by John Pinkney
The state government sent a team of senior detectives to Guyra to find the answers that their inept country colleagues could not. But there were no answers. Despite double cordons around the Bowens’ cottage, manned by shifts of volunteers, the gigantic thumpings and the rain of stones continued. One police sergeant broke under the strain. After sleepless nights standing watch inside the house and preparing traps that were never sprung he suffered what one newspaper (using imagery from the Great War) likened to ‘a form of shellshock’. A subsequent generation would have recognised it as a nervous collapse.
Soon after the sergeant went away on recreational leave, a team of tradesmen travelled from the township to the crisis-wracked cottage and replaced all of the shattered window panes. To protect their handiwork they barricaded the front of the house with stout wooden shutters. The thumpings continued, but the volleys of stones stopped - temporarily.
Several days later the grateful family, accompanied by Mrs Bowen’s stepson Tom Hodder, walked down to a nearby paddock, where they pitted 20 bags of potatoes. When they returned to the house they discovered that the barricade and the windows behind it had been smashed. The wooden shutters and battens lay splintered on the verandah. Beside them rested a large stone.
The Sunday Times, a Queensland newspaper now defunct, sent a ‘Special Reporter’ to cover the haunting. His article read in part:
There is only one topic of conversation at Guyra, a prosperous little township about 110 miles from the Queensland border. Everywhere one hears fiercely heated argument on the subject of the extraordinary happenings at Mr Bowen’s cottage, about half a mile outside the township. Women and even men are frankly afraid. They sleep with loaded guns handy.
…The attacks (by stones) always seem directed against little Minnie Bowen, a girl of about 12. She is tall, thin and dark with peculiar dark introspective eyes that never seem to miss any movement in a room. When she speaks she never smiles and seems to look beyond or through you. She has a rather uncanny aptitude for anticipating questions, almost before they are asked, and answering them.
…Naturally the little township buzzes with rumours. Guyra is divided into two schools of thought - those who believe in the supernatural and those who blame some criminal or joker. Plenty of people will tell you that there are ample reasons why some interested person wants to scare the Bowens away, depreciate the value of their property and so secure possession cheaply. There is a house famine at Guyra, as in Sydney.
But as for an outside agency, it is difficult to see how a man could break through a cordon of 80 well- armed people and bombard a cottage on all sides. Of the spirit idea, all that can be said is that such things have happened before. At present it is difficult to account for the rappings and thumps in any other way.
However, hard-headed men like the local lawyer and doctor reject the very idea. The doctor set an elaborate trap to catch the person responsible. He sprayed the entire walls of a sleeping room with liquorice powder, and had a deep hole cut through the shutter and curtain, all unknown to anyone in the Bowen household. The trap failed.
By now the Guyra Ghost was attracting international attention. A Mr Moors - a friend of Sherlock Holmes’s creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - visited the town with five assistants who, he claimed, were ‘trained in observation and the detection of fraudulence of any kind’. Moors, owner of four plantations in Samoa, described himself as a specialist in the assessment of allegedly supernatural events. With the Bowens’ consent he removed portions of the roof to create lookout posts and also set several elaborate traps. The storms of stones from the bush all around continued unabated. Although they were sitting at a roof lookout during several of these volleys neither Moors nor his assistant could determine the stones’ source.
Moors and his helpers returned home, unable even to say whether the stones originated from outside or inside the cottage.
An Australian investigator, Ben Davey of Uralla, experienced a similar problem. A student of theosophy and the supernatural, he announced that he would submit the Guyra haunting ‘to the acid test of spiritualism’. Accompanied by Mrs Bowman, her daughter Minnie and a local sawmiller, Richard Pearson, he sat in Minnie’s bedroom and waited for something to happen. Outside, under the command of policemen, stood a cordon of 80 men. No one could possibly have approached the house undetected.
At 9 pm a heavy thumping began. ‘It sounded,’ Davey said later, ‘as though it was coming from outside.’ But the pickets and police surrounding the house insisted that the banging came from inside.
