by John Pinkney
Eleven years after Patrick McGann died, journalist Denise Dalgleish interviewed his father. Her article (Australasian Post, 2 March 1991) reads in part:
…Patrick’s father Terry travelled from his home in Yass, NSW, to help search for his son’s body. And (the pool) nearly killed him, too. Now, for the first time since Patrick’s death in 1979, Terry has talked about the tragedy.
‘I slipped in not far from where Pat fell,’ Terry, now 71, recalled. ‘I was being sucked down. I thought I was going to go like my son, but a bloke poked a stick in and I grabbed it. It’s such a serene place - the danger’s not obvious.’
Terry doesn’t believe in the legend which surrounds the area. ‘It’s a nice little story,’ he said. But he becomes almost reverent when he talks of the eerie photo he believes shows his son’s face after his death. ‘It was for police records and when it was developed the sergeant at Babinda took me quietly to one side. There was Pat’s face in the water. He looked exactly the same in both photos, even to the cigarette in his mouth. I’ve spoken to many priests about it and one told me, “There’s a lot of things in life we will never understand. This is one of them.”’
A plaque dedicated to Terry McGann’s son was installed in the Boulders carpark: ‘Pray for the soul of Patrick McGann. He came for a visit on 22.6.79…and stayed forever.’
Most of the ABC’s panel members expressed the conviction that The Boulders deaths were governed by a supernatural force:
MAISIE SMITH: Sixteen young men have drowned there - and they’ve all been from other towns. I had a son who swam in the same spot. I’d say, ‘Be careful’ - and he’d say, ‘I’m not a tourist, Mum - I’m a local. I won’t drown there.’
DARYL MURGHS: We [had] no fear of drowning because we were told the legend…so we still swam in the Devil’s Pool. As Aboriginal boys at that time we still maintained our culture, our belief. And we still believed back in those days that there was something protecting us…like an aura around all of us who were swimming. We had white friends, too, who were protected by the same thing.
DULCIE SCHNITZERLING: (referring to Patrick McGann) When the father came down, the police took him out and showed him where he went down in the chute. And the policeman took photos of that, thinking it’s just a chute. And when he went to Innisfail next morning to get them developed, that’s what they found. In that photo he’s even got the cigarette in his mouth.
EVELYN DAVIES: It’s strange how young men get drowned out there…[and] they’re nearly all white…They never take one of our boys from here, do they? It’s always strangers.
ANNIE WONGA, YIDINJI ELDER: We weren’t allowed to come up here [as children]. It’s like a sacred spot. Babinda means water flowing over rocks.
MAISIE SMITH: I went to school with Annie and Nancy Wonga. We’d go down to their house. Old Grandma used to sit there. I’d say, ‘I’m going out to the Boulders. And she’d say, ‘Oh, don’t go out there. Bad place. Evil place.’
Dead Man’s Startling Silhouette
Two years after her beloved husband Jimmy died, Mrs Emmy Barnes accepted an invitation to go out with a man she had met through friends. When her suitor eventually proposed, she accepted. She knew that if Jimmy was aware of her decision he would be pleased. In his last, poignant weeks he had repeatedly urged her not to be lonely after his death, but to find happiness again. He had even promised (jokingly, she imagined at the time) that he would be present at her second wedding.
Jimmy honoured his pledge.
In June 1982 Emmy wrote to me from her home in Adelaide to make an extraordinary claim. She reported that the silhouette of her dead husband had somehow appeared in a photograph taken at her second wedding. The following month I was able to study the picture and its supporting photographic evidence for myself. As an analysis of the key negative would subsequently confirm, the dead man’s image (see photograph) was indeed prominent in the picture. And the inexplicable silhouette was only part of the story.
‘While Jimmy lay dying we had many conversations,’ Emmy told me. ‘He made several very specific predictions to me, which I assumed were the result of physical weakness or delirium. But in the months after his funeral his forecasts - quite astonishingly - began to come true in considerable detail.
