Great Australian Ghost Stories (8 page)

In the autumn of 1921 the town of Guyra in northern New South Wales found itself in the international spotlight. For a period of about six weeks the world watched with morbid curiosity as a worker's cottage about a kilometre from the town centre was assaulted by a destructive, invisible force, the occupants were driven to despair and the rest of the community tottered on the brink of mass hysteria.

It all began one morning when Bill Bowen, a gang foreman who worked for the Guyra Shire Council, walked into the town's police station and complained to Sergeant Ridge that during the night someone had placed a heavy wooden railway sleeper up against a window of the cottage he and his family rented. Putty, he said, had also been removed from around the pane of glass in the window.

The sergeant sent his two constables out to investigate. One, Roy Stennett, recalled fifty years later that when they got to the Bowens' house they inspected the window and removed the railway sleeper, leaving it fifty metres from the house. As the previous day had been April Fool's Day, the police concluded that the whole incident had been either a prank played on the Bowens by someone else or played on
them
by Bill Bowen. Mild amusement turned to
annoyance when Bowen turned up at the police station the next morning complaining that the sleeper was back and more putty gone. Sergeant Ridge was now convinced that Bowen was pulling his leg. He told his constables to go back and shift the sleeper then return, secretly, after dark, to keep watch on the house.

Stennett and his colleague arrived at the Bowens' for the second time that day at dusk and settled down behind some bushes to watch — confidently expecting to catch Bill Bowen setting them up again. Less than an hour later they heard the crack of a .22-calibre rifle close by and the sound of a bullet ricocheting off the house. They ran towards where the shot had come from but could find no one. They returned to the house, where Bowen, his wife and three children were huddled in the kitchen, clearly frightened.

The next day the police and most of the townspeople were distracted by another problem. An eighty-year-old Irish woman, Mrs Doran, had been seen wandering around a paddock the day before with a potato in each hand. She had not returned home that night, so a full-scale search was undertaken. No trace of the old lady was found and the search was called off when darkness fell.

The two constables returned to the Bowens' home for another night vigil, this time inside the house. Soon after their arrival loud thumping was heard on the walls near the window where the railway sleeper had been placed and in one bedroom. From inside it sounded as though the thumping was coming from outside, but nothing could be seen through the windows. When the police went outside to investigate, the sound seemed to be coming from the inside. These unexplained noises continued for another two nights, then stones ranging in diameter from three to eight centimetres began to rain
down on the corrugated iron roof of the house — singly and in deafening showers.

By then everyone in town and the surrounding district had heard what was going on. Crowds gathered around the Bowens' house each night to witness the strange to-do. Sergeant Ridge recruited volunteers to stand guard in each of the four rooms in the house and around the outside. Motorcars were lined up in a cordon with their headlights trained on the house, ready to flood the area with light as soon as anything happened. And happen it did, just after dark. The thumping began, rocks crashed into the walls and roof of the house and window panes were smashed. No one could have broken through the cordon without being caught, which meant that either someone within the house was responsible for the thumping and someone in the crowd had managed to throw the rocks without being seen, or that invisible forces were at work.

That weekend the story broke in the national press and curiosity seekers jammed the roads into Guyra and poured off the Sydney trains. There were journalists and photographers from city newspapers and a flock of self-styled experts on the paranormal. One of the latter, Ben Davey, described as ‘a student of spiritualism and theosophy', told the press he had been called in by the authorities to subject the phenomenon to ‘the acid test of spiritualism'. Sergeant Ridge (who was showing signs of stress) and his two constables had more or less moved in with the Bowens and were only too willing to allow anyone who offered a possible solution to join them.

Davey announced that the cause was almost certainly the spirit of Mrs Bowen's daughter by a previous marriage, a young woman named May, who had died just three months earlier. May, he said, was trying to contact her stepsister Minnie, Bill Bowen's twelve-year-old daughter, who occupied the bedroom
where the thumping was loudest, and that Minnie was refusing to allow her to ‘come through'. This theory implicated Minnie Bowen and thereafter she was the focus of official and public attention.

