by John Pinkney
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The Many Ghosts of Monte Cristo
The House that Beckoned
The Monte Cristo homestead, which dominates a hilltop in Junee, New South Wales, has long been known as a cauldron of disturbing phenomena. Hens inside a padlocked fowlhouse have been found with their necks wrung. The phantom of a murdered child, inexplicably torn from her nanny’s arms, lingers in the stairwell. A smell of burning has permeated the stables, in which a farmworker died after his straw bed was set alight. The homestead, troubled by uncountable numbers of ghosts, attracts parapsychologists from around the world. Specialist observers generally agree that Monte Cristo is Australia’s most haunted house…
REG RYAN HAS never forgotten the first time he saw Monte Cristo. He even remembers the date: 10 September 1955 - a Saturday. It was shortly after 11 o’clock on a warm spring morning and 21-year- old Reg was teaching a friend how to drive. The pupil was proving quite good for a beginner - and Reg, after initial nervousness, had settled back to enjoy the day.
The road, through Junee, New South Wales, took them past a green hill on which an imposing homestead loomed. For reasons he has never entirely understood, Reg was immediately intrigued. He asked his friend to pull over. The pair climbed the hill for a closer look. As they approached they realised that the edifice - impressive from a distance - was in a state of near-terminal disrepair. Vandals had broken every window, removed the doors with crowbars, smashed roofs, ripped away guttering and lit campfires in the once grand rooms. Even the FOR SALE sign lay trampled in the mud.
The property’s ruinous condition did nothing to dampen Reg’s sense that he had discovered something unique. Fascinated, he walked repeatedly through the decaying house, its gaping windows invaded by tendrils and branches thrusting from the old wild garden.
In 2005 - 50 years after that fateful visit - Reg Ryan told me, ‘There was no logic in what happened from then on. I found myself making plans and thinking, This place is going to take me years to repair. I never had the slightest doubt that restoring the house was what I was destined to do. I could simply have shrugged and walked away that morning - but that never seemed to be an option.’
The old family home that would monopolise the rest of Reg Ryan’s life had been built in the late 19th century and named Monte Cristo (Mount of Christ). Its original owners, Christopher and Elizabeth Crawley, were long dead. The surviving family’s asking price was 8000 pounds ($16,000) - a sum young Reg, a tailor, could afford neither to pay, nor to borrow.
But he was undeterred. Somehow, he knew, he would make Monte Cristo his.
AFTER SEVERAL YEARS of waiting, punctuated by cruel setbacks, he succeeded. In 1957 Reg married Olive Summerell. The young woman, born in nearby Wagga Wagga, enthusiastically supported his ambitions for the homestead. Whenever they could find time the couple climbed the hill to inspect the increasingly bleak ruin, which they already half-regarded as their own. They watched alertly as its price tag steadily decreased - until in 1959 it plunged to 2000 pounds ($4000). This was an entry fee Reg and Olive felt confident they could afford. They signed a contract of sale with Alphonse Crawley, 80-year-old son of the original owners, and immediately began to draw up a restoration plan. Everything, from the wide verandahs and opulent plaster ceilings to the roofs and stairways, would have to be repaired or completely replaced.
But happily the core edifice remained sound. The Victorian builders had painstakingly constructed the house from sandstock bricks, laid on a drystone foundation. After more than a century the plaster remained free of cracks. The solid brick walls, 45 centimetres thick, were still massively strong. Although there was a daunting amount of work to be done - at immense cost - the Ryans had the comfort of knowing they would be building on a solid foundation.
The troubled mansion Monte Cristo in Junee, NSW. Illustration Faith Richmond
But just as they were about to buy their first materials they received a shock, in the form of a legal letter. There had been a misunderstanding in the contract. Unless they could afford to renegotiate they would have to relinquish the property. Unable to take on further debt the young couple gave up the house. Disappointed, they moved to a nearby town where they set up a mixed business.
