Great Australian Ghost Stories (9 page)

Few ghost stories are as reliably attested to as the one known as ‘The White Bull of Yeumburra'. The prime witness to the strange events in this story was one of the most respected policemen in the New South Wales police force.

When Senior Superintendent Martin Brennan wrote his memoirs in 1907 he devoted a whole chapter to a murder investigation he had been involved in during the winter of 1876 and its strange, supernatural sequel.
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Martin Brennan was then a senior sergeant in charge of the Queanbeyan district of New South Wales. On 28 June Brennan received word that a shepherd named Jeremiah McCarthy had been murdered at a remote spot near the boundary of the Queanbeyan and Yass police districts. By arrangement, Senior Sergeant Brennan and one of his troopers met with an inspector and another trooper from Yass, the local coroner and a hastily recruited jury at the scene of the crime. The place was called the Washpool, an isolated spot on the banks of the Murrumbidgee River a few kilometres from the present
town of Murrumbateman. Steep hills surrounded the area on three sides and the only signs of human habitation were some old sheep-washing pens belonging to Nanima station and the shepherd's tiny hut. The nearest homestead was Yeumburra, a few kilometres away.

McCarthy's body was recovered from where it had been found, partly concealed in sparse scrub. It was carried back to the hut, where the coroner examined it and conducted an inquest. The shepherd had been shot in the head, then the front half of his skull hacked away with a sharp implement. Thirty-two pieces of lead shot were removed from what was left of his brain. The jury brought down a verdict of ‘Wilful murder, by person or persons unknown' and the gruesome corpse was hastily wrapped in two blankets found inside the hut and buried close by.

The inside of the shepherd's hut was disordered. Several religious books that the victim had been fond of reading were scattered about. Three possums had taken up residence in the cold fireplace and a large goanna had devoured the contents of the meat bag and gone to sleep amongst the stinking remains of its feast. The flour and sugar bags had also been tampered with. At first it was thought the animals were to blame, but when an empty strychnine tin was found and large amounts of the deadly poison detected in the flour and sugar the evidence pointed to the murderer. There were also clear boot marks on the dirt floor, one pair belonging to McCarthy and another, much larger set made by someone wearing two left boots.

The policemen then rode to Nanima station to speak to James Ramsey, McCarthy's employer. Ramsey confirmed that McCarthy had been forty-five years old, single, sober and well read and had worked on Nanima for many years. Good shepherds prepared to live in wild and lonely spots with only
their flock and a sheepdog for company were rare. Ramsey was very sorry, he said, to lose such a reliable one.

Next the police called at Yeumburra, where Charles Hall could give them little information, and at Ginninderra, another local station, where William Davis had some startling news. On the evening of McCarthy's murder Davis had found a villainous character called Mad Tom the Soldier in his kitchen. Mad Tom, despite his sixty years, was tall and powerful, one sinister eye staring out of a battered face framed with a grisly beard and lank hair. Mad Tom was well known to Senior Sergeant Brennan; his real name was William Hutton but he used many aliases, including ‘Tom Robertson' and ‘Waterloo Tom'. He claimed to have been a soldier in the British Army and to have lost his eye and been injured in the leg at the Battle of Waterloo, none of which was true. He had never been in any army and had sustained his injuries when attacked by Aborigines in Tasmania while trying to carry off a young Aboriginal girl. He had roamed the Murrumbidgee region for years, begging, stealing and intimidating people with his six-foot long-barrelled rifle and a bayonet-like knife. The police suspected him of many crimes but had not been able to convict him.