Minnie Bowen was a tall, thin girl with straight, dark hair and plain features, described by different newspapers as ‘a normal girl', ‘not clever', ‘introspective' and ‘backward for her age'. They all agreed she didn't smile very much and her eyes had a penetrating quality. An uncanny ability to anticipate questions was also remarked on. Davey took Minnie, her mother and a local sawmiller (just one of the troop of vigilantes who were stomping all over the Bowens' house) into Minnie's bedroom and told the girl that when the knocking started she was to ask the spirit if it was her stepsister. The noise began and, reluctantly, Minnie asked. Davey told the press, proudly, that Minnie then fell to her knees, crossed herself and raised her hands in supplication. The rest of the family and the policemen had crammed into the small room by then and they watched as the distressed child staggered to the bed where Mrs Bowen was sitting and laid her head in her mother's lap.

‘It
was
May,' she stammered. ‘She said: “Tell Mother I am perfectly happy where I am, and that your prayers when I was sick brought me where I am and made me happy. Tell Mother not to worry. I'll watch and guard over you all.”' There was not a dry eye in the room when Minnie finished.

Poor Minnie. Those present believed her, but second — and third-hand retellings of what occurred in that room robbed it of sincerity. Minnie was accused of being the cause of the whole affair. She, sceptics said, banged on the walls with a stick and threw the stones. A local doctor secretly coated the walls of Minnie's bedroom with liquorice powder to detect the marks of blows and drilled a hole through the wall so he could keep her
under observation. The paranormal fraternity said Minnie was conjuring up evil spirits. Ordinary folk simply got the wind up.

It was census time while all this was happening and the census collectors found themselves staring down a gun barrel whenever they knocked at a door. A small girl in town found the loaded revolver a parent had hidden under a pillow, fired it and wounded herself in the head. Unsubstantiated reports came in of a farmer's wife committing suicide for fear of the ‘ghost'. Some claimed it was the shade of poor old Mrs Doran (who had been found dead) come back to haunt them. Lights burned long through the night, nerves strained and tempers quickened. A team of carpenters put heavy shutters over the Bowens' windows, but one morning while the family were away someone or something ripped them all down and smashed every window in the house. A cocoa merchant from Samoa, Mr Moors, who claimed to be a personal friend of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the creator of ‘Sherlock Holmes'), insisted on removing much of the roof so that he and his entourage of five fully-grown men could hide in the ceiling overnight.

Sergeant Ridge finally cracked and was sent away for a rest cure. A tough Sydney cop named Hardy was sent up to clean up what was fast becoming a very public embarrassment for the police and after sorting out a notorious gang of Sydney hoodlums the year before, Hardy vowed he was not going to let some hick kid make a fool of him. He was much less gentle than the country police had been when he interviewed Minnie, and he succeeded in wringing a confession out of her. ‘Yes,' she cried, she had thumped on the walls just like everyone said she had and yes, she had thrown all the stones. A very cocky Hardy wired his superiors in Sydney that the case was closed. That night, for the first time in almost a month, there were no thumping noises and no stones thrown. Hardy, the
hero of the moment, caught the train back to Sydney the next day. The following night the whole terrifying business started up again.

At their wits' end, the Bowens packed Minnie off to stay with her grandmother in Glen Innes for their peace of mind and to protect her from vilification and further harassment — and the noises and the stone-throwing immediately stopped. Minnie settled in contentedly with her gran in a cosy house in Church Street, Glen Innes and it seemed as though the Bowens' problems were over. However, ten days after her arrival, to everyone's amazement and horror, stones began hitting the house in Glen Innes. Windows were smashed and solid walls shook under heavy blows. Ornaments crashed to the floor. The police were called, crowds gathered and the whole cycle seemed about to repeat itself. The grandmother wired Minnie's parents begging them to take their daughter back. Minnie packed her bags again and her parents reluctantly collected her.

Back home in Guyra the family sat on the edges of their chairs each night, ears straining and nerves tensed for the sounds to begin and the stones to rain down, but they didn't. Days went by, then weeks and nothing happened. The Bowens began to breathe easily, but the scars of the past were deep. A short time later they packed up and moved on.

Much has been written about poltergeist activity and how it often occurs in a household where there is a girl approaching puberty. One widely held theory claims that such girls are able to use the powers of their burgeoning sexuality to move physical objects and whip up psychic storms. Some believe that young women whose emotions are deeply repressed have the same powers. Minnie Bowen might well qualify as proof of either or both theories. She may truly have been, deliberately or innocently, conjuring up powerful forces. Equally likely, it
could be argued, the Guyra ghost was not a poltergeist at all but a clever man-made plot to discredit the Bowens and drive them from their home, or simply a prank that got horribly out of hand.

