Great Australian Ghost Stories (4 page)

One morning observers noticed smoke coming from the funnel of the hulk. It looked, they said, as though the old ship was preparing to sail away under its own power. Two newspaper reporters went on board to investigate and found that drums of tar stored in the ship had mysteriously ignited. This was just one of six unexplained fires on board.

Another party determined to lay the stories of the ghost set out to spend a weekend on the wreck. Their Land Rover broke down, the motor on their boat would not start and, when they finally put to sea, a single, huge wave that seemed to come from nowhere swamped their boat and soaked their expensive photographic equipment. Despite calm waters around the wreck the party's boat would not stay alongside. A line was tied securely to the
Alkimos
but mysteriously came undone. When they finally scrambled aboard in darkness none of their torches would work. They tried to set up camp on the solid bow area of the ship but their spirit stove blew up and, despite predictions of fine weather, heavy rain began to fall at around 2 am. As they huddled together in the rain, wishing they had never embarked on the expedition, they heard the incongruous sound of a dog yapping. The sound seemed to come from the stern of the ship but no dog could be seen. Despite being stressed out by their recent experiences, concern that an animal might be trapped or injured on the wreck set them searching, but each time they approached the source of the sound it retreated. No dog — or any other animal — was found, but the yapping continued through most of the night. (Strangely, the captain's logbook recorded the mysterious yapping of a dog in the engine room and other parts of the ship when the
Alkimos
was en route across the Atlantic during World War Two, a quarter of a century before.)

In an effort to find the truth, Jack Sue was persuaded to return to the ship with technicians from a television station, who set up cameras and recording equipment in the hope of catching ‘Henry' on film or tape. Jack dossed down on an old steel bunk in one of the disused cabins, but was awakened during the night by strange noises. As his ears tuned to the sounds, he recognised heartrending groans (the sound one might expect from a person in agony), which seemed to be coming from the bunk next to his. Jack reached for his torch and snapped it on. The bright beam revealed that the bunk beside his was empty and when he shone the torch around the cabin there was nothing to be seen. Everything was in place and apparently undisturbed — but the terrible groans continued for several minutes more.

Jack admitted to being deeply affected by the sounds and not a little frightened on both his expeditions to the
Alkimos
; and as anyone who had the privilege of knowing Jack Sue would testify, he was not a man to imagine or exaggerate anything. And, after his wartime experiences, it took a
lot
to frighten him.

One of the technicians who went with Jack reported catching a brief glimpse of a strange, dark figure that disappeared into the salty night air. The recording equipment they used captured eerie rumbling sounds like distant drums or gunfire and a series of blood-curdling shrieks followed by coughing and heavy breathing, none of which was heard by the men on board.

Around 1991 in a heavy sea the bow of the
Alkimos
broke off and the twisted and torn wreck slowly began to disintegrate, disappearing from sight in recent years. To this day people stare out across the sea to where the two jagged halves of the hulk once towered above the water, recalling its grim history.
Fishermen circle round the spot swapping stories and divers occasionally explore what remains on the sea floor in the hope of catching a glimpse of ‘Henry'. But the hundreds whose lives have been affected by the jinx know better and vow never again to go near the ill-fated
Alkimos
.

When personal relationships turn sour (or are soured by a third party), fertile ground for gruesome ghost stories is created. Here are two disturbing stories and one amusing story that prove that point. The first tells of a marital mismatch that resulted in both parties being condemned to haunt their former home. The second and third both tell of how obnoxious relatives wreaked havoc on other couples' relationships before and beyond the grave. All three stories have something else in common. They all originate from one of Australia's great wine-growing regions.

Commencing in the 1830s shiploads of Lutheran refugees from Germany migrated to South Australia and settled in the Barossa Valley. They modelled their settlements on the villages of their homeland, planted the hillsides with grapevines and established a wine-growing industry that flourishes to this day. They were dour and pious people with a culture, rooted in the Middle Ages, that acknowledged the powers of both light and darkness. For them, witches, goblins and sprites infested the hills of the Barossa region as surely as they did the Black Forest; and the devil incarnate was a real threat to their lives and souls. Ghost stories abound in this beautiful part of
Australia and perhaps the strangest and most compelling of all concerns a vineyard near the tiny village of Bethany.

One day in the middle of the nineteenth century a knife grinder came to the vineyard to ply his trade. The property belonged to a young spinster whose parents had died of dysentery when she was a child; since then she had been raised by Quakers. The young woman was endowed with property, good health and pleasant features. The only thing she lacked was a husband. The knife grinder was a personable young man more than content to pass the time of day with the young woman, especially when he learned that she was the sole owner of the neat cottage, all the livestock and the flourishing vineyard that stretched as far as the eye could see. A match was made; the spinster became a bride and the knife grinder became a prosperous farmer.

