Reviewed by Patricia Simms-Reeve
Few people can resist the thrill of the spine-tingling ghost story. Drenched in atmosphere, aided by vivid imagination, unusual natural phenomena, and colourful descriptive language, chilling tales have been part of life for 4,000 years or more. Poetry and drama have an occasional ghostly presence, and even writers such as Arthur Conan Doyle staunchly believed in the world of spirits.
The Min Min Lights, partly explained by science, have been recorded by our Indigenous people since well before white settlers, and today with so much accessible knowledge abounding on the net, there are still countless people who believe that an unexplained presence can be possible and there are those who enjoy the chill of a well-told story of haunting.
Graham Seal, an Emeritus professor of Folklore at Curtin University, is highly qualified to write this comprehensive collection of Australian ghost stories, and has done so by assembling a wide variety of really fascinating and thought-provoking tales. Thoroughly researched, and avoiding sensationalism, the book offers a scholarly collection of ghost stories that would unfailingly attract a wide readership.
They may help us to maintain a connection with the past, as with the gold-rush days, or to reassure with the righting of a wrong when a restless phantom hovers by the scene of a violent unsolved crime. Often, they present a puzzle which sparks a range of possibilities.
The continent’s vast coastline has fostered many stirring stories of drownings, haunted lighthouses and tragic lives lost in wild oceans by shipwreck. Bass Strait especially is the watery graveyard of countless lost lives. Sometimes the reality of lives lived at places such as the Cape Otway lighthouse on Victoria’s southern coast is chilling. So tempestuous were the seas there that the supply ship could visit merely twice a year.
Legends of ghosts often alter over the years, sometimes boosted by authors of fiction who adeptly embellish them. Last century, Ion Idriess accomplished this with his account of the Roseate Pearl as well as Lassiter’s reef, a gold mine somewhere in the heart of desert Australia.
Early last century, Adelaide’s Graham’s Castle, an old gothic style structure was widely held to be haunted. Later on, a building crew discovered that the ghosts were in fact a colony of rabbits whose activities in the dead of night produced scary noises.
Places of misery, violence and downright cruelty have allowed Richmond Jail and Port Arthur to foster a strong belief in hearing signs, moans and cries of past inmates suffering their torments. Norfolk Island too is believed to be peopled by the tortured spirits of people long dead. Punishment cells can disturb even the most sceptical visitors.
Much of Australia is uninhabited and long stretches of highway, over time, become ‘ghost roads’. The Marlborough area north of Rockhampton is regarded as such. Desolate, lonely and a place where travellers have died or disappeared has made it a daunting area to cross. The Adelaide to Darwin road too, is a subject of many tragic endings.
Rottnest Island off Perth, is a very popular tourist destination today but these numbers have been, to some degree, fuelled by its tragic past. Prisoners were incarcerated there during both WWI and WW2.
One of the more touching accounts is of the statue of the Pilliga Princess, a floating spectre of a woman seen by many truck drivers. Together, they have had a statue erected to her memory.
In this entertaining book, there are many and varied subjects that range from ‘Twice Buried’, ‘The Murdering Sandhills’ to ‘A Flying Nun’, and, although they may be the product of susceptible minds and imagination, it must be mentioned that animals too are at times aware of an unseen presence and become disturbed, frightened or erratic. This poses the uncertain thought that ‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio…’
Best Australian Ghost Stories
[2025]
by Graham Seal
Allen and Unwin
ISBN: 978 176147 210 7
$34.99; 314pp