Great Australian Ghost Stories (16 page)

But of all the creepy places in this ghost-ridden location, the creepiest is not a building but an uninhabited island about a kilometre off shore — the ‘Isle of the Dead'. This small, windswept outcrop served as the settlement's cemetery from 1830 to 1877. 1,769 prisoners were buried there in mass graves and 180 free people in individual plots. One of the last resident convict gravediggers consigned to this lonely place, Mark Jeffrey, a tall Irishman with a short temper, is the subject of a macabre story. Jeffrey (who was serving a life sentence for manslaughter) lived in a small hut on the island, grew a few vegetables and kept a few chickens. On Saturday night each week he was picked up by boat and brought to the mainland to attend church on the Sabbath, then returned on Monday morning. The authorities were glad to get rid of this hothead for most of the week and not at all pleased when they spotted a signal fire burning early one mid-week morning. When a detachment of guards rowed across to investigate they found Jeffrey in a wild, agitated state, begging to be taken off the island. He told how, on the previous night, his hut had been shaken and rocked by some invisible force then a fiery red glow had lit the walls and the surrounding ground. Jeffrey had scrambled from his bed thinking a fire had broken out
but was confronted, not by a natural phenomenon, but by the devil himself, eyes smouldering, horns erect, encircled in sulphurous smoke. The guards and the medical officer who examined Jeffrey at the settlement concluded his mind had become ‘unhinged by crime and suffering' and did not force him to return to the island.

The Isle of the Dead can be visited today and even on the brightest, sunniest days there is an oppressive atmosphere there, far stronger than one feels in any conventional graveyard. The chances of encountering His Satanic Majesty are pretty remote but, with almost 2,000 bodies buried below ground, a few spirits would not be out of place.

Given that we can safely assume ghosts don't need to eat, it's amazing how many of their stories involve food. That staple of human existence — flour — is the common ingredient in our first two; the second as sad as the first is shocking.

The cruelty with which many of our ancestors treated Aborigines should be a constant source of shame to white Australians today. The lives of the Indigenous people of this continent were held to be of so little value that the murder of hundreds mattered less to a station owner than the death of a favourite dog.

As late as the 1920s there were reports of ‘pesky' Aborigines being disposed of with gifts of flour liberally laced with arsenic. This barbarous practice had been common for a century and just occasionally backfired on the perpetrators.

There is a story of a station owner in the Mullewa region of Western Australia who left a sack of poisoned flour lying about that his wife used by mistake to bake two loaves of bread. That evening a group of Aborigines on walkabout came to the back door of the homestead asking for food. The station owner's wife wanted to give them one of the freshly baked loaves but her husband wouldn't hear of it. ‘Waste o' good bread,' he grumbled as he tucked into a slice himself. It took about fifteen minutes for the poison to take effect and another four hours,
during which the station owner writhed in agony, for death to claim him.

Ever since (the story goes) the ghost of the poisoned poisoner has haunted the station bemoaning his fate and scaring the wits out of every Aborigine it encounters. ‘He's a
horrible
sight, that's for sure,' one witness reported. ‘His skin's bluey-grey and his eyes are all blood-shot, and ya know, when he opens his mouth t' yell at yer all that comes out is this long, pitiful moan … like a dingo howlin'. You'd feel sorry for the poor bloke if you didn't know what he did t' them blackfellas … and if he weren't so
bloody
terrifyin'. I seen him twice when I was a kid and I can tell ya, I didn't hang around long neither time!'

 

Flour also produced a much more likeable and less frightening spectre which haunts a large pocket of vine-infested grassland known as Munro Plains, a few kilometres west of Tully in far north Queensland. Settler Colin Munro established a farm there in 1852 and built a substantial homestead for his young family. He also employed an Englishman named Dick Grosvenor as tutor to his children. Grosvenor was a gentle giant weighing 140 kilograms, well educated and softly spoken, who admitted, proudly, to being eighty years old. The Munro children adored the old man and would sit for hours on his ample knees, stroking his waist-length beard while he told them tales of his travels and explained the mysteries of the world to them.

One day while the family was away Dick went to get a dish of flour from the 90-kilogram bag kept in the homestead storehouse. While reaching in the old man overbalanced and fell headfirst into the bag. He was unable to regain his footing and within minutes had smothered in the flour.

Old Dick Grosvenor was sorely missed by the Munro family but they were not deprived of his company for long. He
reappeared as one of the fattest ghost ever seen in Australia, his head, whiskers and clothing covered in flour, smiling benignly and waving a ghostly white hand at the children.

