by John Pinkney
Next day I met my neighbour for the first time. I asked her if she had a black cat. She replied, ‘No, but the old lady who lived in your house had one. After she passed away her pet pined and refused to eat. When the poor cat died the old lady’s son buried him in the back garden.’
British university groups conducting research into NDEs (near-death experiences) have collected interesting anecdotal data involving animals. A percentage of patients revived from clinical death recalled ‘passing through a light’, then being greeted, in an idyllic environment, by all the pets they had nurtured since childhood.
Troubled Timepieces
Clock Fell Silent, When its Builder was Buried
On a February afternoon in 1982 the immense four-dialled clock above Brisbane’s City Hall failed to chime. It was the first time in 53 years that the famous clock - then Australia’s largest - had malfunctioned. By an exceedingly strange coincidence the machinery failed at the precise time the clock’s designer and builder, 93-year-old Arthur Appleton Jackson, was being lowered into his grave. This was not the first occasion in Australia upon which a clock had broken down when its maker or owner died…
My grandfather’s clock
Was too large for the shelf,
So it stood 90 years on the floor.
It was taller by half
Than the old man himself,
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more.
It was bought on the morn
Of the day that he was born,
And was always his treasure and pride;
But it stopped short,
Never to go again,
When the old man died.
Lyrics C. Russell Christian.
Music Henry Clay Work, 1875
IN 1926 BRISBANE’S MAYOR and councillors voted to build a grand clock to surmount the City Hall. The firm they chose for the job was the Synchronome Electrical Company, managed by 37-year-old Arthur Appleton Jackson - member of a respected clock-building dynasty. It was the most ambitious project Jackson or anyone else in his family had handled.
For three years Jackson devoted most of his waking hours to the design and construction of his cherished timepiece - supervising every detail from the shaping of the sheet-copper hands on the four dials to the placement of a tonne of white opal in the opulent framework.
In 1929, just as the Great Depression was beginning, the fully automatic clock was activated. Set in a tower 55 metres from the ground, with a striking and chiming mechanism 15 metres higher, it was the pride of Brisbane. By 1931 it had set a world record by losing only five seconds in two years. It continued to keep virtually perfect time through the economic crisis, World War II and the long uneasy peace thereafter.
But then, on a cloudless summer afternoon in February 1982, an unprecedented event occurred. Workers in the City Hall and hundreds of passers-by became aware that something was amiss in the works of the clock far above them. For the first time in more than half a century it had failed to chime the hour.
The mechanism broke down at the precise time the clock’s builder, Arthur Appleton Jackson, was being buried.
‘I feel that the works went wrong in sympathy with Dad,’ Arthur’s son and successor Bill Jackson told me. ‘There seems to be no other explanation. When we checked the chiming system we found a mechanical fault, of course. But it’s a million-to-one coincidence that it should happen at precisely the moment of Dad’s burial.’
City Hall staff agreed. ‘I’ve been with the council for 30 years and have never bothered with a watch,’ one worker told Brisbane’s Courier Mail. ‘You could always rely on Old Faithful to chime on time.’
The Brisbane incident exemplified a phenomenon that has been internationally recognised for as long as clocks have existed. Dr J.B. Rhine, who headed the parapsychology department at Duke University, USA, investigated numerous timepieces whose mechanical lives had ended with their owners’ deaths. He cited the case of a 39-year- old Oregon man who died of a heart attack while reading in his sittingroom. The mantel clock and his wristwatch both stopped at 11.14. Rhine offered no theory to explain the data he had collected. But the French parapsychologist Robert Charroux was bolder - proposing that death may in some cases create a ‘force-field’ which can affect machinery.
Perhaps the most celebrated example of a ‘clock- stopping death’ occurred at the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Official records show that Victoria died at 6.25 pm on 22 January 1901 at her winter home on the Isle of Wight. On the day of her funeral the clock in the tower at Balmoral stopped at 6.25. The periodical Notes and Queries quoted a Constable Reed as saying that ‘the clock had not been stopped by any human hand’. But the magazine pointed out that ‘it was the snow that did it. A crescent-shaped wreath of snow had gathered on the lower part of the dial, arresting the hour hand at VI and the minute hand at V…the exact time of Her Majesty’s death.’
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Anniversary Apparitions
Sightings of ‘time-sensitive’ ghosts - entities which appear on a date that was significant to them in life - have been described to me by several witnesses.
Mrs Phoebe Betteridge of Balwyn, Victoria, recalled: ‘At the time my father was dying of liver cancer we were living far away from him, at a farm near Geelong. One morning I glanced across the room and saw him, as plainly as if he was really there. The expression on his face was heartbreakingly sad. He then vanished and I felt like crying, because I knew he was dead. It was then, for some reason, that I looked at my watch. It was 11 am on November 11. When my sister rang half an hour later she confirmed that like the good old soldier he was, my dad had died at exactly that time - on Armistice Day.’