Davey nevertheless proved himself superior to other investigators - by putting to William Bowen questions no one else had thought to ask. Bowen revealed that May, his wife’s daughter by a previous marriage, had died three months earlier. Davey recalled, ‘I immediately suspected that the dead girl’s spirit was trying to communicate with Minnie.
‘I said to the girl, “If the knock comes again, ask if that’s your sister May.” She replied, “I can’t speak to my sister - she’s dead.” I coaxed her, saying, “Speak dear. Even if your sister can’t reply she might knock again.”
‘I hardly spoke the words before another knock came. My hair stood on end. But I continued to coax the girl and about five minutes later we heard another knock. Minnie crossed and blessed herself and said, “If that’s you, May - speak to me.” She was silent for a few moments and then began to cry. I asked her, “Did May speak?” She said yes…and the message she had received was, “Tell mother I am perfectly happy where I am, and that your prayers when I was sick brought me here and made me happy. Tell mother not to worry. I’ll watch and guard over you all.”’
Davey left, convinced that this exchange had put the ghost to rest. He was mistaken. Within 24 hours the bangings and the fusillades of stones had resumed.
On 28 April 1921 Minnie Bowen’s parents encouraged her to quit the cottage and to move in for a while with her grandmother, Mrs Shelton, in Glen Innes. It had become clear to them that Minnie was the focus of the haunting - and that if she went away the house might be at peace again. This theory proved correct. But no one had foreseen that Minnie would take the ghost with her.
Ten days after her arrival at the Sheltons’ Church Street house, stones began to rattle against the roof and walls. A constable assigned to the case could find no one to arrest. He reported that while he watched, a stone had smashed a bedroom window, becoming entangled in the curtain. And the bangings, too, were back. Neighbours on both sides complained about the uncanny noise. One said that the thumps sounded like an axe striking repeatedly against his wall. A reporter with the British newspaper the Daily Mail wrote:
Mr Alf Shelton, the son of the house, said that some of the bumps against the dining room wall had been heavy enough to dislodge ornaments on the sideboard. He insisted that this effect could not possibly have been caused by a girl aged 12. To prove this point he recruited a friend who weighed 14 stone to throw his weight against the wall near the sideboard. The ornaments did not even shake.
The menacing phenomena continued around the clock - finally prompting Mrs Shelton to write to Minnie’s parents, begging them to take their daughter home. They reluctantly obliged, whereupon the Guyra ghost performed an unpleasant encore. The family eventually became resigned to the destructive entity that noisily shared their house. As Minnie developed into womanhood the phenomena slowly ebbed, then ceased.
At 18 Minnie married a farmer named Inks. In 1989, disabled by arthritis, she tripped and fell in front of a car in Armidale, New South Wales, dying in hospital shortly afterward. As the scientific study of hauntings reached a more advanced stage she was often identified as having possibly been a classic ‘poltergeist medium’ - an adolescent whose troubled emotions create physical effects around them. The proponents of this theory had nothing to say about the role that might have been played by Minnie’s dead sister May.
The Guyra Ghost quickly faded from public memory - plunging the Bowens and their township back into the obscur
ity from which the ghost had plucked them. The world gave little thought to Guyra for the next 78 years - until, in 1999, an object of unknown origin plunged at colossal speed into the town’s water supply reservoir. It drilled a tunnel 20 metres long, burying itself so deeply into the granite that scientists were unable to recover it.
Followed, by WA’s Sinister Stones
Minnie Bowen is by no means the only person to have been pursued by flying stones. Thirty-four years after a violent entity followed Minnie from home to her grand- mother’s house 60 kilometres away, a young farmworker found himself in a similarly disturbing situation.
The trouble began in June 1955. Cyril Penny was living with his pregnant wife Lorna on flax farmer Bill Hack’s property in Mayanup, Western Australia. One afternoon, without warning, stones began mysteriously to fall on the farm. Ranging from pebbles to rocks that were ‘quite large’ the missiles first began descending on the roof of a shack occupied by a 36-year-old part-Aboriginal employee, Gilbert Smith, his wife Jean and their seven children.
