Don’t believe in ghosts? Why would you? They’ve never been more than stories to scare little children, fictions steeped in mediaeval superstition, stunts by spiritualist charlatans or practical jokes by pranksters. In these enlightened days of high-tech science, surely we can separate the chaff from the ectoplasm? Don’t be so sure, says NOEL MURPHY.
THE kids hold their breath as they run past the old abandoned house in Newtown. That’s how you stop the ghosts inside from getting you, they explain, seriousness writ large across their dials.
Some execute a sign of the cross as they pass the cemetery at East Geelong. Elderly folk keep mirrors in the windows to prevent spirits from entering their home. Others opt for metal amulets, candles, charms, gemstones, chants, holy water, and the old favourite, garlic.
You can’t be too careful with the dearly departed, it seems. You should always remove a dead body from the home feet first, re-arrange the furniture so they don’t recognise the place if they return, or keep a metal horseshoe over the doorway.
Of course, these are old prophylactics against ghosts but are they actually as out of date, or ineffectual, as you might think? Besides, ghosts aren’t really real, anyway. Are they?
Pam Jewson begs to differ. The publicist, director of Geelong Business Network-Training and project manager of the Golden Plate awards, had a protracted relationship with a poltergeist at Belmont’s Buena Vista motel when she managed it in the 1980s.
“The kitchen used to be locked at night, I had the keys and I locked it all up myself,” Jewson recalls.
“I slept below the kitchen and used to hear footsteps in the kitchen going back forth _ all the time, even though no-one could get in.
“One particular night, I heard all this banging and taps going so I ran up and opened up. Here was all this ice from the freezer all over benches and all the taps turned on _ at about two in the morning.
“At first, I really thought ‘Oh, the chef’s playing tricks on me’ and for ages I didn’t come at this ghost phenomenon, but over time there were too many incidents to wipe it.
“It was scary at first but in the end I got so used to it I didn’t worry.”
Jewson says staff and owners were all familiar with the ghost, who they called Nathaniel.
Story was that Nathaniel had worked at a motel over the road, where Kmart is presently sited. He purportedly suicided and relocated to the new motel across High St.
How true the story might be is anyone’s guess but Jewson’s adamant about her experience.
So too is another who differs with ghost cynics: Colin Frisch, executive officer of Karingal and the Karingal Foundation, and former marketing manager at Gordon TAFE.
He swears by a ghost traipsing the upstairs corridors of the Fenwick St campus of a night and says he’s hardly the only person to have encountered the apparition.
“A whole range of people including myself claim to have seen a ghostly image or apparition,” Frisch says.
“The story is all based around a former staffer who committed suicide by either eating rat poison and/or hanging himself in the college’s bell tower.
“This guy supposedly got a girl pregnant but he was the wrong guy. Now he’s upset and he has wandered halls of the Gordon since the 1930s.”
Frisch says it’s “a pretty spooky experience’’ going up the bell tower.
“There’s a trap door he would have pushed aside and a ladder inside the tower to get up and change flags,’’ he said.
“He supposedly opened the door, threw a rope over an Oregon beam and they found him dangling there.
“I’ve been working on the top floor at seven at night when something someone passed the door, it sent a chill right up my spine.”
Irish Murphy’s owner Barb Smoorenburg relates another ghostly tale, about a spectre dubbed ‘Mary’, who’s given guests, drinkers and staff more than a few shivers down the years.
The old Argyle Hotel _ dubbed The Strangler’s Arms after the killing of a woman upstairs in the 1950s _ has been witness to glasses hurled across rooms, urns lifted up and moved, doors slammed shut, dockets spat out of printers, phones set ringing, terrifying voices hissed into the ears of staff and drinkers, and more.
“My daughter Victoria was working here alone one night and rang me almost hysterical after one Mary incident,” says Barb.
“The salt and pepper shakers start jiggling all on their own and someone said something quite clearly in her ear. She was so scared she couldn’t even remember what they said.
“I said stay on the (cordless) phone and go upstairs and turn off the lights. Then while I was still on the phone with her I had a call come through from her mobile _ which she’d left downstairs.”
Mary’s also happily turned washing machines on and off, locked staff in the laundry, rattled doors and windows, shaken bar mats, made creepy wind-like whooshing sounds _ she’s nothing if not a busy poltergeist.
Ghostly stories abound across Geelong. And they’re a shivery species of spooky tale too.
Scratch around and pretty soon you find plenty of accounts:
_ A young female ghost haunting Moorabool Street’s former Pancake Parlour, now the Black Bull, after being raped and murdered out the back in Gore Place. Chairs stacked on tables have reportedly moved back and forth around the restaurant.
_ An apocryphal tale of a ghostly baby trapped between floors in Kitchener House, opposite Geelong Hospital.
_ Books and shoes thrown from shelves and across the floor at Myer’s Malop St store, rows of televisions and radios inexplicably turned on, footsteps, basketballs spinning in mid-air at the top of the escalators _ all thought to be the handiwork of the one-time champion of cheapness, 19th century merchant Morrie Jacobs.
_ The shade of undertaker James Munro, meant to whisper body sizes to passers-by outside his former Ryrie St premises, site of today’s Scof. Munro had a spyhole upstairs where he watched for business coming through the front door. The back yard was meant to have been fertilised by the drained fluids of corpses.
Then there’s the old Geelong Gaol, touted as one the district’s most haunted buildings.
There you’ll find my dear old man’s namesake, James Murphy, whose presence is said to be felt around cell 47 and was the first person sent to bright yellow gallows the gaol hosted back in 1863 for the murder of a policeman at the Warrnambool courthouse.
Whisper is you should also be wary around cell number 45 where a malevolent energy is rumoured to hold court _ and where visitors are said to have been pinched or even pushed into the cell.
And of course Winchelsea’s National Trust property Barwon Park is renowned for housing a ghost even if sightings are little more than a moving light sighted occasionally from the bedroom where Elizabeth Austin died in 1901. A photograph of a young woman in a low-cut dress that emerged in recent years has been subject of considerable controversy.
St Albans Park is known for ghosts, too. Built 1873 for racehorse breeder James Wilson, it’s meant to harbour several sprites, among them a racehorse owner, a sleazy ladies man and a disappearing jockey.
Newtown’s Barwon Grange, another National Trust property, is known for a long-gowned female ghost while immediately south of the river, Belmont’s Kardinia House, built in the 1850s for Geelong’s first mayor, Alexander Thompson, is known for an old knitting lady found reaching out to children sleeping in their bed.
She seems comparatively well behaved to other poltergeists supposedly inhabiting the property and kicking up slightly more of a ruckus _ emptying kitchen cupboards of their contents, and scattering them across the floor.
Once again, Colin Frisch, whose Karingal duties are undertaken at Kardinia House, attests to working in a haunted house.
“It’s not actually been my experience but it has been for heaps of staff here,’’ he says.
“They talk about security systems and lights going off, about drapes and doors that are icy cold to the touch. Our cleaner, who comes in early in the mornings, just tells it to sod off.’’
Susan Hill, author of The Woman in Black, writes of ghosts and “…howlings and shriekings, groanings and scuttlings, and the clanking of chains, of hooded monks and headless horsemen, swirling mists and sudden winds…” and, it seems, has a fair take on what it is we prefer to curdle our blood and chill our marrow.
Nope, nothing real about ghosts… just remind yourself of that when next you’re walking the streets of Geelong at night.
And don’t forget to hold your breath as you creep past that abandoned old house.
