My heart surgery’s over. It was just 19 days ago that I was on a table with my chest opened up to the eyes and fingers of surgeons but here I am, back at the computer with a mechanical part ticking away inside. I feel surprisingly normal, though it will take a while for my arms to be properly useful again. Right now they’re only good for drawing and typing (and Skyrim). In other words, I’m well and truly back to work and will be doing little else for at least 6-8 weeks.

Here are a few things about my experience that I won’t easily forget. If you’re easily scared, please read on.

Images

I had horrifying visions and dreams in hospital. Mostly whenever I closed my eyes I had flashes of decaying faces with terrified expressions, or extreme close-ups of open, dead eyes or ruptured skin. Occasionally something beautiful but oddly disturbing would play. One of these was a sheet of floral fabric billowing slowly in bright sunlight, but a hellish choral soundtrack gave the scene a nightmarish ambience that I’ll remember for a long time.

These were always slow and clear, as if 1000 fps in HD. Just a series of slow motion scenes that sat behind my eyes, waiting for me to blink or doze.

My guess is that the drugs had something to do with this, but they weren’t nightmares and I never woke in fright. Even when I dreamed that I woke in a mass grave, my own face tightly surrounded by blood-drenched soil and other dead faces.

Even though I haven’t painted in many years, I find myself inspired to create a series of paintings, based on these images which are still vivid in my head.

ICU

The ICU staff were incredible, though I was generally uncomfortable and in quite some pain. There were tubes and needles hanging out of my arms, chest and neck. There were monitors and cables all over me so I could barely turn my head without pulling some device across the bed and setting off an alarm. My room in ICU had no windows, no TV, not even a picture on the wall. After 3 days I was ready to risk injury and punch through one of those walls to get out. Without my visitors (Jeanette, Mum, Dad) walking into the room every day with their familiar smiles and normal clothes, I would probably have started flinging food and singing loud, angry songs like some insane prisoner.

The nurses in ICU told me they had always referred to my room as the sensory deprivation chamber. Thankfully, once out in the ward, I had more freedom and I did a lot of walking.

Night walks

My imagination has a life of its own but I’m not easily frightened. Even as a little kid, I was more fascinated than scared of what might be lurking in the dark. I always considered myself the scary one, rather than the one who’s scared.

In hospital though, I did something I never thought I’d do. A couple of nights, unable to sleep, I wandered alone through that huge maze of a hospital between 2 – 4am. The corridors, some of them easily 100 metres long were dark and empty, lit only at the ends.

Wandering out of my own ward, I felt invisible as I passed the nurses stations. The one or two nurses on each station peered into charts, or computer monitors and didn’t see me pass. I passed a security guard in one of the wide corridors and he didn’t even look me in the eye. I felt like a ghost as I wandered into areas of the hospital I shouldn’t have, all the dark doorways along the way gaping at me as I passed; the tiny red and green lights of monitoring devices sparkling within, sometimes the sound of a rattling breath, rising and falling, or the hot, heavy smell of a person who’s been in bed for too long.

All this time, I was wearing a wireless monitor that sent my vital signs to the nurses station. I was told those monitors only have a range of 30-50 metres but as far as I know, I set off no alarms on my long night walks.

The Prisoner

Just down the hall from me in the same ward, two policemen sat guarding a room, drinking coffee and reading books. “Just like the movies, huh?” I quipped as I passed, and they both laughed. They were guarding a prisoner who they said had survived being stabbed in prison and was recovering from the surgery. The next day I saw them walking him in chains. The guy was monstrously tall. Easily 7 feet. I’d love to have made some witty remark to him but in my fragile state, feared being lunged at by a proper criminal, even if he was chained up.

Back to work

I worked hard to convince the doctors I was ready to go home. They wanted to keep me in for 9, even 10 days but thanks to all my walking and “enthusiastic” recovery, they allowed me to go home on the 7th day after surgery.

So here I am! It will be approximately 3 months before I can draw a longbow, dig a hole or climb a tree. Work-wise though, I’m almost back at full speed, ready to finish Dashkin and finalise the Kickstarter rewards. I’m extremely grateful for the patience of those waiting on their stuff, and touched by all the messages of support from people I know and even people I don’t.

If we all survive the apocalypse in 2012, I plan on making it a big year for BiteyCastle and Brackenwood.

Berrima NSW, Australia
May, 2004

In early 2004, my girlfriend Jeanette and I decided to take a short break and visit a cluster of quaint villages a couple of hours drive south of Sydney. We decided we would spend about three days just wandering around the little towns, visiting local shops, cafés, museums and markets, and generally soaking up some village atmosphere.

We both really like that whole southern New South Wales region, with its rolling green hills and cooler climate (neither of us are very tolerant of heat and humidity). We had been planning for years to buy a house down there somewhere to settle but we eventually found our dream home in the Blue Mountains, where we now live.