Soon after their marriage the husband discovered a side to his wife's character he had not reckoned on. Some nights she would disappear from their cottage without explanation. When she returned the next morning no amount of cajoling or threatening would make her reveal where she had been. At first he thought she was being unfaithful to him with another man in the village, but then strange rumours began to reach his ears. His wife, it was said, had rebelled against the strict teachings of the Quakers when still a child and had become a devotee of an elder who secretly practised the black arts. Now, rumour-mongers claimed, she regularly travelled in the company of twelve other women to the top of Kaiser Stuhl Mountain to perform witches' rites and dance naked under the full moon.

The husband by then had become a respected member of the local Lutheran Church and it was there he sought help. Before the whole congregation he declared that his wife had
fallen into sin through idleness. The pastor advised him to keep his wife constantly pregnant to prevent her fornicating with the devil. The husband took the pastor's advice and bedded his wife as often as he could physically manage.

Two children were born within two years and after each birth the husband returned to his task with renewed vigour. Finally the wife protested and refused to submit to her husband's constant assaults. He then took a whip to her and beat her mercilessly until her back and buttocks were raw. In despair the young woman ran away from home — to Kaiser Stuhl Mountain.

When she returned a few days later she possessed strange new powers. She crept up on her husband while he was ploughing in the vineyard. She drew some cryptic designs in the dust and mumbled an evil incantation. When her husband saw her he reined in their white plough horse, but when he tried to remove his hands from the plough he found to his horror that he could not. His hands were as rigid as stone and his fingers were firmly locked to the handles of the plough. Try though he might he could not free himself.

The wife had placed a hex on her brutal husband and it seemed he was fated to spend the rest of his life endlessly ploughing the strips of ground between the vines in fair weather and foul. The wife cared for the horse, feeding it and stabling it at night. She brought food to her miserable husband and fed him with a spoon. She also took down his trousers each day so that he could relieve himself onto the soil. Unmoved by his tears and pleas she went about the business of running her own property once more and caring for the babies while he stumbled along behind that plough from dawn to sunset.

News of the husband's plight spread quickly through the village but no one dared come to his aid. It was not until he
developed pneumonia and was close to death that his wife finally removed the hex and released him. He struggled to the cottage and crawled into bed where, just hours later, he died, cursing his wife. At her husband's funeral the young widow refused to don the traditional sackcloth and ashes or even wear black and while the rest of the congregation offered prayers for the soul of their departed
bruder
in their mother tongue, she was heard muttering incomprehensible words in a strange language.

After the funeral the widow was spat on and reviled by the old women of the village. Some said that, as well as her other sins, she conversed with her cat and grew herbs to concoct magic potions. She was blamed for every ill that befell the village. Finally, the elders of the church pronounced her to be ‘the bride of the goat' (the Devil's bride) and ordered that she be tried by dunking. ‘If she drowns her innocence will be proved,' they said, ‘and if she does not, then God will have confirmed that she is a witch — and we shall burn her!'

The young woman was dragged, screaming, to the dam near the village and her head held under the water for more than an hour while the onlookers prayed fervently for her salvation. She struggled for a while but the strong hands of the self-righteous held her down. When they lifted her dripping body from the water, smeared with foul-smelling mud and weed, she was dead and two lifeless eyes stared accusingly at her judges.

Her innocence proven, the young woman was treated far better in death than she ever had been in life. The villagers gathered flowers from their gardens and the surrounding meadows to carpet the graveyard where her funeral was conducted. The pastor delivered an impassioned eulogy while his flock prayed and wept for her and themselves.

As the years passed the villagers tried to put the whole affair out of their minds but they could not, for the ghost of the young woman returned from the grave to take revenge on all those who had mistreated her. The story goes that the pastor, the church elders and each of the young woman's accusers were visited in turn by her vengeful ghost and that all met horrible deaths soon after.

True-believers claim that the ghosts of the young woman and her husband haunt the district to this day. Terrified witnesses have reported seeing the young woman dancing naked on her own grave when the moon is full, a wild and ferocious expression on her face, her body still streaked with mud and her hair matted with slimy russet-and-black weed.

The ghost of her unfortunate husband also appears in the old vineyard that was once theirs. He is seen at midnight and only when the moon is full: a ghastly spectral figure (little more than a skeleton), bowed and cowed, stumbling along behind a spectral plough drawn by a spectral horse.

When this story was made public some years ago the source quoted was a handwritten journal found by descendants of the young couple in a strongbox under the floorboards of the cottage. The vineyard is still there and so are the ghosts but the owners, not surprisingly, are reluctant to discuss this strange and dark episode in their family's history.

 

Another ghost whom locals can (and in this case will) put a name to haunts an abandoned farmhouse six kilometres from Greenock. Travus Klinkwort's story is well known in the district and very few feel sympathy for his ghost. A widower, Travus owned the farm many years ago and eked out a living growing vegetables, aided by his two daughters, Josia and Esther.

Travus was a cold and heartless man who worked his daughters hard and denied them any pleasures. He was also fanatical about protecting their virtue, but over-protection simply increased their curiosity and their desirability to the young men of the district.

