roma ghost (1889)

7/27/2019 Roma Ghost (1889)

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Queensland Figaro and Punch (Brisbane, Qld : 1885 - 1889), Saturday 22 June 1889, page 5, 6

National Library of Australia http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article84756918

Ghostly Apparitionsat Roma.

A Haunted House.

Do you believe in ghosts ? The careless will laughout a negative; the mystical will fall back upon

their unexplainable weird experiences as,a covert for

silence; the thoughtful will hesitate to say that

they disbelieve in ghosts, or that anything is im

possible because it is not dreamt of in their philos

ophy.

We are all more or less superstitious. We have

our lucky days, our lucky dreams, our omens, our

portents, our premonitions, our warnings, and our

inspirations. Byron believed in the mystic signals

to the soul, but, perhaps, superstition is a natural

attribute of a poet. Byron excused his weakness—sif it was a weakness—by citing illustrious instances

of similar believers; as that Scott believed in secondsight; Rousseau tried whether he would be damned

or ziot by aiming at a tree with a stone; Goethe

trusted to the chance of a knife's striking the water

I

whether he was to succeed in some under

taking; Swift placed the success of his life

on the drawing a trout he had hooked out of

the water; Socrates' demon was no fiction;

Monk Lewis had his monitor,- and Bonaparte many

warnings. All such superstitions are iiatural to the

weakness of humanity, and to the finite limitations

of human reason; but, tell me do you believe in

ghosts P Or are you prepared to boldly dispute thepossibility of their existence ?

I

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Moses and Elias reappeared on the Mount of

Transfiguration, and howare we to interpret the

avowal— liberal as its meaning may be—in tto

Apostles' Creed," I; believe .

. ., . in the corn

manion of saints P" For one must baa ghost to be a

saint, I fanoy.

The immortal Shakespeare had much to tell us

about ghosts, and makes his ghosts lovable and

instruments of good, instead of perpetrators of evil,

though he does warn us in Hamlet not to follow a

ghost that might "tempt ns toward the flood, or to

the dreadful summit of the cliff that beetles o'er his

base into the sea." The divine William lets us into

a main secret of ghost habits, how they vanish at

dawn, when they "scent the morning airor, more

definitely still, how they regard "the cock, that is

the trumpet of the morn," when that noisy

fowl doth"

awake the god of day;"for, if we are to believe Shakespeare,no ghost can stand the noise of cockcrow, but, at its

warning, "whether in sea or fire, in earth or air,the

extravagant and erring spirit hies to his confine."

Yet, Shakespeare himself professed not to believe in

ghosts, if we are to heed his statement in the«Winter's Tale"—" Come, poor babe, I have heard

hut not believed, the spirits of the dead may walk

againbut, immediately afterwards, comes the ad

mission—"If such things be, thy mother appearedto me last night."

Addison treated the ghost theory with badinagewhen he said—' A spirit is such a little thing that

1 have heard a man, who was a great Bcholar, say,

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that he'll dance a Lancashire hornpipe upon the

point of a needle "—from which is probably derived

the irreverent problem as to the number of angels

who could do the same.

Earnest H. Brooke, in his "The Fool of Quality/'

deals seriously with ghosts and boldly 'denies them

room in human surroundings, arguing,

thus—" Lnever could think it for the interest of religion that

the providence of God should be elbowed, ias it were,

quite out of the world by a system of demonism. On

the other hand, I take the devil to be a personage of

much more prudence than to frighten his favorites

from him, by assuming such horrid and disgustful

appearances/'

Modern psychologists lay down laws by which they

assert they define this"

spiritual and material

blend," and though tbey do not affirm the existence

of the classical and poetical myths knpwn as.gnomeB,sylphs, elves, pixies, spooks, Ac.jit is not the

business of their creed to deny their existence. Then

the theosophists—the oocultists—speak tons of astral

bodies and fragmentary souls not yet human, andseek

to -account foroccultphenomena by esotericforces andlaws, which need no ghost agency, but are referableto

certain mysterious "

Himalayan Brothers," located

goodness-knows-where in Thibet, or elsewhere. Pro

fessor Fiiedrich Zollner, the author of Transcendental

Physics tried to account for spiritual phenomena by

the hypothesis of a "fourth dimension in space."

