by John Pinkney
Amid the crowds and the clamour the phantom failed to reappear. And that, opined retired criminal psychiatrist Dr John McGeorge, was because it had never existed in the first place. ‘The so-called witnesses who claim they have seen an apparition are victims of hysteria,’ he confidently pronounced. ‘Police should prevent young people from forming cohesive groups in such circumstances. Immature youngsters, inspired by deep superstitious fears and awe, develop a highly emotional state very quickly - and this can become a dangerous force. Mass juvenile emotional explosions are difficult to control once they have been triggered. Decent young girls are in danger in a situation like this.’
Dr McGeorge’s sentiments left scores of newspaper readers (who starkly knew what they had experienced) unimpressed.
The Sunday Mail reported, ‘A surprising number of Queensland people believe they have seen, or felt, a ghost. Many of them wrote to us …’ Among the letters:
Don’t sneer at the idea of ghosts. Back in 1918 I lived in a house at Bowen Hills, not far from your present building. One morning in the early hours my mother was wakened by a noise. She got out of bed, switched on the hall light and walking through the lounge saw her mother standing opposite the clock. The time was 1.10 am.
For 40 years my mother had not seen her mother who lived in Maryborough. She hurried back to my father and told him. He said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ Next morning my mother received a telegram saying, ‘Mother died at 1.10 am today.’
[Parapsychologists commonly describe an event of this kind as a ‘crisis apparition’. See page 25.]
I once lived in an old two-storey house and was going to bed one night when I saw the shadowy outline of a man on a landing. He looked at me for a moment as I stood petrified with fear, and then glided into the bathroom. My mother looked at my white face when I went downstairs. Later she said, ‘You saw something upstairs, didn’t you? Don’t worry, I’ve seen it many times and it’s harmless.’ Then, for the first time she told me that the previous occupant had drowned himself in our bathroom.’
In December 1965, after the crowds had ebbed from Victoria Park, the underpass entity began, reportedly, to appear again. An academic pointed out that the phantom had a history - having reportedly been seen in the parklands as early as 1903. Witnesses, interviewed in contemporary newspapers, said the entity was shaped like a nun and floated beneath the trees.
According to 56-year-old George Reece, an ANZ Bank employee, the ghost had also manifested itself in 1922. ‘My father, Matthew, worked for the City Council at that time as park caretaker,’ he recalled. ‘He and my mother Catherine often walked together through the park. One afternoon she got a terrible shock when she saw a grey, shimmering form up ahead. As she drew my father’s attention to the thing it vanished in the railway cutting.
‘It had been normal for all of us to walk through the cutting - but after this experience, nothing would induce my mother to go through it again. I was only about 12 back then - but I can remember my parents talking to quite a few other people in the area, who’d also seen the shape.’
Over the years there have been further sporadic reports of the Victoria Park phantom - but the intense response from Brisbane’s population in 1965 has not been repeated.
What might be causing the haunting? It has long been established that the distress and pain of suicide or murder may create paranormal phenomena that resonate for long stretches of time. If we pursue this supposition, there are two theories (albeit shaky ones) that suggest who, or what, the Victoria Park ghost might be:
On 14 September 1952 a vagrant, Walter Hall, who regularly slept in the parklands, was beaten to death with a broken bottle. The killer dumped Hall’s corpse in the pond beside the railway cutting.
On 17 November 1960 a widow, Kate Ryan, was found raped and strangled on a vacant allotment at West End. Police questioned a Swedish migrant but did not charge him. On 29 November the man slashed his wrists, then threw himself under a train at Victoria Park, losing two limbs.
The latter case resonates to some degree with Allan Neilsen’s description of a torso with legs severed at knee- level. But neither theory can explain the sightings of 1903 and 1922. In the case of the Victoria Park entity, little can be proved: other than the fact that few, if any, ghost mysteries seem solvable by investigative logic.