Anyway before our trip, I had done a bit of searching online for some accommodation. I managed to reserve two nights in a large historical sandstone building called The Magistrate’s House. Judging by the name, it was once owned by some kinda uh… magistrate, I guess. The following brief history was taken directly from their website:

The house was built c.1840 by a prosperous trader, Mr. J. J. Higgins who lived there with 10 children for some 10 years.

Originally known as the Higgins House, the property subsequently became known as Hampton Court, Carthona, Ballynahinch and the Magistrate’s House.

Magistrates were in residence in the 1880s but subsequently the house was used as a school c.1900. In 1925 the house was restored by the Brown sisters, one of whom was a draughtswoman. Several outbuildings to the rear were demolished and the gardens established. These were open for exhibition in the 1930s and the money raised was donated to the Red Cross.

The House

So after an unhurried and scenic 4 hour trip we pulled into the narrow driveway of the property. A couple of days beforehand we’d received, by email, the front door combination code. As we entered the wide hallway, we saw that it stretched all the way to the back of the house, where an empty keyhole glowed in a dark wooden door.

Magistrate's House - Lounge 1

A huge living room came into view on the left. It contained bookshelves full of old books, there were large rugs on the floor with rocking chairs, coffee tables, tall lamps and an old-style radio built into a cabinet. Despite being early afternoon, it was mostly dark before I pulled open the heavy curtains.

The ceilings throughout the house were nice and high (as you can see in the image). Every room in the house was punctuated with dark wood; the furnishings, the floors, the window and door frames were a few shades short of black.

The day outside was very windy, so the roof and windows creaked constantly. At times, it sounded like there were people in other rooms so the first feelings of unease began scurrying up our spines like little spiders.

At the back of the house were the kitchen, dining, bathroom and laundry. You could walk through the kitchen and into the dining room, into an adjoining reading room lined with bookshelves and comfortable seats, which in turn led back into the living room at the front of the house.

In terms of bad feelings, by far the worst room was the laundry, which was nothing more than a damp, cold extension of the wide hallway. The floor and laundry tub were concrete and a dirty white washing machine stood sulking in the corner with its mouth open.

The Bedrooms

On the opposite side of the hall were the first and second bedrooms. The first bedroom was at the front of the house and was dominated by a king-sized canopy bed, which made the room feel much smaller and more oppressive than it really was.

Between the door and the bed was a large pipe organ (wow!), on which I played a few chords. The heavy sound really was quite creepy, like the wheezing of an old dying man. It echoed down the hall and through the other rooms so that when I stopped playing, the house seemed full of dark music for a few seconds, before the chords melted into the confusion of the wind outside.

Beyond the bed was a huge dark wardrobe, almost as high as the ceiling and almost covering the opposite wall. It was so ugly that neither of us wanted to open it.. and we didn’t.

The next room down the hall was the second bedroom. It was somehow much brighter than the front room, because the curtains were thinner and less foliage over the window outside. However there remained a certain uneasiness in here because there was a locked door right at the foot of the bed.

At the bottom of the door was an unusually large gap, big enough for my fist to go under. Peering under the door, we got a rat’s-eye view of the room and we saw something that I wish we hadn’t seen. It was an old-style rocking cradle with a lace canopy. The little locked room was brightly lit, so we could clearly see all the contents. There were stuffed animals, a wicker box with a lid, and just at the edge of my view I could see a single bed.

Despite how weird the little room seemed, I really wanted to open that door just to satisfy my curiosity and settle this creeping feeling that a tiny skeleton lay in that crib. But the very fact that it was locked made the whole house seem wrong.

We decided that even with the locked door, the least creepy bedroom was the second. It also had an electric bar-heater and a small television on a low table, so we put our stuff in there and we went out for the day.

The First Night

We had spent the day doing what we’d planned: browsing antique shops, drinking coffee, walking along the river and coveting the real estate. In the evening we spent hours in a restaurant going steadily through all the courses.

Returning home with a bottle of red, we got a great fire going in the living room’s fireplace. To my relief the house seemed much friendlier at night, but then it could have been the wine. With a guitar that I found in the corner, I tuned it, then proved to Jeanette that I can’t play while I’m drunk.

“pling plang plang”, went my fingers on the strings. Then we both got sick of hearing it and I propped it in the corner where I’d found it. As I did so, a spider ran out of it. I’m sure he was thinking “I can play better than that” and he would have been right.

As the fire died down the house seemed a bit weird again. There’s something I find oddly disturbing about the thought of a dark room with no people in it, and suddenly I found myself thinking of the other rooms, now dark and cold with nobody in them.

I’ve often wondered; if it was possible to visit a dark empty room without physically being there, what would you see? Would it truly be empty? Or would it be full of ghosts and memories wafting to and fro like smoke or mist perhaps? When a person walks into the room, does the residue of the ethereal presence take some time to dissipate, giving the visitor a feeling of unease?

So as these thoughts began crowding in, we went to bed. The wind outside continued to brush the roof, walls and windows with branches, but it was around 2am and soon we were both asleep without a thought for the locked door at the foot of the bed.

The Second Night

The next day was clear and bright and the wind was gone. With the sound of Jeanette cooking breakfast for us both, it felt like somebody lived here and there was no sign of the previous day’s unease.