The stonefall, seemingly from an empty cloudless sky, was eerily gentle. No one was struck or hurt. But the Smiths were understandably alarmed. Gilbert, who had worked for the Hack family for several years, urged his disbelieving employer to come and see the phenomenon for himself. Assuming that someone was playing a tiresome joke, Bill Hack refused. But next day the bombardment intensified. Jean Smith went to her husband’s employer and begged him to visit the house. Hack relented and invited Mrs Smith to join him in his car. He would investigate right away.
The Smiths’ hut stood in a clearing. As Bill Hack drove closer a large pebble suddenly struck the windscreen. In no doubt that someone had thrown the stone and run away, Hack hurriedly quit the car and strode to the back of the house. No one was in sight. As he stood bemused, another stone from nowhere glanced gently off his shoulder. Jean Smith invited him inside for a cup of tea. Things were even stranger inside the shack, she warned. And she was right. For several hours Hack sat watching stones (originating from nowhere that he could detect) floating down to the kitchen floor. The stones were warm to the touch. Some were hot.
News flashed through the district that the Smiths’ house was either haunted, or under attack by a particularly resourceful prank-player.
Several nights later a crowd of neighbouring farmers and their workers - most of them armed -formed a cordon around the Smiths’ shack. Other men stood guard inside, while associates searched the surrounding bush with spotlights and torches. Possibly nobody in the party was aware that volunteers in faraway Guyra had taken similar action in 1921. From the beginning of this paramilitary exercise pebbles continued to descend in a soft, steady drizzle. Some were like large sandgrains; others the size of eggs and river pebbles. In the wintry bitterness of the June night the freshly fallen stones warmed the hands of all who picked them up.
The vigils, in which Cyril Penny sometimes participated, continued for several weeks. Occasionally farmers would fire their shotguns into the bush, in the faint hope that they might frighten the joker away. But few, by this time, continued to believe that a joker had ever existed. The stones were gradually becoming a phenomenon - admittedly strange, but accepted nevertheless. And as the soft pebble-fall became almost commonplace the crowds of vigilantes thinned. The Smith family, who now regarded the manifestation as more a nuisance than a threat, accepted the inevitable and got on with their lives.
By mid-July news of the Hack farm haunting had reached the metropolitan media. Perth’s Weekend Mail assigned journalist Hugh Schmitt to cover the outlandish story. The stones were still falling when he arrived. In his first report he described the mysterious missiles as ‘ranging in size from a match-head to a hen’s egg’. Their temperature could vary from pleasantly warm to quite hot - but although a few had dropped with sufficient force to knock a man down, no one had ever been struck.
Bill Hack recalled a night he spent sitting in the shack with Gilbert Smith. Stones were falling onto the roof with unusual intensity, sometimes making conversation difficult. Amid the din a large stone ‘seemed to emerge from the wall, falling slowly enough to the floor for me to follow the straight line of its descent’.
Reporter Schmitt wrote that during his time at the farm, volunteers ploughed a ‘ghost-break’ around the Smith house. The circle was so wide that anyone engaged in throwing stones would be forced to cross it. No trace of a footprint was found.
An Aboriginal elder spoke to the Hacks. He announced that the phenomena were being caused by Jean Smith’s father, who had suffered a fatal heart attack three months earlier while digging a posthole. Mrs Hack, who was deeply fearful of anything supernatural, set herself to find a logical explanation. She began by standing guard at dusk beside the wire fence that ran about 180 metres from the Smiths’ shack. She hoped to detect a twanging of the wire, which might be a signal that a human culprit was scrambling through.
There was no twanging. Only a bright ball of light which suddenly appeared close to where she stood. It hovered about two metres above the ground, then moved swiftly away down the gully and disappeared. ‘I had no idea what the light was,’ Mrs Hack said. ‘I just knew it was connected, somehow, to everything that had been happening.’
Shortly after Hugh Schmitt’s articles appeared, employee Cyril Penny left the Hacks’ farm to find other work. The stonefalls stopped, never to resume. It is difficult to find a record of Penny’s movements before March 1957, when he was hired by Alan Donaldson, owner of the property Corabin in Pumphrey, Western Australia. With his wife Lorna and their baby, Penny moved into a small corrugated iron shack owned by his employer.