Davis said that Mad Tom had asked whether the shepherd McCarthy was still at the Washpool. The station owner and his men sent him packing, but discovered the next morning that a blanket, a left boot and a tin of strychnine were missing. The police had their culprit. Mad Tom the Soldier was tracked down and let off one shot from his murderous gun before being overpowered and taken into custody. He was wearing two left boots. The police were determined to get a conviction this time and decided the victim's body should be exhumed and the blankets retrieved as evidence. Senior Sergeant Brennan, the Inspector from Yass and two troopers returned to the
Washpool a few days later to carry out this gruesome task. What happened that day is stranger than fiction. Brennan takes up the story:

It was a beautiful clear day, the sun's rays shining on the river, but this changed as we stood beside the grave. Suddenly an extraordinary cumulo stratus
[sic]
cloud, or ‘woolpack', descended enveloping the mountains and casting deep shadows over the Washpool. We commenced the work of exhumation but just as the spade touched the timber slab that covered the body there was the sound of a terrific explosion. The ground trembled and seemed to sink beneath our feet. A great rumbling sound reverberated through the valley for some seconds followed by a tremendous roar from the hilltop above us. Suddenly we observed through the gloom a huge bull of immaculate whiteness rushing down the slope towards us. We promptly sought the protection of some trees close by, drew revolvers and stood in readiness for defence, but this was unnecessary, as the animal on reaching the open grave, stopped suddenly, and with head erect, surveyed the surroundings, pawed the earth for a few seconds then lay down beside the grave, moaned piteously and expired.

The policemen emerged from their cover and after making sure the animal was dead, inspected it. The great beast was ‘of marvellous symmetry' and in perfect condition. There seemed no apparent reason for its strange behaviour and sudden death. By this time, the four policemen were thoroughly unnerved. They hastily completed their task but had neither the energy nor the inclination to bury the huge carcass of the bull.

Two days later Senior Sergeant Brennan sent one of his troopers back to the Washpool to bury the poisoned flour and sugar and to make an inventory of the contents of the hut. William Davis of Ginninderra accompanied the trooper,
saying he had a special interest in the white bull and wanted to take a look at the carcass. When the two men arrived at the shepherd's hut everything was just as the police had left it two days earlier, except for one thing — the bull had vanished. There were no marks where it had fallen beside the grave, no tracks to suggest it had been moved and no trace of blood, bone or hide to indicate that it had been butchered on the spot or eaten by dingoes or goannas. In fact, as the trooper remarked to Davis, it was as if the huge animal had never existed.

This strange sequence of events puzzled Martin Brennan for the rest of his days and, when he came to write about it thirty years later, he was no closer to finding an explanation than he had been in the winter of 1876. Some elements in the story can be explained by natural phenomena combined with coincidence. The sudden appearance of a cumulonimbus stormhead and a single crash of thunder would account for the mysterious cloud and the ‘explosion'. If the area was then shaken by an earth tremor the dramatic prelude to the appearance of the bull could be explained, but the animal itself cannot. No one in the district owned such a distinctive (and valuable) beast. No cattle had been driven through the district for months and it had been a hot, dry year along the Murrumbidgee without any rain, so there was very little green vegetation for a stray animal to survive on let alone maintain such perfect condition. Martin Brennan believed that the animal was supernatural and admitted so, using the terminology of his time:

I am aware
(he wrote)
that those who allege to have seen ghosts, apparitions and mysterious manifestations are looked upon as weak-minded and superstitious but, unable to account for what four police officers, in perfect health and with all their faculties unimpaired, witnessed, I conclude it to have been a ‘psychological' phenomenon.

Many years after Brennan published his account of these events, some new pieces of evidence came to light that had not been known to Brennan. William Davis's interest in seeing the carcass of the bull, which Brennan puts down to curiosity, was more than that. Some time before the murder of Jeremiah McCarthy, Davis had been out shooting with friends on Hall's property, Yeumburra, when they were charged by a large bull. Davis, a crack shot, raised his rifle, fired once and dropped the animal in its tracks. The bull died instantly a few metres from his feet. Later when he heard about the appearance of a ghostly-white bull at the murder scene, Davis wanted to see if it bore any resemblance to the animal he had shot. Perhaps he was less surprised than the trooper when they found it had vanished into thin air.

