Geraldton Guardian and Express 17th April, 1947 p6
Spooks and witches do not intend to be elbowed out of the post-war world. They have been making their presence felt with renewed vigour just recently in many parts of the world — in Essex, Buckinghamshire, Ireland, Natal and the Cameroons in West Africa, to name just a few.
One of the most sensational stories pointing to the re-birth of spooks and witches comes from Essex, where a bull -dozer stirred up more trouble than enough. The scene of the story is the little village of Great Leighs, where the bull-dozer, pushing emphatically along a lane which was too narrow to accommodate it, turned over at the cross roads a stone which had been set there two hundred years previously to anchor the mortal remains of a witch who had been burned at the stake.
Since then there has been the devil to pay. Church bells have rung by themselves, huge stones have been tossed about like pebbles, hay stacks overturned, and doors slammed shut of their own accord. One of the village elders, finding a stone that would take three men to lift tossed carelessly on to his doorstep, scratched his thatched head thoughtfully. ‘I don’t believe in witches,’ he said —’But then my father didn’t believe in radio!’ The village has become the centre of investigation by the London University Council of Psychical Investigation, which has found no explanation for the disturbances, and attributes them to mischief making poltergeists.
Poltergeists are a type of ghost which specialises in making nuisances of themselves. They throw your best china about, pull chairs away as you go to sit down, blow hot air round your ankles and cold air around your wrists. They fling pictures across a room, and rattle the windows on a still night. They clank invisible chains up and down the stairway, and freeze the water pipes in the middle of summer. They have the perverted sense of humour of practical jokers, but they wreak more damage than any mere practical joker would dare.
Even in these days of acute housing shortages, poltergeists are usually left in sole occupation of a house once they settle in. Cold mists which leave yellow stains on the wall, door bells which ring in an unwired house, and sepulchral wailings at the midnight hour will drive most tenants out of a poltergeist-controlled house. Even physical research investigators feel their hair rising a little at some of the manifestations of a well-trained talented poltergeist!
There have been countless documented and signed statements regarding the damage caused by these ‘creatures,’ and, although you may scoff at such things, hard-headed business men have learnt to take them as a matter of course.
In Buckinghamshire recently a girl and her mother declared that the 270 year-old house in which they live is haunted by a ghost which tickles their faces and pulls off their blankets. ‘It’s not the transparent kind of ghost,’ said the mother. ‘He is a tall misty-white figure with broad shoulders. One night, when I tried to get out of bed, I felt a hand grip my waist, and push me back, and some times the bed rocks as though the ghost were trying to pick the whole thing up.’
Not a nice sensation to go to bed with — but the house is next to the graveyard at Langley, so perhaps it is merely a case of lost-direction on the part of the ghost. Perhaps he is just trying to find his own particular tombstone.
In Ireland recently a Dublin lorry driver died of shock after giving a lift to a ghost. Before he died, he told a friend that he had been driving from Mullingar to Athlone (County Galway), when he became aware of an old man sitting beside him in the cabin of the lorry. At the Bishop’s Tree in Milltown Pass, the old man got out and walked towards the graveyard, where he disappeared. The driver told the same story to the Civic Guards — and shortly afterwards died of delayed shock. There is a superstition that five bishops were buried under the Bishops’ Tree. When the sixth died, there was no room for him there.
The ghost story from Natal concerns the Olympics, a native football team which was suspended for five years for using witchcraft against their opponents. The Olympics sued the native secretary of the Natal African Football Association with defamation. The secretary said that he had accused the Olympics of using witchcraft after members of the opposing team, the Pirates, had begun to roll on the ground in hysterics. In spite of the attentions of a witchdoctor, the Pirates continued to scream and collapse, and one by one they had to be carried from the field. The secretary added darkly that he had heard other complaints about the Olympics resorting to witchcraft on previous occasions.
From Africa too comes the story of the beer drinking ghost which inhabited Johann Albrechshohe, once a German military barracks and later a rest home for Government officials in the Cameroons. The old building was recently demolished, but the story of the thirsty ghost will probably linger for all time. The building built many years ago on the edge of an extinct volcano, was haunted by a former German district officer. Used to having his own way in life, the ghost set-up melancholy wails and groans until the household learnt how to pacify him. Sleepless nights worried everybody until some bright soul hit on the idea I of leaving a tray set with a bottle of beer and a glass every night just before 12 o’clock. This was evidently just what the ghost was wanting. The householders slept peacefully thereafter — but they often wondered when in the morning they viewed the glass encrusted with dried froth how the ghost had been able to consume the beer without removing the patent stopper. They felt that if the ghost knew how to pour beer out of an unopened bottle, he ought to have been able to solve the easier problem of keeping himself supplied with beer.
Not all ghost stories belong to ‘the other side of the world.’ Australia and New Zealand have their ghost stories too — but most of these ghosts seem to be well-established, and in no need of pressing their claims for recognition in the post-war world. Fisher’s ghost is probably the best known of the New South Wales collection, and there are many authenticated stories from people who have seen this ghost, which haunts a bridge in the Camden district. Not far off, in Meningie, is the ghost of a convict who haunts an old mill where, legend says, he was flogged to death.
In New Zealand some years ago an old family house stood vacant for many years on St. John’s Hill, one of the popular residential suburbs of Wanganui. The house belonged to a well known pioneer family who were forced to walk out after too many months of shattering experiences. They would walk into a room to find the piano playing by itself, doors would swing violently open or shut in their faces, and the household cats would spit and arch their backs at unseen enemies. The house was burnt down only a year or so ago.
For nearly eighty years a ghost ship has been the traditional storm warning along the coastal waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Wild and fantastic are the stories surrounding the ship that is said to haunt the shores of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, always before a storm. Fishermen, farmers, residents and even train crews speeding along the lines close to the shore have reported seeing the phantom ship. Always, they say, its rigging and spars are ablaze, while weird tongues of flame lick the masts. A red glow hangs over the whole scene. It is one of the most repeated tales of Canadian coasts.
Even a clergyman testifies to having seen the ship. He described his experience later: — ‘I was returning in company with three other men from conducting services on Port Hood Island. We were walking across the ice to the mainland and about a mile away from us there was open water. Suddenly the sky was lit up by a red glow and I saw a strange blood-red ship sailing northward along the edge of the ice pack. We watched if for fifteen minutes. We came to the conclusion that it was a three-masted schooner ablaze from stem to stern.’
Through the years hundreds of people claim to have seen the ship. There have been many varied accounts of its origin. Some say it was an immigrant vessel that went ashore on its way to Quebec and was struck by lightning. Others claim it was a man-o-war that blew up in the war of 1812. Countless fishermen have manned their boats and set out to investigate the phantom ship, but it has always eluded them and remained always at the same distance, like a mirage in a desert.