Several days later, the young farmworker was reduced to panic when showers of warm stones began softly to fall on him, his house and his family. A procession of journalists and curious scientists visited the farm. All agreed that although the stones seemed to be descending lazily from above, there was nobody up there dropping them. In the cloudless March sky a plane or helicopter would immediately have been visible.
Penny, who had seemingly been a mere bystander in the Mayanup case, was now the focus of what was perhaps an even more mysterious haunting. Britain’s Daily Express correspondent observed that the stones followed him wherever he went. They even dogged his steps (always harmlessly) when he retreated into the farmhouse - appearing from the ceiling as if no roof existed.
Hugh Schmitt covered the new case - reporting that many of the stones falling at Pumphrey weighed as much as three pounds. While he dined with the Donaldsons in their kitchen, several pebbles - smooth and warm - clattered onto the table. Stones were everywhere in the house, even nestling in hurricane lamps. As the stonefalls’ notoriety increased, tourists and novelty retailers arrived at the farm, offering to pay up to $10 a piece for the ‘pebbles from nowhere’. But the Donaldsons refused to sell. They had no interest in profiting from their employee’s misery.
The rain of stones on the young father, and on the property itself, abated. Cyril Penny - blamed by fellow- workers for introducing the phenomenon - gave notice and moved away. As he was no longer plagued by pebbles, the media did not follow him. Few know what became of him after April 1957.
Ghosts in the Lens
The Drowned Man’s Face that Invaded a Photograph
Between 1959 and 2005, 16 visitors - all but one of them male - have drowned in what locals describe as a jinxed pool in Babinda, Queensland. When police took an infrared photo of the treacherous spot, the face of a dead victim appeared, staring up from the crystal water (see pictures). The area’s tribal elders blame an ancient curse for the tragedies and their attendant paranormal phenomena. And they warn that the relentlessly recurring deaths follow a balefully predetermined pattern…
ON 27 MAY 2005 THE ABC TV SERIES ‘Message Stick’ presented a disquieting panel discussion. The talk centred on a cascading mountain stream in far-north Queensland: a waterway whose catchment is known locally as the Devil’s Pool.
Presenter Rachael Maza introdu
ced the telecast thus:
‘Today we take you to far-north Queensland, to a small town called Babinda, where an ancient curse has been claiming the lives of young male travellers. The place is known as Devil’s Pool.
‘Its deep swirling waters have killed 16 people, though unofficially the figures are much higher. According to local authorities the deaths are caused by cramps and currents, but a local elder tells us she knows what’s really luring them to the water…’
To some viewers, these remarks might have sounded like the introduction to an ‘X-Files’ episode. But the facts surrounding the beauty spot known as Devil’s Pool, or The Boulders, are incontrovertible.
Police records collected over 46 years confirm that every person known to have drowned in the pool has been a tourist or ‘outsider’.
Every drowning victim (with the single exception in 1989 of German tourist Jutta Minx) has been a single male.
Collection of death toll statistics began in 1959. The pool’s real toll is believed to be several times greater than the official 16.
Forensic files contain a bizarre 1979 police photograph containing a ‘death image’ of a victim’s face.
In 1990 former councillor and local poet Shirley Harwood recorded a legendary history of the pool. It was recounted to her by sisters Annie and Nancy Wonga, members of the Yidinji, an Aboriginal clan who once lived in the Boulders area. Local Aboriginals believe the pool is haunted by the ghost of a lovesick young woman. She lures young single men to their deaths in the hope that one of them might prove to be her forbidden love - a warrior.
On 22 June 1979 Patrick McGann, a 24-year-old male nurse, became the seventh officially known victim of the treacherous waters. Two hours before the tragedy occurred his girlfriend had taken a snapshot of him, cigarette in mouth, sitting in a rowing boat. On the night of his disappearance, police photographed the pool, using infrared film. When the prints were developed, one of them showed Patrick’s face, complete with cigarette, peering from the cascading rapids.