The second twist to this story belongs to more recent times. A descendent of Charles Hall of Yeumburra asked his aged aunt about the story of the ghost bull. The old lady told her nephew that there was no doubt about the bull's existence. She had, she said, seen it herself.

‘Oh, I've seen it a few times,' she said, as though seeing the ghost of a massive pure white bull was nothing special to remark on. ‘It comes back every time one of the family dies. I remember it suddenly appeared on a ridge near the homestead at sunset one evening during the last war. There was a brilliant, pink sunset and at first it was just a big, dark silhouette against the sky. The thing stood still for maybe two or three minutes and we all watched it. Then it raised its head, shook its horns and let out a tremendous roar that echoed around the valley. It turned then, and the light caught its hide and for a moment it shone, a bright, glowing white. Then it was gone. Next day we found out an uncle … he was a soldier fighting in the Middle East somewhere … had been killed in a battle.'

Finally, if you're wondering what happened to that other ‘soldier', Mad Tom, he was sent for trial before a judge who happened to be a real old soldier: a retired lieutenant colonel with a soft spot for ex-servicemen. The prosecution pointed out that Tom was a liar, a thief and a murderer and that he had not even been born when the Battle of Waterloo took place, but the gullible judge could not bring himself to send Tom to the gallows and gave him a prison sentence instead. Mad Tom died in prison, delirious and crying out that he was being trampled by an invisible white bull.

Pathos is a key element in many ghost stories. It is natural for us to feel sad for the terrified victims of haunting, but equally true that we can't avoid feeling sorry for the plight of many of the ghosts — even while they are chilling our blood and making the our hair stand on end. When the ghost in a story is that of a child whose young life has been cruelly snatched away by fate then the pathos can be almost unbearable, as the next story illustrates.

This tale begins one evening in the late nineteenth century when two stockmen were travelling across the Dargo High Plains in the rugged alpine country of eastern Victoria. It was almost dark when they stumbled upon a deserted hut deep in the bush and decided to camp there for the night. They lit a fire in the crumbling fireplace and spread their bedrolls on the floor among broken furniture and mice-eaten newspapers.

During the night they were awakened by the sound of sobbing and were startled to see a little girl, dripping wet and crying piteously, standing in the doorway. The men called to the little girl to come inside to the fire and made to get up, but
before they could she vanished. They went outside, coo-eed and searched but couldn't find her.

Still thinking a living child must be lost in the bush, they widened their search the next day but could find no trace of the little girl. By daylight the stockmen could see that the hut and its surroundings were a melancholy sight. There was a dried-up well, some stunted fruit trees, the remains of a garden choked with weeds, broken fences and a scattered woodpile all overgrown with a tangle of scrub.

Finally they gave up their search and moved on to the nearest town, where they reported the incident to the local constable and learned that they had seen a ghost. Some years ago (they were told) a couple with a large family had tried to make a go of it in the bush but failed. Eventually they were forced to walk off, leaving everything they had laboured for behind. They took ship from Lakes Entrance, bound for Sydney, and it was not until the ship was well out to sea that they realised the youngest of their brood was missing. The little girl, it seemed, had wandered away from the wharf. The captain of the ship would not turn back and by the time a search was organised no trace of the child remained. Where her body lay no one knew, but her ghost made its way back to the little hut in the bush and there it remained, crying bitterly for its mother. The stockmen were not the first and would not be the last to see and hear this heart-rending little spirit — and once experienced it was never forgotten.

 

Also from Victoria (this time from the comfortable Melbourne suburb of Kew) comes another touching story of the ghost of a dead child — in this case a small boy. An old house that still stands in Barkers Road was the home of a prosperous family in the 1890s and is still, legend has it, the haunt of
the tiny ghost. The father of the family was strict (even by Victorian standards) and imposed rules on every member of his household — spouse, offspring and servants — and meted out stiff punishment when anyone defied them.

