man lay shallowly buried. The killer was arrested soon afterward. These events, central to what would become Australia’s most celebrated haunting, occurred in Campbelltown, New South Wales.
In the early 19th century the township was a sparsely populated carriage-stop whose most prominent landmarks were a church, a courthouse, a jail, a smithy and two public houses. The village was surrounded by large rural estates, one of which was owned by Frederick Fisher, a former convict who had become rich in the colony. One of Fisher’s employees was a fellow ex-prisoner, George Worrall. It was rumoured that the men shared secret business interests.
On the night of 17 June 1826 Fisher and Worrall drank with three neighbours at one of the town’s ramshackle inns. Fisher left early. It was the last time anyone saw him alive.
The local clergyman, Reverend Thomas Reddall, who doubled as the town’s magistrate, was immediately concerned - and questioned Worrall closely. Worrall claimed that his employer, fearful of being discovered in a fraudulent property deal, had decamped to Sydney and from there returned by ship to England. The clergyman remained suspicious, but had no evidence that might have carried his investigation further.
The breakthrough in the case came four months later when a local farmer, William Farley, hammered panic-stricken on Reddall’s door. He claimed that while he was travelling home in his cart, just past the Camden turnoff, his horse had suddenly shied. Farley looked up and immediately saw the cau
se. The tall, imposing and ‘unmistakable’ figure of Frederick Fisher, in white and ghostly form, was sitting on a fence, just feet away. While the farmer stood staring, the apparition raised its right arm and pointed in the direction of a creek meandering through a nearby paddock. It then rose slowly and flew toward the waterway, following the curving banks until it vanished.
The magistrate took meticulous notes, even reproducing several of Farley’s remarks:
‘A horse won’t pass a dead person, sir - that’s why it reared.’
‘…Sure as I live, sir, I could see that ghost as plainly as I see you.’
Enjoining Farley to say nothing to anyone, Reverend Reddall sent an urgent message to Sydney. Next day a party of constables and Aboriginal trackers arrived. They achieved quick results. The senior policeman, Constable George Leeland, found blood smeared on the fence rail where the ghost had reportedly sat. Someone had tried to burn the bloodstains away. The Aboriginal trackers then led a search along the creek, directing the policemen to a stretch of marshy ground. A tracker thrust an iron rod into the mud and announced, ‘Here!’
The constables had brought spades. It took them only minutes to unearth the body of Frederick Fisher.
At the inquest, the coroner found that Fisher had been clubbed to death, the blows fracturing his skull in several places and spilling brain matter. The verdict: murder by a person or persons unknown.
Worrall was arrested soon afterward. He had convicted himself when he tried to pass a forged document. Allegedly written by Fisher five months earlier, it transferred to Worrall the deeds to the farm. At his trial for murder Worrall claimed that he had killed Frederick Fisher accidentally. While driving a horse out of a crop of wheat, he had tried to strike it with a paling and inadvertently hit Fisher instead. This story was judged as false as the document that had damned Worrall in the first place. Fisher had not been felled by a single, accidental blow. He had been brutally struck about the head many times.