And so the baffled enquirer gets a hard tossing of it

from theory to theory, unless (so say the Spiritu

alists) youadinit Spiritualism, which amply

accounts for all otherwise inexplicable phenomena. *

After all, it is a personal question for each~" D&'

you believe in ghosts f Do you believe that dead

ndividualities can materialise and become visible to

human eyesP

"1

Mine is not now the task to lay down the founda-j

tions of a faith, or the lines of a creed 5 it is not now ;

tbe task to confess my own belief in anything orj

nothing; it is simply to narrate facts that can

i

be attested by living witnesses at present easily get

atable.

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The Haunted House at Roma.

I am not going to curdle your blood or harrow

your feelings. I certainly have to tell about an;

apparition—the apparition of a woman—but she ha9

proved herself a gentle ppectre, and has as yet done

no worse harm than to

pull the blanketsoff

a sleepingman. The facts of this narrative have been brought

under the notice of His Honor Judge Paul, who in

tends to obtain the sworn affidavit of each witness,

and to publish the evidence thus obtained, with his

own conclusions respecting it, in some scientific

journal of good repute. For the purposes of Figaro,I do not place the witnesses on oath, neither do I

take down their ipsissima verba, but conveniently

run it into narrative form ; nevertheless, every state

ment placed here is so placed on the utterances of

the persons to whom the experiences actually oc

curred.

I imagine, then, a very ordinary 4-roomed house,

with adjuncts, near the hospital, Roma, owned byMr. Bradheau, and who lived in it himself for about

six months, gome 14 years ago. There was a front

sitting-room, and a front bedroom (hereafter called

Bed-room No. 1) ; two back bedrooms (No. 2, just

behind No. 1; and'No. 3 behind the sitting-room); a

tall between the two back bedrooms; a pantry

attached to Bed-mom No. 3 ; and a kitchen detached

from the whole building. There were two tanks at

tbe side of the house, outside the sitting-room.

Such was Mr. Bradheau's house, in which he lived

for some 6 month p, and which he became anxious to

let some 14 years ago. The house was a wooden

one.

Mr. Bradheau succeeded in finding a tenant in a Mr.

White, who lived alone in this house for about a

month, after which he was joined by his wife and

family. The first night of Mr. White's lonely

occupancy he slept in Bedroom No. 1. Be

fore going to bed, he was engaged in

that apartment reading. About 12 o'clock midnight,

he saw through the open door of bedroom No. 1,

beyond which door there was no light, a woman

standing. She was dressed in dark clothes, and her

black hair was done up in loops. She was leaning

forward and looking straight at Mr. White. He

started and she vanished immediately.

On the second night, Mr. White saw; the same

woman in the same and but earlier in

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woman in the same place and posture^ but earlier in

the night, it being about 11 o'clock. A few moments

previous to seeing her, he had looked in the direc

tion she chose for her manifestation, but had seen

nothing. She vanished directly he looked at her.

Mr. White several times saw the same apparition

in the same place and in the> same posture, during

the month in which he resided alone at the house.

There was always sufficient light to have seen a real

person had a real person"

been standing where the

apparition was.' The figure of the woman stood out

in and seemed to fill

space and displace air, as if it

were the figure of a physical .body.

After a month of Mr. White's residence there, he

was joined by his wife and six children, and a servant

girl. These arrived at the house in the daytime. Mr.

White said nothing to them or to anyone about the

spectral appearances. That very evening he wentinto Roma, and did not return home until between

J.0 o'clock and 11 o'clock p.m. No sooner had he

entered the housa and sat down than Mrs. White,

masked—" Have you seen anything since you have

bfeen here F"

^^^iplied, "Why, whathave you seen ?"

,the figure of a woman while I was sitting in

the sitting-room," she said.