Exactly how the youngest son in the family (aged around six years) managed to stir the wrath of his father one day is unclear — perhaps he spoke out of turn or slid down a banister — but the punishment he suffered is a matter of record. The father locked the child in his upstairs bedroom, denied him his supper and threatened to deny him his breakfast if he didn't bow to his will.

The little lad apparently had an adventurous streak and decided he would escape from his bedroom window and run away from home. His head was likely filled with exciting plans about joining a circus, becoming a midshipman in the navy or a daring bushranger, while he carefully knotted his bed sheets together to form a rope. One end of the makeshift rope was then tied to a bedpost and the other lowered out of the window. The little boy swung his body over the window ledge and began to descend the rope, hand over hand. Then disaster struck. The child slipped, the sheets tangled around his slender neck and he died gasping for breath, his feet just thirty centimetres from the ground.

A contrite father, a broken-hearted mother and a collection of distressed siblings accompanied the little boy's coffin to a local cemetery then promptly sold the house and moved away. The house remained untenanted for many years after the tragedy and rumours spread that the child's ghost could be seen climbing out of the window and hanging by the neck at around midnight on the anniversary of his death.

An old resident of Kew recalled seeing this terrible tableau when she was a young probationary nurse. ‘I couldn't believe
my eyes,' she said. ‘I was walking up Barkers Road from the tram depot and some slight movement at the front of the darkened house caught my attention. I stopped, I remember, and put my hand on the fence and peered through the overgrown garden — and there it was! I could see plainly a small child's body with knee-length pants but no shirt or shoes or socks, swinging slowly back and forth from a knotted tangle of snowy white bed linen. His head was twisted, his little face contorted and his tongue lolled out of his mouth. For a moment I thought I was witnessing a tragedy that was happening then — at that exact moment. I screamed and felt along the fence for a gate so I could go to the child's aid. My hand touched an old rose bush and a thorn dug into my palm. The pain was intense. I looked at my hand; there was already a drop of blood on it, and when I looked back at the front of the house there was nothing there — no trail of white linen and no dead child. Every night after that, whenever I passed the house on my way home from the hospital, I looked for the little ghost, but I never saw him again and, do you know, I'm not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved.'

 

Victoria does not have a monopoly on child ghosts. Another whose story has become famous once resided (and may still do) in the Barossa Valley town of Kapunda, South Australia. On a hilltop a few kilometres from the town stand the ruins of the Kapunda Reformatory, a grim and eerie relic of harsher times, reduced now to foundations and a few bricks. Children, from infants to adolescents, were confined there in the nineteenth century under appalling conditions. Most were accused of petty crimes they may or may not have committed and a few were put there simply for convenience by parents who did not want to acknowledge them. Underfed, poorly clothed and
seldom allowed to enjoy sunlight and fresh air, dozens of short and miserable lives ended in suffering within the reformatory's cold stone walls.

At the bottom of the hill below the ruins is an old graveyard. Many of the old headstones are crumbling, the fences are rusted and weeds grow in profusion. Local residents will not venture near the ruins on the hill or the graveyard at night. Both, they claim, are the haunt of the ghost of a young girl called Vera.

Vera was an inmate in the reformatory and her grave stands in the cemetery but, as many people who have seen her will testify, she often leaves her grave at night carrying a lighted hurricane lamp and goes searching for something or someone. She appears dressed in a white shift too large for her gaunt body and her feet are bare. She can be seen rising from her grave and climbing the hill to the reformatory ruins. In earlier times before the ruins crumbled, she would enter and her lamp could be seen moving from window to window as though she were pacing the length of the building. Today it is said she looks about, confused and mystified that the building is no longer there.

Observers who have had the courage to remain have watched her return to the cemetery, stop at her grave, condense into a thin strip of intense light then slide, noiselessly, back into the earth. The letters ‘V', ‘e', ‘r' and ‘a' (inverted so the ‘e' looks like a ‘9') were often found scratched on the walls of the reformatory and are still occasionally spotted drawn in the hard-baked earth of the graveyard.