Josia, the prettier of the two, invited a youth named Randall to meet her in the potato patch one night. Esther stood guard at a distance while Josia found out what she had been missing. Travus, suspecting deceit, grabbed his gun and ran to the potato patch. Esther screamed while Josia and Randall scrambled to their feet and tried to pull on their clothes. Travus fired both barrels of his gun.

The lovers were never seen again but it is said that Travus's potato crop the next year was the richest ever. Travus died a few years later and Esther went to her grave a crazed, crippled spinster, still hiding the secret of what had occurred that night.

As if condemned to endless punishment, Travus Klinkwort's ghost is trapped at the scene of his terrible crime. He has often been seen (and even photographed) standing in the doorway of the crumbling building. He wears a torn great coat, baggy trousers and a battered hat. He stares unrepentantly back at observers while they wonder if he still has his gun.

A real-estate agent (new to the district and knowing nothing about the house's history) ventured up the dusty driveway to the Klinkwort house one day a few years back, hoping to find a property to list and, to his dismay, discovered the answer to the question about Travus's gun.

Finding the house deserted and the front door ajar he ventured inside. At first he saw nothing but dust and cobwebs and heard nothing but the wind whistling through gaps in the roof. ‘I was just doing a few calculations in my head about what it might cost to fix the place up when I heard a sound
behind me,' the real-estate agent later explained. ‘I thought I must have disturbed a dog because it sounded just like that deep growling sound dogs make in their throats. I turned around very warily and to my surprise found, not a dog, but an old man standing in the doorway of the front room. I was relieved that it was not a vicious dog, then terrified when the man raised an ancient shotgun and pointed the barrels at me.

‘The old man's mouth was closed and the strange sound seemed to be coming from inside his body. The sound got louder and louder until it was a deafening roar and then I saw one crooked, bony finger begin to close around the trigger. I yelled “Don't shoot!” but it was too late. I saw the gun fire, but heard no explosion and in that instant the figure and the roaring sound vanished … and so did I a split second later. Up until then I'd never believed in ghosts, but
real
guns go “bang” and
real
people don't vanish into thin air!'

The real-estate agent also recalled the awful stench of rotting potatoes in Travus Klinkwort's house … and smells of an even worse kind figure in our final story of ruptured relationships from the Barossa Valley.

 

When a thirty-six-year-old shy spinster met a like-endowed bachelor in a café near Nuriootpa, love (or desperation) brought them together. Certain that the bride's tyrant of a mother, a widow herself, would not approve of the match, they eloped. Eventually the mother came round — or appeared to — and invited the couple to share her house, but it soon became apparent that all she really wanted was an unpaid labourer to tend her garden and a handmaid to wait on her. She also took every opportunity to drive a wedge between husband and wife, telling each the other was ‘screwing around'.

The old woman had some other objectionable habits. She weighed 130 kilograms and consumed platefuls of spiced sausages, dill cucumber, pickled onions and sauerkraut at every meal. Dessert comprised dozens of cream cakes that she devoured with glee, cream dripping off her jowls. After these gargantuan feasts she would repair to the stone dunny in the yard, there to sit and fart thunderously for the best part of an hour.

The repugnant parent insisted the daughter sleep with her, so these times were the only opportunity the unhappily married couple had to be alone and to catch up on some of the pleasures they had missed out on in their youth. One night the husband and wife realised that Mother had been an unusually long time in the dunny and that they had not heard the results of her labours for some time. The daughter went down with a torch and found her mother slumped on the wooden seat, her voluminous red bloomers hanging around her bulbous ankles. The old woman's face was much the same colour as her bloomers and she was quite dead.

Daughter and son-in-law had a terrible time shifting her. Finally they dragged her out of the dunny and rolled her onto a sheet of corrugated iron. This they dragged under a stout tree branch then winched the body into a wheelbarrow with a block and tackle. When the doctor arrived the old woman was lying angelically composed on her bed and the couple were drooping with exhaustion.

During the old woman's wake the daughter excused herself from the guests and went down to the stone dunny. She was glad of a few minutes' rest and solitude but soon her relief turned to terror. The carefully bolted door was suddenly flung open then slammed, jamming securely. The daughter's
screams attracted the guests, who came running to her aid. When they tried the door it swung open effortlessly.

Next time the daughter used the dunny the contents of the pan boiled up and splashed over her shoes, and when her husband was taking a pee the raised wooden seat was slammed down with dire consequences. That was too much for the couple; drastic remedies were required. They decided to demolish the old dunny and build a new one (with one of those newfangled flushing systems) attached to the house.

A team of workmen arrived a few days later to begin work. The husband thought the solid wooden door on the old dunny worth saving, so while the workman started removing the roof he went inside to unscrew it. The door slammed, trapping him. ‘Let me out you bloody old bitch!' he screamed (or words to that effect). The workmen told him not to worry; they would pull him out through the roof. Then it happened. As the workmen watched, mouths agape, the large metal can rose from its spider-infested bed, hovered momentarily in mid-air then flipped upside down, pouring its stinking contents over the mortified husband's head.