* * *
Sydney’s Chilling Cop-Shop
In 1891 two prisoners hanged themselves, at different times, from trees in the gardens of Rose Bay police station in Sydney.
Through the generations that followed, the converted cottage acquired a reputation for being (in the words of one officer) ‘badly haunted’. A sergeant said, ‘I’ve seen a lot of things in my time as a policeman, but nothing ever matched being put on night shift at Rose Bay…it was eerie.
The haunted police station in Sydney’s Rose Bay
‘On hot summer nights, when you’d have sweat dripping from your face, the building’s temperature would suddenly drop to near-freezing point. You’d find yourself shivering in the middle of a heatwave. During these times phones would ring repeatedly - but when we picked up there’d only be a dial tone. We were always calling technicians in, but they could never find anything wrong.’
Another sergeant, Bob Raymond, told me, ‘When I was at Rose Bay there was constant talk about the so-called ghosts. Happily I never experienced anything, but one of my colleagues was very disturbed by what was happening. He described how he’d hear unexplainable noises at night, and how doors would close and open when no one was around.’
I interviewed a young constable who recalled ‘cold gusts of wind’ that blew papers around when conditions outside were hot and still.
‘But my worst experience came one quiet night when I was reading the paper,’ he said. ‘I was alone, and had just started sipping a cup of hot coffee. I put the cup down for a few seconds, so I could turn the page. When I took my second sip - no more than a few seconds after the first one - I spat it out.
‘The coffee had gone stone-cold - as if it had come straight from a fridge. There was no practical joke involved. No one else could have come into that room without me knowing.’
* * *
Greeted by Grasping Hands
Fremantle’s Arts Centre and History Museum is often called the most haunted building in the southern hemisphere. Whenever I mention its name on radio or in press articles I can rely on receiving at least one letter from someone with personal knowledge of its myriad entities.
An account which has lingered particularly vividly in my memory came from Mrs E. Jones of Scarborough, Western Australia:
‘The old museum building was originally used as an asylum and later as an old people’s home. Years ago, my sister attended art classes there. One very hot day she popped out for a drink of water and took a wrong turning.
‘Intending to ask for directions back to the classroom she opened a door. Immediately she had the dreadful feeling that hundreds of hands were reaching out trying to pull her into the room. She screamed and ran.
‘Staff members told her she’d wandered into the former cell where the worst cases had been kept.’
The limestone-brick Arts Centre, with its high walls and gothic facade, was built by convict labour. It opened as a ‘lunatic asylum’ in 1867 and was governed on the lines of Britain’s Bedlam hospital for the insane. The only treatment the mentally unbalanced inmates received was of a brutally violent kind. In 1909, after a series of scandals involving several deaths, the asylum was closed. The building then became in turn a nursing home, a US Army headquarters and a technical college - until in 1970 a museum opened on the site.
The misery of the thousands who suffered in the building still resonates. The spectre that both staff and visitors most often claim to see is of a woman in a grey shift, almost always in the Investigator gallery. She is believed to be connected in some way to an inmate who - believing her daughter had been abducted - jumped to her death. A sobbing sound which sometimes emerges from anot
her room is said to be the ‘echo’ of a psychiatric patient who - weakened by starvation and beatings - was clubbed to death shortly before the asylum was closed.
Other phenomena include a foggy figure seen standing at a window, locks which seize up, defying staff attempts to open them - and ‘invisibles’ which startle visitors by gently kissing them on the neck or cheek.
‘In some rooms we get cold spots that nobody can logically explain,’ recalled Emma Phillips, an Arts Centre executive. ‘It’s hard to argue with it…this is an extremely haunted place.’
The oddest experience in my file on the Arts Centre was related to me in 1996 by a lecturer at Melbourne University: ‘I’m still trying to make sense of this. While I was spending a week with my girlfriend at a Sydney hotel I had a recurring nightmare. It woke me up most nights we were there. The events in the dream were always the same. A ragged young woman was screaming to be freed from a locked room. Her suffering was so intense that I longed to open the door and save her - but every time, I was too frightened to enter that room; a fact that left me feeling cowardly and inadequate.
