Best Australian Ghost Stories by Graham Seal - Extract

Read an extract from Best Australian Ghost Stories by Graham Seal.

The Haunted House at Humpty Doo

‘I have certainly seen a few strange things happening at that house, and the last time I saw a few things flying around.’

Father Tom English was describing his experience in a house in the small Northern Territory town of Humpty Doo. He went on to say, ‘This mercurochrome bottle came flying out of the bathroom and there wasn’t anybody in the bathroom. It was very strange stuff, I have never seen anything like it.’ He blessed the house five times but could not shift the unsettled spirit that seemed to have invaded.

This was just the beginning of the troubled times the residents of the house would suffer over the next few months, and not all from supernatural sources.

It was January 1998. The comfortable, four-bedroom bungalow nestled in bush was the picture of banality. Two couples and a male mate were living in the house when another couple with an eleven-month-old daughter moved in. The frightening incidents began almost immediately. Stones fell from the sky or the ceiling. Knives, tools and other objects also fell or were seemingly thrown. Then the messages began to appear on walls or using Scrabble tiles. One of the first messages read FIRE, SKIN, CAR, HELP and TROY. The inhabitants took this to be a reference to the death of their friend Trouy (so spelled), who had died in a fiery road accident a few months earlier.

It was now that Father English arrived. When he performed his blessings, windows were mysteriously smashed, and his Bible and crucifix were thrown around by an unseen force.

Other priests also failed to exorcise whatever was troubling the house and its inhabitants.

A television program arrived to cover the amazing story. They paid the inhabitants for access and spent more than three weeks documenting the incident, managing to record several examples of apparent haunting. But, after screening the story, the program declared it to be a hoax— the work of the inhabitants. The residents of the Humpty Doo house were not happy and cut off further contact with the program.

Shortly afterwards, some experienced ghost hunters arrived and struck up a more positive relationship with the people in the house. They were able to stay there and witnessed many unexplained incidents, including the frequent disappearance of the crucifix Father English had left in the house. It would suddenly reappear, crashing into a wall. Pistol cartridges materialised from nowhere, pebbles and knives fell or were thrown, and mattresses were unaccountably moved.

The residents, traumatised but determined, had now taken to speaking to whatever was haunting them. They swore at it and told it to go away, refusing to believe it was their dead friend Trouy. They even took to tormenting the spirit by reading psalms from the Bible and generally became used to living with the malicious unknown. But it became too much in the end. All the residents left the house in May, after almost five months of deeply disturbing and unexplained incidents, intense media scrutiny and what appeared to be a psychic assault.

The story was national news for many weeks. There were the usual suggestions that the events were caused by a poltergeist, the suspect being the one-year-old child. This would be unusual in poltergeist cases because the culprit is usually, though not always, an adolescent. An Aboriginal curse was mentioned, as well as a malediction from the Greek wife of the property’s original owner. He and his family had been forced by their bank to sell many years before and were reportedly desperate to return to what had been their dream home.

Or was it all a hoax, as many, including the television program, claimed? The ghost hunters paid close attention to this possibility. Their verdict? ‘We don’t believe hoaxers were at work but if they were they were not only first-rate conjurers but first-class actors as well.’

Nobody knew then what caused the Humpty Doo high jinks, nor does anyone today. It remains one of the most puzzling cases of apparent haunting in Australian history.

Photo Credit: Australian Poltergeist

Extracted from Best Australian Ghost Stories by Graham Seal.

Published by Allen & Unwin.

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Best Australian Ghost Stories

by Graham Seal

Australia's master storyteller uncovers stories of hauntings and uncanny events in the bush and in our towns - and maybe in your own neighbourhood too.

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