When researching this story back in the mid-1990s I got some very strange responses from my inquiries made in Guyra. So strange, in fact, that I concluded the original published version of the story with the observation:
Readers are advised not to go asking questions around Guyra about the ghost: they may be surprised at the hostile response they get. Three quarters of a century after these events the people of Guyra still get annoyed when strangers pry into the affair. The Bowens' house is still there, but the current occupants do not take kindly to curious visitors. Descendents of the Bowens who live in the district get quite belligerent when anyone mentions the subject, and the local historical society declines to answer inquiries about it.

I concluded at the time that perhaps they were all simply fed up with the whole business and made the observation that, as there is a vast amount of documentary evidence about the affair available, it seemed futile for the good folk of Guyra to close ranks so late in the day. That opinion has not altered and in fact, has been reinforced by a few more recent revelations.

When another researcher attempted to piece the mystery together in 2010 he found that archived copies of the
Guyra Argus
of the time were missing from the collections of both the State Library of New South Wales and the National Library in Canberra. Other inquiries in recent years prompted a few locals to come forwards with some facts that far from clarifying the situation confuse it further. One claimed that the house in Guyra that had been identified for decades as being the Bowens' was, in fact, not — their true house had been
200 metres away in a different street. The same informant suggested that the real house was subjected to thumping and stone attacks after the Bowens departed and up until it was demolished some years later.

A little of Minnie Bowen's later life has also recently been revealed. When she grew up she married, becoming Mrs Inks and living a long and peaceful life in Armidale, before being struck down and killed by a car in her eightieth year. Apparently she spoke little about her childhood, but did show evidence of having psychic powers and it was said that she could always make objects move without touching them.

The theme of the dead returning to avenge themselves on those responsible for their deaths belongs more to popular fiction than genuine ghost lore. Leaving aside gruesome appearances, the ghosts in most of these stories seem a fairly respectable lot and as puzzled as their victims to find themselves where they are — but not all. There's an old story from the Monaro district of New South Wales about an enraged spirit who returned almost immediately to take his revenge on his persecutor in some very peculiar ways.

The story concerns a retired army major turned farmer and one of his convict labourers. The Major, according to the story, was a priggish bachelor with a quick temper who took sadistic pleasure in meting out rough justice with lash and noose. A loaded pistol was kept on his dining room table during meals and beside his bed each night. It was said that if any convict walked behind him, swore or blasphemed, the Major would have him flogged and serious offenders were hanged from one of two large gum trees in the homestead garden — four men in one day, it is claimed.

The convict in the story was an Irishman, transported for political crimes, who considered himself a cut above the rest and complained about having to work and sleep with riff-raff. When the Major showed no sympathy the convict threw a stone at him. According to the story, the Major tried the convict, condemned him to death and presided over his hanging that very afternoon but, if summary justice had rid the Major of problems before, it failed this time. A few nights after the hanging strange things began to happen on the farm: milk pails were knocked over, animals were let out of enclosures and a haystack burned down. The barracks that housed the convicts at night was a sturdy building from which they could not escape, so the Major blamed his free servants and the local Aborigines. His overseer was told to be more vigilant but the incidents continued and then, one dark and windy night, the Major himself discovered the culprit.

The incongruous sound of a man singing in the middle of the night woke him. Night-gowned and tassel-capped in the fashion of the time, the Major sat up in his giant four-poster bed and reached for his gun. He fumbled with candle and matches, but before he could strike a light the room began to fill with a lurid glow and the figure of the dead convict materialised at the foot of the bed. As the Major watched, horrified and scandalised, the ghost began to dance an Irish jig and sing a particularly bawdy song about the whores of Sydney Town. The Major fired his pistol at the figure but the bullet passed straight through and smashed an expensive vase on the mantel.

Now the Major had many unlikeable qualities but he was not a coward. He ordered the spectre to desist, cursed it and inveigled heavenly support. He hurled the pistol at it but all to no avail. The ghost of the Irish convict just chuckled, bowed obsequiously, kicked up its heels and launched into another,
even more ribald song. Finally the Major closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears and that was how the servants found him when they came to his aid — but no trace of the ghost did they see.