‘The following year we went to Western Australia to visit my girlfriend’s sister. She and her husband showed us around - and one of our stop-off spots was the Fremantle Arts Centre. I’d barely heard of the place - and certainly knew nothing of its history. But as soon as we got inside, I thought I recognised scenes from my nightmare. Those feelings of fear - which till then I’d forgotten all about - resurfaced. I felt sick and had to go outside into the fresh air.
‘Later, my girlfriend’s sister suggested jokingly that I might have seen a ghost. When she then told me about the centre’s past, and about its reputation, I felt very shaky and odd. I knew that in my dreams I’d had a patchily detailed foreglimpse of a place I’d never seen. I’d also experienced the terrible emotions that were still being felt there. I think about this a lot - and sometimes I wonder if the spirit of that young woman somehow reached out to me while I was asleep.’
Shadows Shattered a Mountain’s Peace
In 1985 the new owners of a small shop in the Melbourne mountain suburb of Belgrave discovered ghosts on their premises. Co-proprietors John Kliska and Doug Pearce described the shadowy entities as ‘extremely unfriendly’. John Kliska told me:
‘The troubles started soon after we took over the old building. One Sunday morning while I was in the back room unpacking stock the door slammed loudly behind me. I tried to open it - but it seemed to have been locked from the other side - seemingly impossible as I was the only person on the property.
‘I called a neighbour for help. He was astonished to find three vertical bolts pushed firmly into place, sealing me in.’
Daryl Gladwin, who rented a room above the shop, said, ‘I had exactly the same experience. I was alone working when I heard bolts on my door thudding into place, trapping me. I had to shout across the street for help.’
I spoke to locals who told me that the old building had been troubled by entities - often described as ‘shadowy’ - for as long as anyone could remember. The silhouettes, in the shape of two stooped elderly men and a small girl, were notorious for their unpleasant tricks, which ranged from throwing objects about to violent attacks. In the 1950s ‘something unseen’ even tried to hurl a woman employee down the stairs. (Her experience was not unique. Elsewhere in this book I describe two similar cases. The first victim was a Victorian hotel licensee whose ankle was shattered when an ‘invisible force’ pushed him violently down a stairwell; the second, a TV compere who recalls how something ‘cold and strong’ tried to shove him down a steep flight of stairs in Melbourne’s Princess Theatre.)
Disturbed, but also intrigued by the remarkable events occurring around them, Kliska and Pearce quickly became experts on their haunted shop’s history. They learned that in 1940 a store manager had suicided in the upstairs back room. In 1978 a manager had died in a shooting accident. ‘A former owner’s wife has told us she saw one of the ghosts,’ Daryl Gladwin said. ‘She flatly refused to describe it, saying it was too horrible to put into words. I know what she was talking about. Whatever we have here tends to create a brooding feeling in the air. At one stage I slept upstairs for six weeks. The atmosphere was so malevolent I didn’t dare venture outside the door all night.’
* * *
The Ghost and the Governor General
For almost a century Yarralumla, the governor general’s residence in Canberra, has been haunted.
The mansion’s vice-regal residents are usually reluctant to admit that a phantom stalks their premises. But in a newspaper interview more than three decades ago, Sir Murray Tyrell let the spectral cat out of the bag.
Sir Murray was private secretary to a succession of governors general from 1947 to 1973. In an interview published 27 August 1970 he told the Canberra Times about his frightening brush with the unknown. It had occurred, he said, seven years earlier, when police and Yarralumla staff were preparing for a visit by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Sir Murray first became aware something was amiss when a caretaker burst into his office to report an intruder. ‘I rushed out to see a figure - or presence - drifting up the stairs,’ Sir Murray later recalled. ‘It had no hands and no feet and I could see the stairs under it…I shouted but the figure took no notice, so I ran up the stairs after it. When I reached the top it had disappeared.’