Around 1908 the family left to take up another property near Mission Beach but the ghost stayed on at Munro Plains. Soon there was no one left who remembered him or could put a name to him. Later residents in the area, who occasionally saw him wandering about dejectedly, referred to him simply as ‘the sad old cove with the long, white whiskers'.

 

Also from Queensland comes a gruesome ghost story set in a Brisbane butcher's shop. The shop stood behind the Brisbane Arcade in Adelaide Street, facing the present King George Square. It was there during World War Two and for many years after, but it is gone today. The shop was L-shaped, the meat being prepared in one part and the customers served in the other.

The story goes that the butcher and an apprentice got into an argument one day. A meat cleaver was thrown and the apprentice died. Subsequent owners of the shop, their staff and customers would occasionally hear the sound of the men arguing and struggling, then terrible screams coming from the back of the shop. A former customer told the
Courier Mail
years later that the sounds she heard there one afternoon were the most terrifying and disturbing she had ever heard in her life.

‘I started going there to buy sausages; they made good sausages they did, with plenty of meat in them — not like the rubbish you get today — and my hubby loved them. Anyhow, I went in there one day just on closing time. It was a stinking hot afternoon I remember and I said to the lady behind the counter I'd just have a pound because they might go off in the heat. She went round the corner to get my sausages and as
soon as she moved out of sight, there was this terrible, blood-curdling scream that echoed off the tiled walls, followed by a shocking gurgling noise. I was the only customer in the shop and I hadn't seen anyone else behind the counter, so I didn't know what to do. I called out “Are you all right?” I got no reply, so I put down my shopping bag and stepped behind the counter, expecting to see the woman lying dead or some bloke attacking her. But the woman was just standing there with my pound of sausages in her hand. She was white-faced and trembling, but there was no one with her. When she saw me she pulled herself together and said, “Oh, you mustn't come back here … this area is for staff only.”

‘I said: “I heard you scream. I thought you were in trouble.” She replied, “No I'm all right, thank you. It wasn't me who screamed.” I could tell something was going on so I pressed the point. “Look,” I said, “I was only a few feet away and I heard you
scream
and then a horrible gurgling noise!” At that the woman turned even paler and I thought she was going to faint. My sausages slid from her hand and landed in the sawdust on the floor. There was a chair for customers out front so I insisted she sat down there. She seemed terribly relieved to be on the
outside
of the counter. When I put my hand on her arm to comfort her I could feel her trembling and she started to cry. “I just can't take it any more,” she said. “I've worked here for just over a year and that's the third time I've heard those awful noises. It's just horrible … and there's
no one
there. It's the ghosts … I know it is!”

‘Between sobs the woman told me the story of the butcher murdering his apprentice and I advised her to find another job. I don't know whether she took my advice or not, but I told my hubby if he wanted any more of their sausages he'd have to go and get them himself.'

 

The glutinous, yellow lining of a cow's stomach known as ‘tripe' was a staple in butchers' shops until about fifty years ago and is on the menu for our next story. Served piping hot with lashings of onion, tripe was a dish relished by our forefathers, although it has now gone right out of fashion and its passing seems to have caused little regret.

One such forefather was a stevedore who lived at Cottesloe near Fremantle. His great delight was to come home from the Fremantle wharves to a plate piled high with freshly steamed tripe and fried onions. The pungent smell of the food would fill the house while the stevedore filled his stomach.

Pain, warning of a heart-attack, was mistaken for indigestion one night and the offal-guzzling gourmand departed this life unexpectedly. His disconsolate widow stayed on in the house for the rest of her life, but could not bring herself to cook tripe and onions ever again. That did not stop the unmistakeable smell of that dish from returning to the dining room about once a week at dinner time for the next twenty years!

 

Tripe was a food that children had to be ‘encouraged' to eat and one of the many ghosts stories from the historic Rocks area of Sydney concerns a man who made encouraging his children to eat a mission. Louis Garel lived in Harrington Street in The Rocks in the late nineteenth century and the story goes that he would pace around his dining-room table at meal times with a stern look on his face and his hands clasped behind his back admonishing his large brood with his favourite saying: ‘Eat up and grow strong!'

When Mr Garel's mortal life ended they carried his body out of the house in a coffin but his spirit remained. His ghost was regularly seen by family and visitors to the house, gliding around the dining table and up and down the stairs, stern
expression still on his face and hands still firmly clasped behind his back. Observers swore that the faint, hollow sounds that came from the ghost's lips were the words: ‘Eat up and grow strong.'