The Major, being the practical man that he was, probably put the first night's experience down to indigestion or overwork but, when it was repeated night after night for weeks on end, he finally broke. Fearing that he would go mad if he stayed a night longer, the Major packed his possessions, sold his farm and moved back to England.

Well, that's how the story goes. History, however, tells it a little differently. Major William Sandys Elrington retired from the British Army aged forty-three in 1824. He was tall, red-haired and carried a large sabre scar across his forehead, a legacy of the Peninsula Wars where he served under the Duke of Wellington.

When he arrived in Australia in 1827 he was not a bachelor but a widower. His son Richard and the Major's old nanny, Mary Smith, aged seventy-three, accompanied him. Governor Darling granted the Major 200 hectares of fine land on the banks of the Shoalhaven River near the present town of Braidwood. He called the property ‘Mount Elrington'. The census of 1828 shows his labour force comprising five assigned convicts and two emancipated convicts. Thomas Clarke, father of the notorious bushranging Clarke Brothers, also worked for the Major at one time. The Major had an elder son, also in the British Army, Lieutenant Clement Elrington, who sold his commission and joined his father for a time.

Major Elrington prospered. He was older, more experienced and had more capital than most settlers. He also lived on his property and supervised its running (many wealthy landowners preferred to live in the relative comfort of Sydney and left their
properties in the hands of unscrupulous managers). He was respected in the district and appointed the local magistrate soon after his arrival.

Major Elrington was often cited as a model free settler but the model was flawed. The Major was subject to rapid changes of temperament and may have suffered from what we call today bipolar disorder. He quarrelled openly with his son Richard, disinheriting him and challenging him to a duel on at least one occasion, although there is no evidence of a duel taking place. His relationship with his other son, Clement, a would-be poet, was probably not much better. The Major also had a mania for discipline. The convicts at Mount Elrington were driven mercilessly and the lash and other brutal forms of physical punishment applied with alacrity.

There is official correspondence between the Major and the colonial secretary that confirms his power as a magistrate did not extend to pronouncing death sentences on convicts (or anyone else), but two trees, fitting the description of the infamous ‘hanging' trees, stood until fairly recently at Mount Elrington in the location described in the story.

So, what of the ghost? There were many Irishmen among the convicts at Mount Elrington at different times; and a lad of about fifteen did throw a stone at the Major. This was probably not the youth's only crime, for he was brought before a senior magistrate. The Major, apparently in a benevolent mood, spoke in the young man's defence and tried, unsuccessfully, to save him from the noose.

Major Elrington did sell up, suddenly and unexpectedly, in 1845, and returned to England, but whether the reason was a ghost or simply the desire to spend his last days in his native Northumberland no one knows. So legend and history agree on some things, disagree on others and we must make up our own
minds whether the Major was a maligned man and whether one of his convicts did enjoy a gleeful, ghostly revenge.

 

The Irish spook with his nimble feet and his bawdy songs is not the only saucy spirit in the annals of Australian ghost lore. A few of those ladies mentioned in his songs also feature in other stories and not only in Sydney. Take for example the ghost of the prostitute that used to appear on foggy nights on Princes Bridge in Melbourne in our great-grandfathers' time. She was a grotesque, aging creature with a painted face and threadbare finery who would stand under one of the street lamps, twirling a tattered pink parasol. As men passed she would smile at them and if any took a fancy to her and stopped, she would reach out a hand as cold as the grave and hold their arm in an icy grip. Then she would stretch back her head to show off her breasts, revealing a broad, jagged and livid scar running from her right ear to her left shoulder. While the observer gasped and recoiled in horror the wanton wraith would laugh — a staccato cackle that blended with the rattle of carriage wheels on the bridge. She would then try to shove her victim onto the busy carriageway. Most managed to regain their balance before falling or being run over and when they looked back their tormenter had disappeared, leaving only the smell of cheap violet scent lingering on the damp air.

Another of the ‘sisters' features in a story about a lesson in manners that went horribly wrong in the Murray River town of Echuca around the same time. The story goes that this
fille de joie
picked up two sawmill workers in an Echuca pub one night and allowed them to buy her drinks. Later when the trio were strolling along the river bank near the sawmillers' cottage the men suggested the lady should repay their generosity with some free sex.