Lady Tyrell indirectly encountered the phantom. ‘It happened several weeks after my husband’s experience,’ she said. ‘Princess Marina was a guest at Yarralumla and some policemen had been assigned to keep guard. When my husband told the officers about the ghost they laughed, thinking he was joking. But they soon changed their minds. Our house was near the main building and at 2 am a policeman woke us with a frantic phone call.
‘He said, “Come quickly, there’s someone in the house.” We subsequently learned they’d seen something wearing a long cape drifting up the stairs. They brought in a police German shepherd to check the stairway. But the dog refused to go up…it crouched whimpering at the bottom.
‘Two hours later the police came to our house saying they’d found no one. That dog was still cringing and miserable, its tail between its legs. I went to give it a comforting pat but the policeman warned, “Don’t touch him! His nerves are gone.” I’ve always found it hard to believe in ghosts, but something very strange happened at Yarralumla that night.’
Early last century, when Yarralumla was still a grazing property, an historian explored a stone vault in the garden, built to house the remains of Colonel Gibbes, a previous owner. The historian discovered a cobwebbed manuscript, handwritten and unsigned, which he immediately delivered to Frederick Campbell, his host. Campbell believed the document to be genuine, but its authenticity has since been questioned. It read:
In 1826 a large diamond was stolen from James Cobbity, on a station in Queensland…The theft was traced to (a convict) who had run away. The convict was captured in 1858, but the diamond could not be traced, neither would the convict give any information, in spite of frequent floggings…(However) he left a statement to a groom and a map of the hiding place of the missing diamond.
…The groom and his family lived out west for several years, according to Rev. James Hassall. I have no reason to think he tried to sell the diamond. Probably the ownership of a thing so valuable would bring suspicion. After (the groom’s) death his son took possession of the jewel, and with a trusty blackfellow set off for Sydney. After leaving Cooma, they met with a bushranging gang…The blackfellow was captured and searched to no avail, for he had swallowed the jewel.
The gang, in anger, shot him. He was buried in a piece of land belonging to Colonel Gibbes and later Mr Campbell. I believe the diamond to be among his bones. It is of great value. My hand is enfeebled with age, or I should describe the troubles through which I have passed. My life has been wasted, my money expended. I die almost destitute and in sight of my goal. I believe the grave to be under a large deodar tree. Buried by black
s, it would be in a round hole…
Written near Yarralumla, 1881.
This purported testament encouraged the popular belief that the phantom was the spirit of a courageously defiant Aboriginal whose bones (along with the swallowed diamond) lay entangled in the roots of Yarralumla’s grand old deodar tree. Happily, Frederick Campbell was never tempted to uproot the magnificent deodar, diamond or not. His vice-regal successors exercised similar restraint.
But was the story true? In 1984 Sergeant Bill Wittle, a former Yarralumla security guard, suggested that the manuscript was probably a hoax, played by two holidaying schoolgirls. In his memoirs he described how a female visitor, ‘Mrs Little’, had introduced herself to him as Kate, Frederick Campbell’s daughter. The woman said that she and an equally bored friend had taken a sheet of parchment notepaper from her father’s study, concocted the message, then planted it, freshly grimed and cobwebbed, in the vault.
Believers in the deodar tree manuscript were outraged. Hoping to find some flaw in the expose, they immediately checked the relevant Yarralumla visitors’ book. Sure enough, the name ‘Mrs Little’ was there. But it didn’t add up, because Frederick Campbell’s daughter had never been the wife of a man named Little. Her married name was Newman.
Had the self-described Kate Campbell’s story of a hoax been a hoax in itself? Possibly. But in evidential terms it hardly matters. A large number of eyewitnesses, including police and vice-regal employees, have sufficiently confirmed that Yarralumla is haunted - by something or someone, unknown.