But the homestead continued to tantalise. In 1960 the Crawley estate offered it for sale again. There were no takers. The only regular visitors by that time were the vandals, whose relentless assault on the house prompted fears that they would eventually burn it down. The estate’s manager hired a caretaker, Jack Simpson, to camp on the premises and fend off the attackers. It proved an impossible - and ultimately fatal - task. After 10 months in the job Simpson was shot dead by a youth who subsequently told the judge he had been inspired by Hitchcock’s Psycho.
The caretaker position was readvertised. Unsurprisingly no one applied. The vandalism worsened. In 1963 the Crawley estate desperately offered the devastated homestead at the knockdown price of 1000 pounds ($2000). No one, aside from Reg Ryan, showed the smallest interest. He signed a second sale contract, ensuring that it was error- free this time. Soon afterward he and Olive and their three small daughters Deborah, Noelene and Michelene moved into Monte Cristo. No one had thought to tell them that the premises were haunted.
A Brilliance in the Fog
It was on 3 June 1963 that Reg and Olive first became aware something might be amiss. They had been living at the homestead for three days. Because there was neither power nor water, a relative was babysitting the children. After spending a day clearing rooms of rubble the couple drove down to the town for supplies. ‘It was very foggy that night,’ Reg recalled. ‘When we returned and came around the bottom corner of the driveway, light was streaming from every door and window.
‘This came as such a shock that I slammed on the brakes. We sat there staring up at the house. It wasn’t just lit, it was brilliantly lit - and that’s what we couldn’t understand at all. There was no electricity connected. All we had for illumination was a single kerosene lamp - and of course we’d turned it off before going out.
‘We knew that even if someone had lit the lamp again it couldn’t possibly have created this dazzling display. Olive was scared it was burglars with powerful torches - but that couldn’t have been so, because their lights would have been throwing shadows as they moved around the rooms. The light we were looking at was solid and motionless.
‘I got out of the car, intending to walk up to the house to see what was going on. But the moment I pushed the car door shut the lights went out - and the house was in foggy darkness again.’
(In 1990, whatever agency had illuminated the homestead performed an eerie encore. The Ryans’ then 21- year-old son Lawrence had driven home, leaving the rest of the family at a ball in Wagga Wagga. As he turned into the driveway he saw - just as his parents had seen - that every room in the unoccupied homestead was ablaze with an intense brilliance, uncomfortable to his eyes. As he drove closer the light abruptly went out.)
‘We tried hard to rationalise our initial experience,’ Reg told me. ‘A few people suggested the light source might simply have been our headlights reflected in the windows. But at that time there wasn’t a single pane of glass in the whole place.’
At that busy stage in their lives the young parents had little time to puzzle over an inexplicable occurrence. They were beset by more practical problems. To enable him to begin the long task of restoring Monte Cristo 29-year-old Reg had taken out a large bank loan. He was paying the instalments, and feeding his family, by working as a door- to-door salesman from nine to five and as a drinks waiter at night. In what he ironically described as his spare time he renovated: restoring the sweeping gardens, reflooring the balcony and verandah, fitting cast-iron railings and installing opulent doors, harvested from other mansions that had flowered and faded. On a friend’s advice he eventually started a home-based antiques business, which proved so successful he was able to accelerate the restoration work.
As their house grew majestically around them the Ryans began to
love Monte Cristo. But their happiness was flawed by a series of sinister events. ‘Every pet we brought to the place reacted violently,’ Reg said. ‘The first indication came from our cat Blackie, who we brought over from Wagga on the first weekend. The minute I put him down on the floor his hackles rose and he went berserk. When he couldn’t find a ground floor exit he raced up the side of the broken stairway, jumped off the second floor balcony and bolted. We never saw him again.
‘We couldn’t work out what had upset him. It was only a few days later, when we talked about it to some locals in Junee, that we learned our place was reputedly haunted. We hadn’t seen any ghosts yet, but as time went by we didn’t find the stories all that hard to believe. Our beautiful little Australian terrier (misnamed Scottie) suffered much the same fate as our cat, going crazy when we released him into the house. He could feel something in there - we knew that just by looking at him. He found a downstairs door to escape through, then disappeared, just like Blackie.
