Great Australian Ghost Stories (19 page)

There's an old story still told around the Castlereagh area of outer Sydney about the Bugler's Ghost. While no one can
vouch for its authenticity, its charm is undeniable and the principal named characters were real people.

Until well into the nineteenth century the Hawkesbury – Nepean river system formed the frontier of white settlement in the colony of New South Wales and, at what is now Emu Plains on the west bank of the Nepean, stood a stockade — a meagre bastion of British military might, protecting the settlement from the perils of the wild mountains beyond. Later this became the barracks for a detachment of troops assigned to guard the convicts working on the road over the Blue Mountains. Nothing is left of the complex today, but it is commemorated by Barracks and Stockade Streets and some of its probably reluctant occupants are recalled in this old story.

Off-duty soldiers from the barracks would row across the river to enjoy the delights of Penrith (a couple of inns and a bawdy house or two) and return to quarters, rather worse for wear, late at night. One night a small boat overloaded with a group of these revellers returning to their quarters hit a floating log in the river. The boat almost capsized and three of the occupants were thrown into the water, including the company's bugler who was as we might say today ‘legless'. There was much yelling and thrashing about as the men in the boat tried to drag their comrades back on aboard. Two were rescued spluttering foul water but alive. The bugler was less lucky. When found he was floating face downwards and when dragged aboard he was quite dead.

The wet and bedraggled party rowed back to the eastern bank and carried the bugler's body to the Penrith courthouse, where a doctor was roused from his nearby bed. Yawning uncontrollably, the doctor pronounced the bugler dead and suggested that as the weather was hot, he should be buried forthwith. ‘Can't have him going
orf
now, lads,' the physician
advised (between yawns). ‘He already has a
very
peculiar pong about him from the river and very soon, I promise you, he'll stink worse than that little fish we pulled out of his drawers!'

By this time most of the damp soldiers were tired of hanging about and decided to return to their barracks. Only two of his erstwhile comrades volunteered to bury the unfortunate bugler. They commandeered a farmer's horse and cart and loaded the body onto the tray then drove ten kilometres to the nearest cemetery at Castlereagh.

On arrival the pair roused the Anglican minister of Castlereagh, Henry Fulton, from his bed. Now Fulton was a fiery Irish patriot and no admirer of the military and he was not best pleased to be troubled on a hot summer's night by two redcoats smelling of grog and bearing the remains of a third in a cart. Muttering words no one would expect to hear from a clergyman's lips, Fulton sent one of his sons to rouse the local grave digger. That worthy then set to work by lamplight to gouge out a shallow grave in the hard, dry soil of the cemetery with pick and shovel. By the time all was prepared it was after midnight and the bugler was laid to rest by moonlight attended by his two remaining friends, the sleepy grave digger and the crotchety parson.

Thereafter, the story goes, the bugler, angry at being deserted by the rest of his comrades, would rise from his grave at around nine each night, dance a jig and play his bugle. The people of Castlereagh lived in fear of this awesome sight and none would venture near the cemetery after dark. Not many claimed to have actually seen the ghost, but everyone had heard his bugle. It was described as an eerie sound like a bugle being played a long way away and the few who claimed a glimpse of the ghost swore he wore his military uniform and
that his red coat glowed, his pipe-clayed belt glistened and his polished buttons glinted in the pale moonlight.

A few witnesses also told of being able to smell the strong, sweet odour of rum wafting across the graveyard when the ghostly music started and one Castlereagh matron (of impeccable character) claimed the ghost had made a ‘most unseemly' proposition to her as she passed the graveyard on her way home from a prayer meeting one night.