‘I still vividly remember Jimmy’s first prediction to me. He said I’d definitely marry again - and that my new husband’s initials would be B.B. Jimmy said I’d first meet this man after being introduced to an Irishwoman born in India. I’d recognise her because, within a few moments of us meeting, she’d invite me to look at her new lounge suite, which would be covered in a bottle-green fabric.
Jimmy also said he’d be present when I remarried.
I didn’t take much notice of all this. I was too grieved - and anyway I imagined his predictions were the wanderings of a dying man. But then it all began to happen. I was working in a hospital in the period after Jimmy’s death - and a friend I’d made there invited me to a party. I was scarcely inside the door when the hostess, whom I’d never met, urged me to follow her to an adjoining room so she could show me what her husband had bought her. It was a three-piece lounge suite covered in bottle-green. We began to talk - and I learned that my hostess was of Irish descent but had been born in Delhi, India - as Jimmy had foretold.
‘It was at that party that his forecasts started falling into place. I was introduced to a man named Bernard Barnes (B.B.) - and within months I’d accepted his marriage proposal. A few days before the ceremony, some friends clubbed together to buy me a wedding present: a professionally shot portrait. When the picture was delivered to them they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.
‘A friend called around to give me the news. She said, “You’ll never believe this Emmy, but your Jimmy’s in the photo.” I had a problem believing her, but when I saw the portrait later that day I knew she was right, quite dramatically so.
‘Jimmy’s silhouette was reflected in a sideboard mirror. I knew then that he’d kept his promise - and was staying close to me for my second wedding.’
Outback Apparition on Film
In 1959 a clergyman, Reverend R.S. Blance, photographed an abandoned ceremonial site at Corroboree Rock, about 200 kilometres from Alice Springs. He noticed nothing unusual while pointing the camera - but when his film was developed it was dominated by the figure of a white- robed man.
Rev. Blance’s Corroboree Rock photograph inspired international speculation.
Reverend Blance was bewildered by the image. He knew little about the location, other than a rumour that it had been the scene of cruel rituals in the distant past. And he could offer no theory to explain why an unidentifiable person should silently have intruded on his film.
Despite the lack of information surrounding it, the picture was reproduced in newspapers and journals around the world, becoming one of the 20th century’s most discussed ghost photographs.
Asphalt Apparitions
Killed on the Road by a Tortured Ghost
Do smash victims haunt the highways on which they died? Reports from a surprisingly large number of witnesses indicate that bizarre confrontations, suggestive of the supernatural, do occur on our nation’s roads. The most remarkable Australian case of an asphalt apparition received wide publicity during the 1980s when 19 cars were involved in a massive crash on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Police could find no clear cause for the pileup. But some motorists insisted they had swerved to avoid a ghostly figure - misty, floating and of human shape…
SEVERAL DAYS AFTER 19 cars had crashed bonnet-to-rear end along the Mornington Peninsula freeway I received a call from my friend, the journalist John Westbury. ‘As you know,’ said John, ‘I’m open-minded about ghosts, but tending toward disbelief. Nevertheless, something extremely weird’s going on around here. I think you should come down and take a look.’
I followed his advice.
Over the previous six months motorists in the area had been privately discussing with friends and families
a phenomenon their minds could not encompass. On the local roads a misty apparition had been seen floating about a foot above the bitumen. People would have liked to dismiss it as fog which, by the merest fluke of air currents, had momentarily taken quasi-human shape. But that explanation wouldn’t do, because too many motorists were describing the same chimera. In several cases the white wraith had floated so close to windscreens that the drivers swerved and almost crashed.
One local resident who made an emergency stop to avoid hitting the figure was Bill Featherstone, a Seaford boilermaker. He told me:
‘The thing almost forced me off the road. I was driving my Falcon along the Frankston-Mornington freeway at about six in the morning when a white figure just jumped out in front of me. It was so close I was certain I’d hit it. I stood so hard on the brakes I almost went through the windscreen. Then I sat in the car, shivering with fright. The thing had simply vanished. It was the most terrifying moment of my life.
