by John Pinkney
In 1998 the Film Archive’s relieved employees said goodbye to their ghosts and moved into a new building.
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Invisible Assailants
Chilling Case of the Priests and the Poltergeist
For five disturbing months in 1998 a violent poltergeist wrought havoc in a house in Humpty Doo, south of Darwin. Priests called to exorcise the angry spirit had Bibles snatched from their hands and pages torn loose. One priest’s arm was painfully twisted. Newspapers published theories about what was ‘really’ happening. But the five people who shared the premises had their own instincts about the haunting’s possible cause…
ABC RADIO REPORTER TRACEY FARRAR described it as the strangest experience of her life. It began on one of her rostered days off in April 1998 when she sat on a Darwin beach collecting small brown shells. She little imagined that within 24 hours those shells would assume a breathtaking significance.
The following day Tracey reported for work. She was assigned to cover an unusual story: the haunting of a house in the Northern Territory town of Humpty Doo. Like most journalists she had limited knowledge of ghosts. But she was keeping a determinedly open mind when she arrived at the McMinns Drive bungalow, painted egg-blue and standing behind a high cyclone fence. The two-hectare property was richly planted with mango trees, which toward Christmas would again grow heavy with lush red and orange fruit. Beneath the fierce sky a blue swimming pool sparkled in the sun.
But the property’s peaceful atmosphere was deceptive. For the past week the five distraught tenants had been complaining that ‘some kind of ghost’ was running riot among them. Journalists from the local Northern Territory News and Litchfield Times had gone in prepared for a hoax, but emerged shaken. Something beyond reason and everyday belief was unarguably occurring behind the walls of the modest residence. Pebbles, knives, scissors, shards of broken glass and other objects of unknown origin were sporadically flying through the rooms 24 hours a day - punctuating the daylight hours with sudden shocks, and making sleep virtually impossible.
On the floors and scattered on the ground outside, words arranged from Scrabble tiles were continually appearing - spelling out such ‘messages’ as HELP, SKIN, CAR, FIRE, TROY and many more. Two months earlier a young man named Troy - a friend of household members - had died in an inferno when a paint thinner-laden utility in which he had been travelling crashed into a tree.
Tenants of the blighted bungalow were Dave Clarke, his partner Jill Summerville, a friend who preferred to be known merely as Murph, and three more recent arrivals - Andrew and Kirstie Agius and their baby Jasmine, aged 11 months. All, except for the infant, were gainfully employed working people saving for homes of their own. None had endured a crisis of this kind before.
The story took a momentous turn for ABC reporter Tracey Farrar when she sat at a table to interview Kirstie Agius. First, Tracey received a painful and unprecedented shock from her microphone - after which an object of unknown origin suddenly clattered down in front of her. She picked the thing up. It looked familiar. Then she recognised it. It was a small brown shell of precisely the type she had been collecting at the beach the previous day.
It is not uncommon in poltergeist hauntings for an individual to receive ‘personal attention’ of this kind.
As interest in their bizarre predicament grew the household’s five residents were increasingly exasperated to be receiving calls not just from around Australia but from the United States, Britain and Scandinavia. ‘All we want,’ Murph told an enquirer, ‘is for the bloody thing to f*** off.’ But it didn’t - and the visitors kept arriving.
One reporter, Nikki Voss of the Northern Territory News, recalled that she and her photographer had approached the house in a state of ‘extreme scepticism’. But - as with everyone else who crossed the threshold - their cynicism quickly crumbled. Soon after Nikki and her colleague stepped into the kitchen they were obliged to duck as a beer mug shot ‘with astonishing accuracy’ through a small hole in a windowpane. Later, while they were standing in another room with their backs to a solid windowless wall, a fusillade of small objects struck them painfully on the backs of their necks. The material turned out to be gravel.
Sceptics, hungry for evidence of a hoax, could find nothing - which was not surprising because few could summon the energy to actually conduct a first-hand invest- igation. The loudest critics preferred (characteristically) to pontificate from a distance of several thousand kilometres. One inventive rationalist suggested that the tenants might be loading the blades of the ceiling fans with sharp knives, broken glass and stones - then launching the dangerous cargo with the flick of a switch. Kirstie Agius mildly remonstrated that she was worried enough about her baby daughter’s safety without allowing such potentially deadly pranks to be played.
Conclusive pictorial evidence proved difficult to come by. As in the case of Britain’s Enfield Poltergeist (see panel) the entity declined to cooperate with cameramen - even attempting violently to disable and sabotage their equipment. When the Seven Network’s ‘Today Tonight’ program dispatched a team headed by journalist Greg Quail they filmed results that were occasionally dramatic, but analysed on an incident-by-incident basis, open to argument. The ghost (if it was a ghost) gave the production group a chilly reception. On the bathroom floor they found fresh arrangements of Scrabble tiles bearing the messages GO and NO TV The following day the latter message had changed to NO CAMERA.