Reverend Fulton's son, John, determined to lay the ghost and prove these stories were figments of over-fertile (or over-fuelled) imaginations. He went to the house of a friend who lived near the cemetery and asked him to join him in a vigil to catch the ghost. The friend refused, saying he had heard the spooky bugle and nothing would induce him to enter the cemetery at night. Young Fulton then asked the grave digger if his two sons (both big, burly lads like their father) would accompany him, but they too claimed to have heard the mysterious music and would have no part in the venture. So Fulton set out alone, carrying an unlighted lantern, a tinderbox, a roast beef sandwich, a stone jar of beer — and a long coil of rope, with which he presumably expected to catch someone pretending to be the ghost.

The young man arrived at the cemetery at around eight o'clock in the evening and positioned himself behind a tall gravestone just a few metres from the bugler's plot. There was a cool breeze blowing from the north-east that set trees bordering the graveyard shivering and whispering. The moon was rising and its light cast deep shadows around the gravestones and made dew on the grass glow with an eerie phosphorescence. It was, one might say, a perfect night for ghost hunting and while he tucked into his sandwich and his beer, young Fulton felt an exhilarating cocktail of excitement, anticipation and trepidation coursing through his veins.

On the stroke of nine the sound began: a soft, wavering trumpeting that floated over the graveyard and made young Fulton sit up and brace himself. He peeped over the headstone and focused his gaze on the bugler's grave — but of a dancing ghost or any other visible form there was no sign. Fulton also sniffed the air but found no trace of rum. He climbed to his feet, emerged from his hiding place and listened more closely, then burst into raucous laughter — laughter that echoed across the graveyard and sent startled night birds flapping into the sky.

John Fulton enjoyed telling the story of the Bugler's Ghost for the rest of his life, not least because he believed he had ‘laid' it. The sound, he would explain, did not come from the bugler's grave but came floating in on the breeze, carried over the waters of the Chain of Ponds Creek from Windsor, where the Windsor Town Band practised twice a week, commencing at 9 pm.

Now, readers who know the area might argue that fifteen-odd kilometres is a long distance for sound to carry, but John Fulton was convinced his theory was correct. Most of the good people of Castlereagh, however, continued to avoid the cemetery at night.

If someone conducted one of those ‘Top 10' surveys on the colour of ghosts' clothing, then grey would undoubtedly be the first colour on the list. It seems to be far and away the most fashionable shade for lady ghosts, in the form of grey crinolines, grey uniforms, grey dresses and grey habits. And why is that? Well, historians might suggest that the colour has links with death and mourning, but I suspect it's simply vanity — choosing a shade to match the wearer's complexion! Jokes aside, the dozen or more ‘grey' ladies who feature in Australian ghosts stories (including the couple we've already met) have little else in common. They range from kind nurses to cruel harridans and from gracious women who are ladies to a gracious lady who was not a woman at all.

The Mater Misericordiae Hospital at Crows Nest in Sydney is reputedly haunted by a grey-habited nun, the ghost of a nursing sister who died during the devastating influenza epidemic of 1919. This ghost appears more often to patients than staff according to a nurse who trained there in the 1960s. Often, she is on record as saying, nurses would go to help patients only to be told: ‘It's OK, nurse, the nun did it.' There was, the nurse claimed, a policy not to alarm patients by denying the existence of the nun or referring to her as a ghost.

The most hair-raising experience the nurse herself had with the grey nun was on a night when a patient died. The occupant of the next bed was awake and said to her: ‘I knew she'd died, nurse: the nun came, said a prayer and turned the oxygen off.' Sure enough the oxygen had been turned off, the hose neatly coiled and the cylinder set aside.

 

Another ghostly, grey-habited nun is said to dispense comforting words and good counsel to patients in the alcoholics ward at St Vincent's Hospital in the inner Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. Many a distressed dipsomaniac in Ward 14 has commended the hospital on having such a caring and compassionate team member. And, before the reader suggests the sympathetic sister might be a symptom of the patients' condition, I hasten to add that many doctors and nurses have seen her too.