‘The 19-car pileup happened on the freeway just four days later. The talk around here is that the motorists in front saw the same thing I did, swung the wheel to miss it and started the concertina.’
Among others who encountered the manifestation was my original informant, John Westbury:
‘My wife and I were doing about a hundred kilometres an hour along the freeway when this misty white thing, shaped like a man, suddenly appeared right in front of the windscreen. I’m not a believer in ghosts - but I can’t explain what I saw, either. The figure has frightened a large number of people in the Frankston area.’
Little-commented upon at the time was the fact that a second accident happened almost concurrently with the 19-car crash. ‘The misty shape drifted up to the flyover road,’ John Westbury recalled. ‘Within moments two cars had collided up there.’
I later discovered that the apparition was also thought to have caused two deaths. A driver in a fatal accident insisted to ambulance men that he had swerved to avoid something that was ‘half-man, half-fog’.
However, police to whom I spoke were sceptical. A constable who had investigated another concertina collision - this time in local Chelsea Road - told me: ‘People are reporting to us that they’ve seen a foggy figure - but that’s all they ARE seeing: fog! I’ll bet the ghost is nothing more than puddles of water formed on the road, which evaporate as mist.’
Bill Featherstone was unimpressed. ‘As an early- morning driver and former tow-truck man I know mist when I see it. I can tell you for sure - this thing is no mist.’
Calls Flooded a Radio Station
Coast-dwelling radio listeners appeared to agree. When Greg Evans invited me to discuss the alleged freeway haunting on his 3MP radio program he was flooded by calls from listeners who asserted that they too had seen the phantom. Production staff said the station had never previously experienced such a dramatic talkback result. Moments after Greg completed our conversation an army of witnesses took to their telephones - many alleging that their encounter with the phantom had almost ended fatally.
One caller said, ‘The thing’s been around a long time. I saw it about 10 years ago. It was white, in the shape of a woman, hovering above the overpass.’ Another listener reported that he and his father had been driving down deserted Thompsons Road at 5.30 am, when they noticed that a ‘red, glowing light’ was following them. ‘It was hovering at eye-level,’ he said.
‘We were dead scared - and when we checked with friends we learned that quite a few people had had the same experience.’
A female listener recalled, ‘I was driving with my husband when the grey misty shape of a woman suddenly hurled itself in front of the car. I was so frightened I almost swerved off the road.’
Several callers believed that far from seeing an apparition they had been buzzed by an unidentified flying object. Others recalled that there had been at least two violent deaths in the ‘haunted’ area: a pilot who perished when his aircraft crashed and a man who hanged himself near the freeway.
My interviews with motorists, combined with the response to Greg Evans’s program, convinced me that the Mornington Peninsula phantom was one of Australia’s most widely witnessed paranormal phenomena. These singular events were not, of course, peculiar to coastal Victoria. There have been numerous well-publicised ‘hauntings’ on highways in Britain, Europe, the United States and elsewhere. During the 1990s an American psychical research society claimed to have identified 16 road sites at which entities are repeatedly seen and where accidents often occur. Some researchers believe that road- ghosts are lingering after-images of people killed in smashes or by suicide.
Before describing other highway hauntings I have studied in Australia over the years I will touch briefly on three cases which demonstrate the phenomenon’s global nature.
In a letter to me from her new home in Whyalla Playford, South Australia, Barbara Wainman wrote:
When an old lady stepped in front of my brother-in-law’s car I braced myself for a horrible accident. But to my astonishment the vehicle passed straight through her as though she were empty air. This extraordinary incident occurred near Sheffield, England, in 1980. Ken, my brother-in-law, was driving me home from a family gathering. The rain was teeming down as we passed Derwent Dam where the movie Dambusters was filmed.