Kittens, Birds Died
‘It was three years before we could keep a pet. “Miss P.” was the first cat that actually agreed to stay around - but never in - the house. Originally I’d found her crying in a paddock, caught in a rabbit trap set by one of the local boys. I managed to bandage her injured paw, but she refused to enter the homestead with me. She insisted ever after that the children feed her outside. A few months on she had a litter of kittens in one of the old sheds and the children delighted in visiting them. But to the whole family’s dismay, every one of those kittens, at a few weeks old, would froth at the mouth and die.
‘One kitten defied the trend and survived to the age of about five months. We kept her inside to look after her better. Then one morning Olive made a shocking discovery. Coming down to start breakfast she found the kitten dead, with its stomach opened … a bizarre happening we’ve never been able to explain. The house had been completely locked from inside.’
The kittens were not the only creatures to perish. Determined to start making practical use of the hectare on which the homestead stood, Reg Ryan built a fowlhouse. The resident hens laid no eggs - and after several days began to die off. Reg bought more hens, protecting them behind a tall wire-netting fence with a padlocked gate. To keep aerial predators out, he added a strong wire roof. Three days after finishing the job, he found all the birds dead, their necks wrung. Also strangled was the family’s pet parrot, which had been locked into the enclosure for safety. The wire fence and roof were intact - and the padlock had not been tampered with.
As the children grew, the deaths continued. On her 16th birthday Deborah’s boyfriend gave her a pair of finches. She kept them in a small cage in her second floor bedroom and scrupulously watered and fed them. ‘One day she came home for lunch and went straight up to check the birds,’ Reg said. ‘As usual they were active and chirpy. She came straight down to the kitchen, ran some fresh water for them and went back up - all in a matter of one or two minutes. When she stepped into her room, both birds lay dead on the cage floor. The pet shop people had no answers as to how or why they’d died.’
Throughout their childhood the sisters became accustomed to mysterious events. For several years Deborah and Noelene shared an upstairs room. It had no verandah - only a blank wall dropping away to the ground far below. Often they would summon their parents to complain that ‘the man’ had returned. They described the apparition as the head of a young male, the shoulders only partly visible. He appeared to be wearing a farmer’s work clothes - and would, quite impossibly, float outside their window, staring in.
So many visitors, ranging from antique shop customers to tradesmen, made similar complaints that the Ryans finally - albeit unwillingly - accepted that they were the owners of an extremely haunted house. Unlike their daughters neither Reg nor Olive ever saw an entity, but they ‘felt’ and ‘sensed’ foreign presences quite regularly. And both were well aware of the powerful physical effect certain parts of the homestead could have on outsiders. One afternoon a woman and her daughter became ‘stuck’ on the stairs. They were unable to move, either up or down - saying they could feel an invisible force impeding their progress. Parapsychologists who later studied the dark history of the house would confirm a witness account that a small child, torn from her nanny’s arms, had violently died in the stairwell. The infant’s spirit had lingered on the landing ever since. Other visitors to the homestead have described being followed through the grand rooms by a bearded man in a brown suit. This entity is thought to be the ghost of Thomas Crawley, the original owner. The soft notes of a piano sometimes issue from an upstairs room in which there has been no piano since 1948.
Reports of Monte Cristo’s phantoms, and their extraordinary interactions with present-day people, began to circulate widely in Junee. As with many other Australian provincial mysteries, these stories were seldom heard beyond the district’s borders. However, all this changed in 1977 when an ABC rural journalist heard about Mr Crawley’s ghost and tipped off a producer with the ABC series A Big Country. A film crew, accompanied by three self-described mediums, descended on the homestead.
Standing at the door of a spare bedroom one of the mediums, Van Berk, said he could see an elderly woman dressed entirely in black. A silver cross was hanging on the wall behind her. Berk was then filmed in the stables, from which he ran, coughing and choking, saying that he could smell death. Months later these impressions would prove to have been remarkably accurate.