The medical superintendent of St Vincent's spoke publicly about their grey nun in
The Bulletin
in 1980 and said that his staff were reluctant to talk to strangers about her, considering that their relationship with her was something special and private. Some years later one staff member, Sister Catherine O'Carrigan, broke ranks and told
The Australian
that there was ‘very much a sense of security' when the ghostly grey nun was about.

Stories about this gentle spectre abound. She is supposed to have fallen to her death down a stairwell many years ago or been the victim of some unresolved crime. Since then her ghost has resided in a lift well and made itself useful around the ward, chatting to patients and dispensing blessings.

One particularly interesting feature of this ghost's appearance is that her feet are not visible. Black stockings protrude from under her habit and disappear into the floor.
Hospital records give a possible explanation for this: the floor of Ward 14 is now a few centimetres higher than it was in the grey nun's time. She, it seems, still walks on the old level.

 

A motley mansion with a motley history at Bothwell, Tasmania, is said to be haunted by yet another of these ghostly grey females, but this time her occupation is a mystery. Inverhall, as the house was originally named, was built by the first Australian-born commissioned officer in the British Army, Captain D'Arcy Wentworth, brother of the politician William Charles Wentworth. Captain Wentworth sold out to a testy magistrate who renamed the house ‘Schawfield' after himself and went bankrupt enlarging it to accommodate himself, his long-suffering wife, their one son and their seven daughters — Sarah, Anne, Susan, Isabella, Janet, Elizabeth and Henrietta.

When Magistrate Schaw and his brood departed the house became Bothwell Academy ‘for the sons and daughters of gentlefolk', where knowledge and discipline were meted out in equal measure. Later, as Wentworth House (the name it bears today), the house had several owners before becoming an Anglican rectory.

The unidentified grey ghost's favourite haunt is the unusual cantilevered staircase that rises steeply from the entrance hall at Wentworth House. The spectre is described as a tall, slim, elegant young woman wrapped in a long grey cloak with a cascade of reddish-brown hair falling over the collar. Her face has been described as pale and unblemished, framing an upturned nose and a pair of large, hazel-coloured eyes with very long lashes. Witnesses claim that she appears at the top of the stairs at night and seems oblivious to their presence and to whatever may be happening around her. The
spectre pauses at the upper landing, gathers up the folds of her cloak then floats effortlessly down the stairs. When it reaches the entrance hall the heavy front door (whether bolted or not) will swing silently open, allowing the apparition to glide, noiselessly, out into the night.

This grey lady was also spotted in the yard one day by a tenant chopping wood. Unsure whether she was human or phantom he asked her what she wanted. In reply she simply disappeared; and a bishop staying at Wentworth House when it was a rectory mistook her for a chambermaid after she appeared suddenly behind him reflected in his shaving mirror. ‘Yes, yes. I'll be down in a moment,' the lathered cleric snapped impatiently. Later he complained to his host about the maid's intrusion on his ablutions. ‘So you've seen our ghost,' said his host calmly. ‘We see her all the time.'

No one has been able to work out just who this spectre was before death claimed her, but there has been much speculation that she might have been one of the magistrate's daughters, at least five of whom he managed to marry off before he quit Tasmania. So it's reasonable to suggest her surname might once have been Schaw — but her given name? Well, maybe it was Sarah, or maybe Anne … or Susan, or Isabella, or Janet, or Elizabeth, or Henrietta.

 

The town of Roma in Queensland also has a ‘grey lady' ghost but, unlike the anonymous one at Bothwell, Roma's can be identified and her strange story, before and after her death, is well documented. Jim Lalor, owner of Gubberamunda station, which bordered the town, gave a couple named Bonnor permission to build a weatherboard cottage on his land behind the Roma Hospital. Bonnor was a bush carpenter who worked for Lalor, but it was his wife who interested the local
gossips. When she came into town Mrs Bonnor always wore the same severe, grey dress with an old grey shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her face was expressionless and if anyone spoke to her in the street she ignored them. One day the Bonnors disappeared without explanation to Lalor or anyone else. There was food in their cottage and Mrs Bonnor's large grey cat was still there.