Just as we passed a large house I noticed the lady, dressed in grey, standing by the roadside. When I asked Ken what she could be doing outside on such a filthy night he didn’t reply. But suddenly she stepped in front of the car. I screamed a warning, then waited for the impact. But there was nothing. She vanished into the headlights.
I turned to my brother-in-law and incredulously asked him why he hadn’t swerved. He said he’d seen nothing, but then asked whether the person I’d glimpsed had been a woman in grey clothes. When I nodded he revealed that other people in the district had also reported encounters with her. This incident has puzzled me ever since - especially the fact that the woman was perfectly clear to me and yet invisible to Ken.
Road Wraiths Reported Worldwide
As a further indication that the ‘asphalt apparition’ phenomenon is not peculiar to Australia, I quote two widely-publicised examples:
In 1990 a local council in eastern Norway erected signs warning motorists that ghosts might cause hazards on the stretch of highway ahead. Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted a roads department official thus: ‘We’ve had dozens of multiple crashes on this seemingly safe stretch over the past year. So many drivers, tested as sober, have told police they swerved to avoid phantom figures that we’ve finally been forced to believe them.’
The report added that the ‘source of the phantoms’ was thought to be a roadside cabin in which a drunken railway worker suicided after murdering his mother and sister.
One of the world’s most notorious freeway phantom cases occurred near Petersburg in South Africa’s Transvaal. The deadly disturbance, which attracted enormous media interest, began in 1954, when 23 people died in 16 accidents on a 50-metre stretch of bitumen over a three-week period. Police investigations showed that all the vehicles had been in reasonable to excellent condition, that there were no imperfections in the road, minimal wind and no oil-slicks.
When uproar over the so-called ‘hoodoo highway’ was at its height a group of Xhosa tribesmen approached a local newspaper. The road, they said, was jinxed.
Ten days before the rash of accidents began a witchdoctor had been struck and killed by a car - and now his spirit had returned to seek revenge. When the medicine man died, the tribesmen said, his doulosses (magical animal bones) must have been scattered across the road. Until the bones were buried with him he would continue to trouble the highway.
Police searched the highway and flanking veldt, but the bones - if they existed - could not be found. The haunting continued for five years, prompting motorists to make wide detours to avoid the area.
Woman ‘Floated Above Bitumen’
In the late 1980s an entity thought to be the ghost of a suicide victim repeat
edly startled motorists in Queensland’s Gold Coast hinterland. One witness, Bronwyn Gluyas of Burleigh Heads, told me, ‘Late one night I was on the back of my boyfriend’s motorcycle, travelling to his parents’ house. It was very dark and we could see nothing outside the yellow pool of the headlight. Up ahead I spotted a woman walking alone. I wondered what she was doing there, because there were no houses for miles.
‘Then, as we got closer I realised she wasn’t walking at all. She seemed to be gliding a foot or so above the ground. My main impression was her long straight hair - either blonde or grey, it was impossible to see. Not until we got to my boyfriend’s house did I ask whether he’d noticed the woman too. He had - and he was as disturbed by the sight as I was.
‘Until then neither of us had thought much about ghosts - but we both agreed we’d seen one. Over the next week we made enquiries - and learned that the floating woman was quite well known locally. Apparently she’d gone into the bush near the spot where we saw her - and suicided with sleeping pills. She had long blonde hair, just like the person we’d seen.’
The Uncanny Swagman
Case notes and letters on my files show that asphalt apparitions have been reported in many regions of Australia. Sometimes the confrontations have produced unpleasant physical effects, as Mrs M. Camilleri of Fairfield, Victoria, testified:
In 1959 my husband, brother-in-law and I were driving home from a country holiday. The night was pitch-black, but clear and starry. We were travelling along a straight stretch of road when we saw what seemed to be a small patch of fog far ahead. As we approached it assumed the shape of a human figure, un-hunching itself and thumbing a ride.