Another of the mediums, Liz James, said she could sense ‘death and tragedy’ on the stairs. When the program went to air an 86-year-old Cootamundra viewer, Mrs Babcock, wrote in to offer more detail. She said that her mother (under the maiden name, Cupee) had worked as a maid at Monte Cristo between 1907 and 1911. One of the nannies had dropped a little girl to her death down the stairwell.
A distraught servant claimed at the time that ‘something’ had wrenched the child from her arms. Analysts have since speculated that such deadly attacks, along with the slaughter of birds and animals, could be the work of a single disturbed spirit: the phantom of a mentally deranged man, son of the housekeeper, who was imprisoned in a small room at the homestead for more than 40 years. There is still a hole in the wall, worn away by his chains. When the captive’s mother died, other staff members forgot to feed him. He was eventually found dying, crouched in the fetal position. Hair long and matted, and fingernails growing back into the palms of his hands, he had eaten everything he could find - leaving only the few pitiful crusts that lay beyond his reach.
Particularly disturbing to the ABC film crew was the incident of the looping smoke. The director was shooting a sequence in the brightly floodlit dairy. At the same time, to offset the chill of the country evening, the Ryans built a fire in their dining room fireplace. To the astonishment of witnesses the smoke emerged from the second-storey chimney, curled neatly in the air and (as if sucked) flowed straight down the chimney attached to the dairy.
Several weeks after the Big Country episode was televised the housemaid’s daughter, Mrs Babcock, revisited Monte Cristo, which she had not seen since she was a child. She showed the Ryan family the original room in which the piano had stood - an instrument all the Crowley children had played. This is the same room from which the sound of piano music still reportedly emerges today.
The elderly lady then climbed to the spare bedroom in which Van Berk claimed to have seen a cross affixed to the wall, with a woman in black standing near it. When she was a girl, said Mrs Babcock, this had been a box room. But in 1910, when the original owner Thomas Crawley died, his widow transformed it into a chapel. The local Catholic priest visited twice a week to pray with Mrs Crawley, who dressed at all times in black.
Perhaps the most dramatic confirmation of Van Berk’s abilities came toward the end of Mrs Babcock’s visit. While passing the stables - from which the medium had run, saying he could smell death - the old lady recalled that in the early 20th century a stableboy named Morris had woken extremely ill and unable to ri
se from bed. The foreman, convinced the boy was a malingerer, ‘taught him a lesson’ by setting fire to his straw mattress. The boy burned to death.
Police laid no charges, describing the occurrence as a ‘tragic accident’. Visitors to the stables have since reported hearing their names called - and turning to see the figure of a 10- to 12-year-old boy fading into the brickwork.
The TV report changed Monte Cristo’s destiny. No longer an obscure rural antique shop and museum it became a focus not only for the curious but for investigators of the paranormal from around the world. Many camera-equipped visitors have managed to capture bizarre images (see photo supplement). No one has been able to estimate the sheer number of entities that inhabit the house - or explain why they have chosen this particular place to manifest themselves. One English observer wondered whether the homestead might be standing on a ley-line of the kind associated, in Europe, with uncanny phenomena. Other theorists suggest that the Crawleys, having become ghosts themselves, evolved in some way into a magnet for other spirits.
In 1997 the Ryans received an Australia Day award - not for their homestead’s phantoms but for their prodigious efforts, against crushing odds, in restoring the historic homestead and its gardens.
‘I’m comfortable with Monte Cristo’s ghosts,’ Reg told me. ‘But Olive tends to get upset by them. I know that if I died tomorrow she’d be out of here the next minute. But it’s always been a bit different for me. The day I first saw this place I knew without a doubt I’d live here one day. I truly believe that something supernatural led me to this homestead - and that somehow I was meant to be the guardian, keeper and protector of this piece of Australian history that was so nearly lost.’
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