The cottage remained empty for a while then a saddler named Johnson rented it and moved in with his family. The cat slunk away into the bush. One of Johnson's daughters, Matilda (‘Tilly'), became seriously ill and had an operation at the hospital. She came home swathed in bandages and was put to bed. Next morning she was agitated and told her mother that ‘the lady in grey' had visited her during the night. The figure had stood at the foot of her bed and told her, in a persuasive voice, that the way for her to get well was to remove all her bandages. Mrs Johnson told Tilly she must have been dreaming, but later in the day the horrified mother found her daughter lying unconscious on her blood-soaked bed. The girl had ripped off all her bandages. Before the doctor arrived, Tilly died. The death certificate, curiously, shows the cause of death as pneumonia, which either puts paid to the story or more likely was a convenient way of sparing the distressed parents a public inquiry.

At the time of Tilly's tragic death, her elder sister was being courted by a local chemist. On leaving the Johnsons' house one evening the young man felt a sudden urge to look back. There, standing in the moonlight beside the cottage door, was ‘the lady in grey', her eyes glaring at him. The young man did not hang about. He bolted for his life — straight into a barbed wire fence. Five minutes later he staggered, trembling and bleeding, into the hospital. That was the last straw for the Johnson
family. They moved out of the cottage and Mrs Bonnor's grey cat moved back in.

 

The last of these grey lady ghosts is undoubtedly the most intriguing of them all. Its haunt is a ninety-year-old house in Ozone Avenue, Mount Martha on the Mornington Peninsula outside Melbourne. This ghost appears in an empire-line grey satin gown trimmed with silken tassels and wearing a grey veil over its face. So, what's so intriguing about that? Well, the ghost's identity is known and, in life, he was an Englishman named Herbert Dyce Murphy.

‘H. D. M.' as he was known to his chums, was quite a character. After graduating from Oxford University, he joined British Intelligence and carried out spying missions in Europe disguised as a woman — and if you are curious regarding how successful his disguise was, I suggest a visit to the National Gallery of Victoria. There hangs a painting called
The Arbour
by E. Phillips Fox and the shapely young lady with auburn hair dressed in white in the centre of the painting is believed to be Murphy.

In 1911 ‘H.D.M.' was considered manly enough to accompany Sir Douglas Mawson on his expedition to the Antarctic and in 1923 he returned to Australia and built the house in Mount Martha for himself using his own hand-made bricks. In 1920 ‘H.D.M.' signed on as ice master to the Norwegian whaling fleet, piloting the mother ship through ice floes in the North Sea and Arctic Ocean for three months every year. This might be described as Murphy's last great adventure, but it was a long one, continuing for a remarkable forty-five years and ending only in 1965 when the fleet's insurers discovered that the man they entrusted the safety of their ships to was in his eighty-sixth year.

In his final years Murphy was considered a great raconteur but often stretched the truth about his exploits — although the truth was so remarkable it hardly needed any embroidery. As well as being immortalised in paint, Murphy is also immortalised in words. He was the inspiration for the central character ‘Eddie' in Patrick White's great novel,
The Twyborn Affair
.

And the ghost in Ozone Avenue? Well, later owners of the house claimed to have seen him/her in their living room sitting quietly in an armchair, shapely and smooth legs modestly crossed and with a cigarette held in a long ivory holder emitting wisps of odourless smoke. Ash has also been seen to drop from the cigarette, scattering and drifting like a flight of tiny grey moths, but when the carpet is later checked no trace of it has ever been found.

Neighbours also report the ghost as a familiar sight in the house's garden. Outdoors it moves with a cat's insolent elegance, grey gown shimmering in the moonlight, tassels swaying gently and face demurely concealed behind its grey veil. Occasionally the spectre will stop, reach out a slender hand to shake dewdrops from a cobweb or draw a flower to its face to savour the fragrance, before blending into the grey shadows.