Asked what the figure was like, Mrs. White gave a

description of the apparition which her husband had

several times seen. Mr. White did not himself see it

on that night.

Notbiiig strange was seen or heard in the house

until about a fortnight afterwards. Then, one night,

between 10 o'clock and 11 o'clock, as Mr. and Mrs.

White were sitting in the sitting-room, the children

being in bed, they heard a noise outside the house, as

if water were running from the taps of the tanks.

Mr. White, thinking the tank-tap3 had somehow goff

tnrned"

onwent outside and examined them, but

found nothing the matter. This phenomenon of the

noise of "escaping water' from the tanks was after

wards heard _many times by Mr. White during his

tenancy of the house, which covered a period of two

years; and it.was also beard by many other persons

who at such times were always in the sitting-r»om

No water ever actually escaped from the taps on

>

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these occasions.>

There were several other mysterious noises in the

house at times. Locked doors, though they never

moved, would'be beard as if swinging open and

banging to. Sometimes would be heard noises on the

roof.asof the scrambling of birds j or the sounds -made'

by parrotsand

cockatoos.Mr. White often rushed

out to look at the roof, but could never see anything

there. Mr. White frequently heard the noire as of a

chain being dragged underneath the house, which

was built on blocks. He also saw the apparition

many times, but always from the bedroom and in the

position described as that of its firstappearance.

Mrs. White also saw the spectre severaltimes; but the

husband and wife never saw it at one anclthe same

time. Perhaps that is because they never happened

to be looking at the exact favorite spot at the same

time.The servant girl also stated that she saw the

ghost, but Mr. White is not certain where the girl

said she sawit. The girl, however, had to-be per

mitted to Bleep away from the house, as she refused

to sleep there any more.

One night, in Mr. White's absence, a Mrs. Rohan,

who visited Mrs. White, saw the ghost.

On another evening, when Mr. White was absent,

a Mr. Hewitt, a dentist, was using the sitting-room.

When Mr. White returned, Mr. Hewitt said —

"You've got some funny companions in the house,"and told Mr. White he had seen an apparition,

describing the woman whose figure wa,s becoming

familiar by that time. Mr. White acknowledged to

Mr. Hewitt that he had eeen the woman so described

several times.

The Smith family—6quatters living at Stuart's

Creek, near Rorua—also saw the spirit. They had

not been told of the previous appearances. Mrs.

Eliza Smith was with Mrs. White when she saw and

described the apparition accurately enough for identi

ficition. On the same night, Alfred Smith was

walking home with Mr. White, when a startling

experience befell both men. When about 40 yards or

50 yards from the house, both men suddenly found

themselves apparently enveloped in smoke and fire

which spread upwards from the ground just under

and in front of their feet. There was no smell, no

sound, no heat, and the apparent flames and smoke

disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared. In

to Judge Paul, Mr. White declares that there

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reply to Judge Paul, Mr. White declares that there

was no "diffused light" in connection with this

phenomenon. Mr. White mentioned the occurrence

directly he and Mr. Alfred Smith got into the house.

Mr. Alfred Smith recollects the incident clearly.

Hawtrey White, son of Mr. White, and then about

8 years or 9 yearsold, saw the form of the woman in

the usual place and posture, but he was himself in

the sitting-room. He had not heard of the appear

ances before.

None of Mr. White's children were told by the

parents of the mysterious sights j yet they all saw

the apparition. Once, one of the children saw the

form of a woman in Bedroom No. li and rushed out

of the room in alarm.

Not a green thing, not a blade of grass woujd grow

within a radius of 30 or 40 yards of the house,

althoughthe soil

appearedto be perfectly good.

Mr. White left the house about the year 1877, and

was succeeded in its tenancy by Mrs. Cartwright, to

whom the house was let by Mr. Graynor, an employee

in the Government service. Some time after, Mr.

White bad vacated the house, Mr. Graynor #sked him

if he had ever heard any strange noises in it.

"

Why ?"

asked White.