From Leigh Creek, South Australia, Chris Chase wrote: ‘My father was working overseas in Adelaide House, next to London Bridge. One night he caught sight of a smartly dressed man wearing a bowler hat walking toward the building’s edge. Dad called out, but the man didn’t stop. With horror my father realised that if the man kept walking he’d go over the edge - and that’s what happened. He watched helplessly as the man fell. But when the plummeting body was midway between the roof and the wharf below, it vanished. Next day Dad learned that a businessman had suicided from that spot one year before.
The home of a woman living in Maryborough, Victoria, was disrupted by bizarre electrical breakdowns shortly after her husband died. Mrs W.S. wrote: ‘Soon after my husband was killed in a car accident everything started happening at once. Three globes and an outside light suddenly blew…a fluorescent tube shattered…a bar in a heater broke…a lightswitch fused…and a stove burner coil blew out. The batteries in a torch, fresh the day before, went flat suddenly, and my electric clock stopped. I had no more electrical trouble until 12 months later: the anniversary of my husband’s death. On that day it all happened again. The light globes in three rooms failed, a heater element fused, my torch and clock batteries went flat, and a headlight globe on my new car blew out. I cannot put all these failures down to coincidence. I am convinced that my husband was somehow communicating with me.’
Melina Walsh of Rockdale, New South Wales, said: ‘…I was renting a flat above a shop. One bitterly cold night around 8.30, the atmosphere in my bedroom suddenly started to warm up, for no apparent reason. After a while it was so hot I had to open the window. The sense of stifling heat lasted for about 10 minutes. When I told my landlady she was unsurprised. She told me that the old lady who owned the shop had died in that bedroom at around 8.30 pm on August 11 - the same time and date I’d felt that blast of heat.’
* * *
Cedar Clock ‘Sent a Message’
The Adelaide radio announcer Judith Barr also experienced an uncanny brush with a clock. In 1983, during the period that she was compering the afternoon program at 5DN, she told me, ‘It all began when my engineer uncle Bill, to whom I was very close, died at his home in Suffolk. The family were mildly surprised by the fact that his favourite cedar clock stopped on the day he passed on. The clock resisted all effor
ts to restart it.
‘Four years later I went home on a visit. To everyone’s amazement the clock spontaneously began ticking and chiming - within a few hours of me walking in the front door.
‘When I left the clock stopped again. Maybe it was all a coincidence. But I’ve often wondered whether Bill was using that clock to send me a farewell message.’
The Chimes that Annoyed a Ghost
A noise-sensitive spirit that apparently tampered with a mantel clock’s mechanism was described to me by a Queensland correspondent, Betty McGill of Everton Park. She wrote:
When he retired my father was presented with a chiming mantel clock. Dad hated that timepiece. It ticked too loudly and he’d often complain that its Westminster chimes drove him crazy. So he ensured that it stood silent for 30 years - until he died in a bedroom of our family home.
I inherited the clock and because, unlike Dad, I was rather fond of it I got it going again and placed it on a bookcase in the hall. Sitting in that position it ticked and chimed continuously. Then my mother died and I set to work reorganising the house. I converted my dad’s former bedroom into a lounge and it seemed the natural thing to put the clock in there.
But as soon as I moved it from the hallway into what had been Dad’s room, it stopped working. I tried returning it to the hall bookcase and it started again, ticking and chiming quite reliably. After several further attempts to keep the clock going in the old bedroom I asked my brother to check that it was correctly balanced. He confirmed that it was - and admitted that he was baffled.
That wasn’t the only strange occurrence in my father’s old room. Whenever I put the clock in there, a china cabinet would start to shake and rattle. I finally admitted to myself that Dad was still very much present and was telling me to keep that detested clock elsewhere. One day I overcame my misgivings and tried to talk to him. I stood in his old room and said, ‘Cool it, Dad - I’ll keep the clock on the bookcase from now on.’ After that we had no problems with the clock, but my father remained in the house for a while. One day, while making my son’s bed, I heard footsteps in the passage. I saw, near the bookcase, a grey ghostly outline which I knew to be my father. As I stood watching him he faded to nothingness.
Clock Stopped at Instant of Death
An incident involving an ornate wall clock, which broke down at the moment its owner died, was described to me by Wayne Iles of Woy Woy, New South Wales.
In 1977 my sister and I were devastated when our beloved grandfather died from a brain tumour. One circumstance of his death was extremely unusual. Family members who’d been sitting with him were astonished to notice that his favourite, very elaborate wall clock, which he’d wound every day, stopped at the moment he drew his last breath.
But that wasn’t the only extraordinary event. After the funeral the family, including my sister and I, went back to Grandma’s house to stay overnight. I lay awake for a long time, feeling very sad and distressed, because my grandfather had been a good friend. When I finally fell asleep I dreamed I’d walked into the kitchen. I was shocked to see my grandfather there, alive again, sitting at the table. I turned to run, but he told me not to be frightened - he’d only come back to show me he was all right.
This reassured me - and I gave him a big hug. Next morning I woke feeling strangely calm. I knew that my grandfather was happy and safe. I kept this dream secret for five years. But one afternoon, when my sister and I were having a long talk about the family, I told her about my meeting in the kitchen, which by that time I’d convinced myself was no more than a fantasy.