 

History records the story of another girl whose ghost haunts bushland near North Motton in Tasmania. Residents of this small town (near Ulverstone) don't like to talk about ‘their' ghost because its presence is a reminder of a brutal event that
took place in the early years of the twentieth century and which they do not care to recall. A small girl was murdered on a road that runs through a thickly wooded area just outside town and her lifeless body jammed into a hollow tree. Police reports also show that a piece of jewellery she had been wearing had been forced down her throat.

The little girl's spirit is said to wander the road where her life was so callously snuffed out. It appears unexpectedly in front of cars and has almost caused several accidents. ‘One moment the road was empty,' one driver reported, ‘and the next this kid was standing in the middle of the road! I slammed on the brakes and jammed my hand down hard on the horn, knowing there would not be time to stop before I hit her. It all happened so quickly, but I can still see the little figure that seemed to be rushing towards the car. At any moment I expected to hear the crunch as I hit her and I expected her to come flying through the windscreen … but
nothing
happened. At the moment when the impact should have occurred she was just
gone
. I stopped and jumped out of the car and ran back, but I was alone on an empty road. When I got back in my car it was filled with a kind of grey fog so I opened the windows to let the breeze through. Next I heard a faint sound coming from far off in the bush. It was an unearthly wailing noise like I
had
never and
have
never heard coming from a human throat. I hit the ignition and the accelerator, putting as much distance as I could between me and whatever it was I had seen and heard.'

 

Of all these stories about the ghosts of children perhaps the most touching comes from another part of Tasmania — the Hobart suburb of New Town, where a charming little spirit was said to occupy St John's Anglican Church, the oldest church still in use in the city.

Picture if you will, this gaunt, Gothic chapel on a Sabbath morning in winter around the middle of the nineteenth century. In a cosy, boxed-in pew close to a large fireplace where logs blazed brightly sits the governor and his family, decked out in their winter finery. Arrayed in similar pews behind the viceroy sit his aides, officers and their ladies and the local gentry. Sputtering whale oil candles fixed to the pews light their hymnals and prayer books. Merchants, tradesmen and seamen with their plump wives and well-scrubbed children rugged up against the bitter cold fill the farthest reaches of the gloomy nave.

High above the rest of the congregation in a gallery on the southern side of the church, 100 or so emaciated convicts (male and female) huddle together on hard benches under the watchful eye of their gaolers. Admission to this bare and draughty eyrie is by way of a narrow, enclosed staircase barred by three doors, unlocked and locked in succession as the convicts pass through. The great doors of the church are also securely fastened in case some rash individual should attempt to escape.

Opposite the convicts' gallery runs a second gallery and here, shivering in threadbare uniforms, are the miserable and perpetually hungry inmates of St John's School for Orphans (located next door to the church) — the abandoned offspring of convicts and paupers, unwanted children of mixed parentage and the small, confused survivors of disease and accident.

On the preacher's command the congregation begin to sing (‘Rock of Ages' perhaps, or the Twenty-third Psalm) and above the cultured voices from the nave and the gruff mutterings from the convicts' gallery rise the tremulous voices of the orphans, intoning words they barely understand, fearful that any lapse of memory or volume will earn them a box around the ears.

It is said that if you happened to be alone in St John's Church at dusk at any time in the last century you might have heard one of those tiny, plaintive voices still singing 100 years on. Parishioners called her ‘Gwennie' for want of a better name and because the eerie disembodied voice was surely that of a little girl. It is also claimed that a cloud of chill air, like cold mist, enveloped the orphans' gallery when Gwennie sang:

‘Goodness and mercy all my life

Shall surely follow me,

And in God's house for evermore

My dwelling place shall be.'

There have been no reports of Gwennie in recent years. Perhaps she has found peace and somewhere warmer to dwell. The same wish might be made for all the little ghosts in this chapter.