Channel 7’s crew - along with numerous witnesses including three priests - found themselves confronted every few hours by the unbelievable:
A pair of scissors plunging into the pool
A bullet ‘from nowhere’ slamming onto a kitchen table
A steak knife plunging onto a cameraman’s hire car
Bedding hurled against a wall
A spanner crashing into a kitchen cupboard with such force that it rocked a film camera
But when the crew captured such incidents on film and videotape the resulting footage always contained elements of doubt. ‘We’re all seeing it,’ said a crewman, ‘but it’s like we’re being deliberately blocked.’
Newspaperman Max Anderson was yet another journalist who arrived as an unbeliever and was subsequently obliged to accept the evidence of his eyes. In The Australian of 9 May 1998 he described how he had watched knives, glass and a bullet hurtling through the house at moments (seemingly chosen with exquisite timing) when cameras were pointing elsewhere or when their view was blocked. This finally prompted a frustrated cameraman to ask the ghost to cooperate for once. Which it did, in a taunting fashion. Anderson wrote:
The cameraman called out again, ‘At least show us on camera so we can go!’ Within minutes the crew had an incident on three cameras: a baby’s bottle toppling from a microwave. But conclusive evidence? On tape, Dave’s leg occludes a clear shot the second the bottle leaves the oven, throwing the incident open to question. The timing is not just excellent; it’s genius.
On 6 April the Northern Territory News published an interview with the house’s previous owner who opined that the poltergeist must be his own ‘unconscious energy’ at work. A bank had forced him and his family off the property - and his feelings of anger were now taking paranormal form.
Back at the house the entity was becoming increasingly assertive. On one astonishing occasion two Scrabble tiles fell, seemingly from the direction of the ceiling, and perched themselves precisely on top of a sound recordist’s fluffy microphone. The tiles formed the word GO. The ‘Today Tonight’ crew obliged. (They had been planning, anyway, to return to Sydney that day.) The network commissioned a local freelance cameraman to take additional shots. To the frustration of the departed crew he managed, in his first hours on the job, to film mysteriously flying crockery. Greg Quail was excited at first, but ultimately rejected the footage because it could not be checked against other camera angles.
During this period the bungalow’s five residents were confronted not only by a ghost, but by the landlord’s
lawyer. They appeared in a Darwin court to fight an eviction notice which accused them of damaging the property. Their solicitor - aptly named Kelvin Strange - protested that his clients had broken nothing. They were sincerely convinced that an unruly spirit had caused any small damage that had been done. The magistrate ruled in the tenants’ favour. They could stay.
Toward the end of April 1998 the Seven Network televised episode one of its investigation, in which Greg Quail asserted that he had seen a poltergeist in action. The program attracted a huge audience. But after a tape editor noticed a momentarily reflected image of someone apparently throwing an object over a cameraman’s head, the network abruptly changed course. Nervous executives decreed that the entire Humpty Doo affair must be a hoax. They thus placed two seconds of inconclusive videotape against the testimony of their own reporter, his entire crew and countless independent witnesses including three priests and journalists from rival media organisations. They also ignored a mass of indicative evidence in the form of extensive footage showing mayhem everywhere on the premises. Although none of these sequences, seen individually, was flatly conclusive, the sheer aggregation of activity in the house offered proof of a different kind. It was obvious that no person or persons could have ‘caused’ such a quantity of glass, knives, batteries and pebbles to fly without the ubiquitous cameras catching them at it.
Meanwhile, back in McMinns Drive, the disturbance continued. Independent investigators and reporters continued to visit the house, generally concluding that the phenomena were too overwhelmingly plentiful for deception to be possible. Father Tom English recalled on ABC Radio Darwin how the tenants, frightened by the sudden appearance of a large cross and trident formed in pebbles, had asked him for help. While blessing the house he was startled by an object (provenance unknown) which slammed down on to a steel table. It was a .44 magnum bullet. When he began to sprinkle holy water a medicine bottle exploded into view and smashed against a wall. ‘Something’ then wrenched Father English’s crucifix and Bible from his hands, sending them flying across the room. When he retrieved the Bible he found that several pages had been torn loose.
Two fellow-priests said they had had similar experiences in the house. One, from the Greek Orthodox Church, set up an altar on the kitchen table. As he knelt to pray the presence snatched a large book from his hands, then twisted an arm painfully behind his back.
In May, less than a month after their eviction notice was overturned, Dave, Jill, Murph, Andrew and Kirstie decided they had had more than enough. Accompanied by baby Jasmine they quit McMinns Drive for good. The following February the owners renovated the house, adding a second storey. The ghost, they assured all who asked, was gone.
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Famous London Haunting Mirrored Humpty Doo
The Humpty Doo poltergeist was not the first entity to show violent antipathy toward cameras and recording equipment.
The widely reported haunting of a council house in the London suburb of Enfield bore many resemblances to the Northern Territory case.
The trouble began in August 1977 when the children of divorcee Peggy Harper complained that their beds had begun to ‘jolt up and down’ in the night. The following day the family watched chairs moving and a heavy chest of drawers shifting of its own volition across the floor. The frightened family called police. Two constables testified that while standing in a room whose door and window were closed, they were struck by flying marbles that ‘felt hot on the skin of our hands’.