My sister just sat staring at me. Then she said, ‘I had exactly the same dream on the night of the funeral.’ The knowledge that we’d shared this experience had a major effect on both of us. We began to believe, without a shadow of doubt, that life continues after death.
Another grandparent’s demise - that coincided with a multiple stoppage of clocks - was described to me by Keith Humphrey of Warrandyte, Victoria. ‘My grandmother, who was only 69, suddenly collapsed and died during a family afternoon tea at her unit in Brighton,’ he said.
‘It wasn’t until a couple of hours later that we saw to our amazement that every clock in the unit - and one watch - had stopped at the moment of Grandma’s death.’
Untimely Hauntings
During the 1950s a noisy entity, which seemed aware of daylight saving time, disturbed an abandoned cottage at Toolong, near Port Fairy, Victoria. At six o’clock every evening the sound of a small bell would echo within the building. Visitors who went inside to investigate could never find a person - or a bell - on the premises. Locals surmised that the bell might have been rung by an invalid who died waiting for help. In 1963, when daylight saving was introduced, the bell continued to ring. But now it was heard every evening at seven o’clock.
Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital was reputedly frequented by the shadowy figure of a matron who died when she fell down a disused liftwell (see also Haunted Hospitals, page 291.) Whenever the apparition appeared in a particular ward its clocks (and sometimes patients’ and nurses’ watches) ceased to function.
A poltergeist, which wrought havoc in a house in aptly named Mortdale, New South Wales, showed particular interest in a newly purchased clock. Mrs Sue Wilson of Claymore, New South Wales, recalled, ‘My husband brought the clock home and placed it on the TV set. For reasons we could never guess at it immediately became the focus of unpleasant events. While my sister-in-law was watching a program the clock suddenly flew across the room, cracking its glass dome. A few days later we heard a crash in the lounge. We ran in and found the clock on the far side of the room. It never worked again. Nor did any other clocks we introduced into the house…We finally decided to pack up and leave.’
A suicide victim’s ghost was believed to be haunting a Queensland civic centre. Visitors to the clock tower above the South Brisbane town hall reported sensing a powerful and menacing presence. The phantom was most frequently seen near the top of the 90 steps leading up to the clock’s massive works.
John Jackson, son of clock-builder Arthur Appleton Jackson, wound the clock for 52 years and described the tower apparition as ‘extremely frightening’. He told me, ‘Often I had to work in the tower late at night. Even when the air was still I’d suddenly feel a freezing gust of air which covered me with goosepimples.’ Some visitors to the town hall claim to have seen the phantom - the image of a young man - drifting above the steps. The apparition was commonly believed to have been the spirit of a young soldier who returned from the war in 1918 - and shot himself when his fiancee rejected him.
Churchmen’s Ghosts
Minister Haunted Vicarage for 50 Years
Reverend John Blennerhassett was one of the most popular ministers ever to serve in the Anglican Christ Church at Birregurra, in the foothills of Victoria’s Otway Ranges. When he died of a diabetes-linked illness in 1956, old friends said they would miss his kindness and good humour. Their regrets were premature. Reverend John would not be leaving the world for quite a while…
AFTER RETIRING FROM THEIR FARM IN 1969, David and Julie Flavel decided to rent while they sought a house of their own. The two-storey vicarage next door to Birregurra’s Anglican Christ Church was available. They moved in.
‘Strange things started happening almost from the first day,’ Julie, in her 90s, recalled. ‘In the evenings, when David and I were relaxing in the sittingroom we’d often hear heavy footsteps going up the stairs. It sounded as though somebody was carrying something heavy - and the footsteps always stopped at the bedroom door. One night I looked up the stairs and saw a dark shadow on the landing. At first I thought it was my husband carrying firewood up to the bedroom but he was still downstairs. Later I heard from friends at the golf club that the previous tenants had heard those footsteps too.’
The Flavels were assailed by many other sounds, ranging from what they took to be a windup gramophone playing songs of the 1930s to the voices of women laughing and walking around the kitchen in hi
gh heels.
‘I didn’t take much convincing that we had ghosts,’ Julie recalled. ‘I knew that at least one of them was a man, because of those heavy footsteps. I felt it was someone who was mirroring the action of carrying firewood upstairs, in the same way my husband and I did. Not only did I feel no fear, but I knew instinctively that this male person was benign…and on one occasion he and his companions possibly prevented a disaster.
‘I was fast asleep when I was woken by voices in the front room. I went down to investigate, but no one was there. What I did see, though, was that a log had fallen from the fireplace. It was smouldering on the carpet - and I realised that if I hadn’t got up the room would have been on fire. I believe those voices warned me.’
Julie Flavel had her strangest experience in 1970, shortly before Christ Church celebrated its centenary: ‘It was a hot day and when I got home from golf I decided to take a nap in a chair in the upstairs bedroom. I’d half dozed off when I was woken by someone in the room. It was a woman, arranging flowers on a small table. It gave me a start - and the woman apologised, saying, “The vicarage is so old I didn’t think anyone lived here any more.”
By that evening, Julie had put the incident aside, confident she had dreamed it. But she received a shock on the day of the centenary, when dozens of former residents visited Birregurra for Christ Church’s celebrations.