The prostitute got on her high horse and told the men her company was ample reward for the drinks. If they wanted sex, she said, they would have to pay for it. Just then they were approaching the old tramway bridge over Southern Cross Creek, so the men suggested that if the prostitute didn't cooperate they'd dangle her over the bridge until she learned how to show her gratitude properly.

The lady was still adamant: no pay, no pleasure. So the men carried out their threat. It was then that things went horribly wrong. As she dangled over the water, the prostitute's tight-fitting clothing bunched up around her neck, stopping her breathing. Her face suffused with blood and her eyes bulged. After five minutes the men dragged her limp body back onto the bridge but it was too late; the lady never again gave pleasure, with or without payment.

For the next thirty years or so, until the bridge was destroyed by flood, the ghost of this prostitute used to appear there when the full moon was setting (as it was when she died), waiting to take revenge on her unprincipled companions. The ghost's face was described as ‘beetroot coloured' with either rage or the effect of strangulation, and its eyes bulged hideously. Witnesses claimed it would materialise in front of males crossing the bridge in pairs and block their way. It would stare at each pair until satisfied they were not the murderers, then howl with frustration and slowly ‘evaporate'.

And then there's Sabrina — no,
not
that blonde bombshell whose mammaries used to fill our screen in the early days of television — but a lithesome young spectre of more recent times, given that name by the companion she adopted. Sabrina's story (surely one of the most bizarre in this collection) has its origins at the scene of a fatal road accident
in the Sydney suburb of Blacktown. An unemployed artist told his part in the story to the
National Enquirer
in 1993.

The artist was the proud owner of a 1974 Triumph 2500 with a red body and white top. When he went driving alone one day and had car trouble a reassuring voice from the back seat told him not to panic — there was a garage one kilometre up the road. When the artist swung round there was a ‘passenger' sitting in the back seat. The figure was hazy but clearly female, young and very attractive. He yelled: ‘Who the hell are you?' (or words to that effect). The figure vanished — but not for good. She appeared six times more, lighting her finger like a candle on one occasion, according to the informant, so he could read a road map in the dark.

The young man told the
National Enquirer
the ghost usually appeared dressed in the same clothes — very short red shorts and a very tight white tank top — but, on one memorable day, appeared
stark naked
. He finally got an answer to his question after the two got to know each other better. Sabrina, as he decided to call her, told him she had been riding her bicycle in Blacktown one day when she was run down by a car and killed. It was not the Triumph that hit her and it did not then belong to the artist, but it was being driven past at the time. It was so new and bright and shiny and painted in her favourite colours that she decided to ‘move in' — permanently. The artist said he didn't mind ‘Sabrina' living in his car but he did try to avoid having friends sit in the back seat in case they took up her space or, worse,
sat on her
.

Another decidedly ‘saucy' spectre which might, like Sabrina, still be around haunts Saint Andrews Inn at Cleveland in Tasmania. The old inn dates from 1825 and offers excellent accommodation and fine food. In its heyday, the hotel served travellers on the road from Hobart to Launceston and
was popular with cut-throats and vagabonds. History tells of Tasmania's most notorious bushranger, Martin Cash, trading shots with the police there one day while holding the innkeeper's daughter hostage and stealing some bacon.

History records that a girl was also murdered in an upstairs room at the inn in the 1860s. Perhaps it is her ghost, or that of the young lady affronted by Martin Cash, who stalks the staircase, exacting revenge on the opposite sex.

Legend has it that the spirit accosts males of all ages, sidles up to them and begins to unbutton their clothes. Transfixed with fear (or delight) the victims allow themselves to be stripped completely naked after which the ghost vanishes leaving them mortified with embarrassment and, if it happens to be winter, shivering with cold.

The owners in the 1970s told the press the ghost had been very active in their time (following people up and down the stairs), but when they sold out she seemed to go to ground. The third owners saw her frequently, but the fourth did not, suggesting that perhaps the ghost skips a ‘generation' of owners. The next owners (the fifth in this cycle) took over in the 1990s and reported hearing murmuring voices in one room and complained of clothes being put away mysteriously, so maybe it won't be long before this clothes-stripping, saucy spirit (like Freddy Krueger) is ba-a-ck.