The manifestations created unprecedented interest. Investigators Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair from Britain’s Society for Psychical Research believed the poltergeist was intelligent - and conducted tests to prove it. At one stage Grosse asked the entity, ‘How many years have you lived here?’ The purported ghost rapped 53 times in reply.
A BBC crew surmounted immense technical problems to produce a documentary on the entity. They not only recorded its rappings, but interviewed teenage daughters Janet and Margaret when they began, in a trancelike state, to speak in ‘impossibly deep’ male voices. Daily Mirror photographer Graham Morris spent eight months at the council house, trying desperately to obtain pictures of the phenomena that exploded daily around a trail of visitors. He had considerably less luck that Channel 7’s Humpty Doo crew would experience 21 years later. Despite the Darwin poltergeist’s hostility toward them the Australians at least managed to produce large volumes of footage - inconclusive though it was deemed to be. Inside the Enfield house, recording equipment and cameras were endlessly sabotaged.
Despite constant replacements the Daily Mirror’s cameras malfunctioned 100 per cent. Batteries lost their charges immediately the flash operated.
Engineers from Pye Business Communications placed three videorecorders in a room, hoping to capture events automatically. The BBC reported that all lights on the recorders came on one after the other - ‘a technical impossibility’. When the engineers checked the machines next morning they found that all three tapes had ejected. They were blank.
Radio journalists who recorded interviews in the house found either that their tapes had been erased or metal inside their machines was bent out of shape.
After several months of investigation the SPR’s Grosse and Playfair announced that the house was haunted by a ‘classic poltergeist’. The focus - or unconscious cause - of its activities was likely to be sisters Janet and Margaret. Both had entered puberty - a time when poltergeists operate.
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A Packhorse Panicked, by Floating Stones
The house in Humpty Doo was not the first Australian residence to be plagued by a poltergeist. In New South Wales on 11 March 1887 the Kiama Independent and Shoalhaven Advertiser (with acknowledgement to the Mudgee Independent) reported that the Lang family, in the vicinity of Cooyal, was being troubled by gravity-defying stones.
The newspaper said:
According to the family the stones fall through the roof or float through the air without the slightest warning. Mrs Lang said that when a stone fell on the floor, it fell with a dull thud and appeared to be black in colour.
When asked if the stones had ever hit anyone she replied that some of her children had been struck, but never very hard. They described it as being as if a small bag of feathers had struck them.
On the first evening Mr Lang was returning home with a bag of flour on a pack horse. On approaching the house the animal showed reluctance to proceed further. On being unpacked he immediately bolted.
At that moment the stones started to fall for the first time. During the evening and on each successive evening from 5 o’clock until 9 or 10 o’clock the stones continued to fall. On several occasions they floated into the house, sometimes in a diagonal position; at other times horizontally.
One evening a flat stone floated in at the door, struck a kerosene lamp on a table, turned, and knocked against half a dozen plates, causing them to roll to the floor. Fortunately nothing was broken. The stones, although not seen by the reporter, were said to be about 5 inches in diameter, nearly circular in shape and flat.
The Grim Ghost of Guyra
Late on the night of 8 April 1921* an aggressive poltergeist launched the first of many attacks on a modest weatherboard cottage near Guyra, New South Wales. The four-roomed house, owned by council ganger William Bowen, would soon become the most infamous residence in Australia, attracting investigators and mediums from around the world.
* Coincidentally the Humpty Doo poltergeist disturbance also began in early April, almost exactly 77 years later.
Bowen lived in the cottage with his wife and three daughters. When the rapping began the family imagined they were the victims of a practical joke. But as the blows gradually became titanic, shaking the entire structure of the cottage, they wondered, wildly, whether some large and powerful animal might be trapped within the walls.
That theory, however, failed to explain the stones which the invisible assailant soon took to throwing - so violently, and in such large quantities, that
the couple feared for their children’s safety.
When every pane in the cottage had been smashed - and the stones (some warm to the touch) kept flying through the gaping window frames, William Bowen rode into Guyra to seek help from the police. By the time the three local officers, accompanied by volunteers, arrived Mrs Bowen and her daughters were huddled in the front garden, shivering in the cold autumn night. All (except 12-year- old Minnie, who seemed composed) were sobbing and terrified.
The night was cloudless with a brilliant moon. No one could have approached the house unseen. The policemen and their civilian helpers, carrying lamps and torches, fanned out to search nearby bush. They found nothing. Significantly, stones continued to hurtle into the cottage throughout the hunt - an indication, everyone agreed, that the culprits were in no fear that they would be discovered.
Next the policemen checked inside the house. Curiously the focus of the onslaught seemed to be Minnie’s room. Her mirror had been smashed, the walls were pitted with holes, a chair had been overturned - and the bed was littered with stones. The investigators could find no clue as to how, or why, all this had happened. After several days spent resolutely pursuing an invisible attacker, the police asked headquarters for help. Panic, they reported, was spreading not only through Guyra but into neighbouring townships. Locals - and newspapers throughout Australia - had begun to talk about a vicious ghost. Some residents were so nervous that they slept with guns beside the bed. There had been several shooting accidents: the worst affecting a young girl, wounded in the head.