 

Like private dining rooms, public restaurants seem to be among the most popular haunts for ghosts and a couple of Australia's most famous have resident spooks their owners have been proud to acknowledge. One such restaurant is Oatlands House at Dundas in Sydney's west. Oatlands House has a long and colourful history. It was built in the 1830s by Percy Simpson, former officer in the Royal Corsican Rangers and one-time governor of the Greek island of Paxos. In Australia he (like many men of his class) pursued two careers — civil servant and pastoralist. At different times he was superintendent of the Great Northern Road, a police magistrate and a crown lands commissioner — all the while building a rural empire at Oatlands.

The next owner was also a politician – pastoralist, James Brindley Bettington. The last of his line to own Oatlands House died in 1915. Today Oatlands House is an award-winning function centre and, although the cuisine is
nouvelle
and the service up-to-date, one timeless link with the past is said to remain — a ghost called Rebecca.

According to local stories Rebecca was a beautiful young woman who was jilted on her wedding day. Occasionally since then her ghost is reported to have appeared in the upper storey of the house or in the garden, magnificently dressed in an old-fashioned satin wedding dress and searching for her errant bridegroom.

The owner in the 1990s, celebrated restaurateur Oskar Nemme, reported that his staff were reluctant to go upstairs
on their own and some who had worked at Oatlands House for twenty years and more claimed to have seen this sad, romantic spectre many times. But it is not only staff who have seen her, according to Mr Nemme. A woman sitting in a car outside the restaurant one day (who knew nothing about the ghost) came running inside, pale and trembling, with a remarkable story to tell.

She accosted the first staff member she encountered and with a trembling voice posed two questions: ‘Where is the bride?' and ‘Is she all right?' The staff member (a waitress) could see the woman was in distress and shepherded her to a chair. ‘What bride would that be, madame?' the puzzled waitress asked.

‘The bride who just
arrived
, of course,' the woman replied and when she saw the doubtful expression on the waitress's face she became impatient. ‘The
one
who walked through the bougainvillea … she came in through the same door I did, just a moment ago!'

Now the waitress knew there was no wedding reception booked for their establishment that afternoon, no bride was expected and the only person to enter the restaurant in the previous fifteen minutes had been the confused woman herself. The waitress began to wonder if the woman was drunk or mentally unstable and called to a colleague to summon the manager.

After being given a glass of water and reassurances that no one was trying to trick her and that she was not the victim of some conspiracy or cruel practical joke, the woman calmed down and was able to relate exactly what she had seen.

She had driven into the car park intending to have lunch in the restaurant, she said, but before she got out of her car she noticed a young woman in a long white satin bridal gown
striding across the car park. Thinking it odd a bride should be arriving alone and on foot the woman watched her head towards the building. In the bride's path was a huge, purple bougainvillea in full flower, but rather than stepping around it, the bride headed straight towards the thorny bush. The woman watching felt a cold shiver pass through her body, thinking the bride must have been daydreaming and was about to destroy her gown and possibly injure herself badly.

‘I jumped out of my car and called out to her to be careful of the thorns, but she didn't seem to hear me. She kept walking and went straight
through
the bougainvillea … as if it wasn't there!'

No one knows what Rebecca's surname was. Perhaps she was one of Simpson's numerous offspring, or perhaps she was a Bettington. Whoever she was she certainly is a benign and harmless spirit — ‘A very friendly ghost' is how Oskar Nemme described her — who only
very
occasionally alarms.

 

Cleveland, on the shores of Moreton Bay near Brisbane, also has a famous haunted restaurant. This pleasant suburb almost became the capital of the State of Queensland. Many people believed it a much better site for a state capital than the flood-prone and insect-infested former penal colony on the Brisbane River. Among Cleveland's strongest supporters was Francis Bigge, late of the Royal Navy, parliamentarian and grazier, who built a residence there in 1853. Later the house was leased by the State Government as a police residence and court house. It stands today in yet another guise: as the award-winning Olde Courthouse Restaurant, complete (it is proudly claimed) with its own resident ghost.

Stories of the Cleveland Courthouse ghost — a middle-aged woman in a long gown, her dark hair gathered in two tight
buns over her ears — have circulated for generations. No one knows for sure who she is, but most people believe it is Francis Bigge's wife, Elizabeth. Mrs Bigge actually died back home in England (she hanged herself, legend has it), so if it is she, her spirit must have decided to return to the scene of one of the happier periods in her life.