"JMrs. Cartwright saysit is haunted/' exclaimed

Gaynor,"

and will not live in it."

"What did shebea,r?" enquired White.

"Her husband andherself

went to bed,after

having locked up the house," pursued Mr. Graynor,

"and were wakened out of their sleep by hearing

doors slammed. Mr. Cartwright got up but found

all the doors locked/'

After this, the house very naturally acquired an

evil reputation, and bore the name ofbeing haunted.

Mr. White left Roma several years ago, and heard

nothing more about the house until a couple of

months ago— April, 1889.

Haunting the Site.

In April last, Hawtrey White, the son, was in

Roma. Curiosity prompted him to go out to the old

spot in order to view his past home. He found that

the house had been pullfed down, but some fending

served to indicate its former site._

Hawtrey White

came across a young man there, with a swag,' and the

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came across

two talked as meeting bushmen will. Then the

young man told young White a Btrange story.

The Swagman's Tale.

"I have been sleeping in a tent pitched on thesite

of this house you say you lived in, but I wouldn't

sleep there again for £5 a night. The veryfirst

night, I sudd nly woke Up, shivering with cold. Myblankets were off me, and I fulled them over me

again. Nothing further happened that night. On

the second night, I was again awakened with the

cold feeling, and found the blankets were

once more off me. I pulled the blankets on to

the bunk again, aind fastened them with wire to the

bunk to keep them secure. I was just dozing off

again, when I felt the blankets being gently moved.

I opened my eyes and saw the figure'of a woman

standingat the foot of

mybed and

holdingthe bed

clothes. There was ho light in the tent, but the fire

at its entrance was glowing, and by its light I could

see the woman distinctly. She was an elderly

looking, old-fashioned-looking woman. Her hair

was done over her ears. I was frightened and put my

hands to my eyes. As I did so the woman disap

peared."

Before going to my tent on tlie third night, I

told my two nights' previous experiences%o a friend

in Roma, and this friend agreed to cotme and

stay in the tent with me during the night.The arrangement was that my friend was

to sit in a corner of the tent and watch. Both

of us tried to keep awake. I .'fell asleep,

however, and was aigain awakened by a feeling of

cold, and found the blankets once more off the bed.

My friend was fast asleep, and I awoke him, showinghim the blankets off the bed. My friend told me to

goto Bleep again and he would watch. I did. so.

Later on, I was awakened by my friend and the

blankets were again off. My friend told me that, as

I lay asleep, he saw a woman come to my bed andpull off the clothes. He was so frightened that he

could not speak, but watched the woman closely.

As soon as the clothes were off, she vanished. Then -

he was able to awake me."

Another witness to whom I am referred as being

likely to give evidence regarding this female ghost is

Mrs. Hogan..

Summary.

Such is the tale told of seen near

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Such is the tale told of apparitions seen near

Eoma by several witnesses now living. What do

you think of it ? A spiritualist would probably say

that here isan unquiet, disembodied spirit trying

very hard to run across a good medium, in order to

communieate some important intelligence to the

material world. A romancist would weave a tragedy

possibly around this female wraith, who, however,does not seem to have any more serious earthly

materialisation to do than to remove the bedclothes

from the sleeping form of a young swagman. Cer

tainly there are the mysterious noises from the tanks

and on the roof to work on, but the tragedy wouldlack horrors unless, indeed, an artist hand worked

up the fire and smoke phenomenon, and gave some

demoniacal reason for the.refusal of vegetation to

grow on the"

blasted heath"

around the dwelling;

Seriously

speaking—The witnesses areof

goodre

pute and truthful. The appearances actually shapedthemsel ves to the visions of many witnesses." ihenoises were undoubtedly heard by several distinct

parties. -

What theory is sufficient to satisfactdrily accountfor iall these phenomena ?

-

Cigar Pasha isone. of the greatest generals in El

Mahdi's army. He is so fond, "too, of the fragrant

weed, that he iscommonly called Mustapha {must

havea)

Club House Cigar.

roma ghost (1889)

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