Great Australian Ghost Stories by Richard Davis

and lantern-shaped. He wore an old-fashioned coat of dark-coloured velvet and tight knee breeches. He had large buckles on his shoes and a heavy gold watch chain was fixed to his waistcoat and glinted in the moonlight. Under his arm he carried a brass telescope — like those used by ship’s captains — and I fancied that before I had woken he had been using the instrument to look out the window. Now, however, his gaze rested squarely on me in a piercing and accusing stare. He was scowling at me as he would if he had come upon an intruder.’ The travellerreached for his walking cane and the apparition vanished. Next morning when he described his nocturnal visitor it fitted the description old-timers gave of the King of the Hawkesbury.
    The ghosts of three different convicts are also said to haunt the house. One, according to a popular but unlikely story, was Jane Wiseman’s lover whom Solomon caught, tied in chains and dumped in the river. The second is an old lag who was supposed to have been flogged to death at Cobham Hall and the third a young convict-servant who came to Solomon one day begging to be allowed to go to Sydney to visit his dying mother. Solomon, the story goes, refused his request, saying there was too much work to do. The young man ran away and tried to swim across the river (which is odd considering Sydney is in the opposite direction), but his leg-irons dragged him under.
    This convict was said to appear regularly at the door of Cobham Hall in ghostly form searching for his former master and still begging for permission to go to his mother. A witness described him as covered in weed and slime and with tears coursing down his ashen face: ‘His hands were raised and held together, like he was prayin’ or beggin’. There weren’t much flesh on him … maybe like he’d been eaten by the fishes, but his leg-irons was still on his ankles. I ain’t never seen anything so bloody terrifying in all me life!’
    One, or both, of the other convicts have been heard slowly dragging their leg-irons and chains across the yard, into the house and up the stairs — an eerie clanking sound that is all the more frightening because it has no visible source.
    In the spring of 1961 Jane’s ghost was blamed for a farcical sequence of events while the hotel was being renovated. An old wall was deliberately knocked down and, at the moment it fell, thunder boomed overhead and another wall collapsedspontaneously. An embankment close by gave way, allowing 5000 gallons (22 cubic metres) of water to rush like a tsunami through the ground floor of the hotel, smashing furniture and making what the appalled owner at the time called ‘a horrid mess’.
    In 1967 a well-known psychic and her assistants spent a night in the hotel with photographic and sound-recording equipment. At around midnight the temperature in the kitchen plummeted and a black cloud (‘like smoke, but not smoke’) enveloped half the room, obscuring everything it covered. Photographs taken then reveal a dark haziness over the affected area.
    The expressway now linking Sydney and Newcastle takes a different route from the old Great Northern Road. There’s not much traffic through Wisemans Ferry any longer but it is a popular spot for campers and visitors to nearby national parks. There is a cable-operated vehicular ferry where Solomon’s ferry ran, and Cobham Hall under its Wisemans Ferry Hotel guise is still there — much altered but intact. To this day if you ask staff about the ghosts they will tell you stories of doors mysteriously opening and closing just last week, of strange noises heard the week before, of items moved by unseen hands and of the shadowy figure seen ‘not long ago’. Whoever the restless spirits are that haunt Wisemans Ferry, they don’t seem to show any inclination to depart.

11.
The Guyra Ghost: A Touchy Subject
    â€˜Oh, Sir, Sir, there are more tricks