The morning shower was a bit strange because the bathroom was large and spacious. I always feel weird standing wet and naked in a large room. On top of this, the soap was flecked with the pubes of past visitors, and the floor and mirrors were dirty.

After breakfast we went out for more walks through the village and along the river. When we returned to the house a few hours later it was early afternoon, so we spent time reading, listening to music and drinking coffee. I collected some wood for the evening fire and just before dark, we walked out into the village to another restaurant.

The back "yard" and the river - possibly where someone drowned

Later that night, once again full of food and drink, we returned to the house which was as cold and dark as a grave. I lit the fire and Jeanette switched on the old television. The wood was burning quickly and the living room wasn’t heating up very well, so we decided to put on the heater in the bedroom and watch TV from the bed.

Some hours later I walked across the cold wooden floor to turn off the light. I got back into the warm bed and we talked until our sentences became vague, just like on a school camp.

The house seemed dead with the silence. No wind outside, no television, no drunk guitar playing, no fire.

CLATTER! A noise from the living room exploded through the silence and echoed through the house. It sounded as it somebody had dropped a metal tray of cutlery onto the floor. Jeanette and I, now wide awake, stared at each other in the dim starlight from the window.

Suddenly the house seemed to come alive with little creaks and clicks, from the ceilings, the windows, the walls and floors. Because the night was so deathly still, each tiny noise came to us cloaked in echoes of itself.

There were creaky floorboards all throughout the house and I dreaded that we would hear something or someone walking through the rooms toward us. I could hear Jeanette’s heart beating. The sound of my own heartbeat became extremely frustrating, as I strained to hear if anything was coming down the hallway.

On my side of the bed, I was further from the door, so I swapped with Jeanette so I could be closer to it, should anything come through it. I lay there watching that dark section of empty hallway for a couple of hours, trying not to blink too often.

My imagination got the better of me several times and my heartbeat pounded loudly from the terrible visualisations that came alive in my mind. Once, I saw, heard and felt the terror as the locked door at the foot of the bed creaked open slowly. Another time, heavy-booted feet came slowly up the hallway and a tall dark man stood in the doorway looking at us.

I wanted the night to end and these horrible thoughts did nothing to help me drift off to sleep. But in time, as I heard Jeanette’s breathing deepen in sleep, my eyes grew tired and eventually closed. With any little sound, they flicked open again, but inevitably sleep took over.

Leaving

Surprisingly, neither of us had any bad dreams that night. We woke the next morning to another bright, clear day. However the house continued to feel strange through the morning as we had breakfast and packed our gear into the car.

We had both expected to see something fallen in the living room; a tray of cutlery perhaps, or any kind of fallen metallic object. But nothing was out of place. Everything exactly as we had left it when we’d gone to bed the evening before. We checked the other rooms too.. nothing.

A wave of goosebumps rippled over me each time I walked through that wooden laundry room, as I carried our bags out to the car. We were both quite relieved as I locked the laundry door behind me and we drove back up the narrow driveway to the street.

The laundry door and rear entrance to the house.

Afterword

I don’t want to discourage you from staying at the Magistrate’s House if you visit Berrima, NSW. This story is merely an account of our weekend there and because of the strange things that we felt and heard, I have long planned to tell the story here.

At the time, accommodation at The Magistrate’s House was priced to suit two or three couples, so I’m sure the atmosphere would have been very different when occupied by more people. For us though, two smallish people inhabiting one room in a very large, old, dark house was just a little harrowing.

If you have stayed at the Magistrate’s House and can back me up with a similar experience, please drop me a line!
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If you are the former owner* of the Magistrate’s House, I have one question and one suggestion for you. By locking that small room in the second bedroom, what were you thinking? It was really bloody creepy! For the new owners* if you plan on renting it to holiday makers, I suggest unlocking the room and clearing the stuff out of there for avoid creeping out future guests.

* On Dec 10, 2011, the Magistrate’s House sold for an undisclosed price. The website for the house is gone now.

Pilliga Scrub, NSW Australia
c.1980

The Pilliga Scrub is a massive expanse of thick bushland in the central upper half of New South Wales and covers an area of about 80 x 120 kilometres. Much has been lost in there, never to be found again, from sheep and cattle, to people and vehicles. Even today, it is dense and forbidding, although what used to be a dirt track that ran through the middle is now a major road called the Newell Highway.

There are a lot of stories that have emerged from the forest, and one in particular that sticks in my mind is that of a bag-lady who lived in the Pilliga Scrub. She was often seen with her old battered shopping trolley loaded with her belongings along the road, and truckers would see her at night walking in complete darkness.

She was a recluse, old, grey haired and crazy, and they dubbed her the Pilliga Princess. For many years, she was a familiar sight to regular travellers, particularly truck drivers along that stretch of road. Because the Pilliga Scrub had (and still has) unexplained stories of terror associated with it, the locals will tell you you’d have to be completely crazy to be in the scrub after dark. Anyone passing through for the first time saw the Princess as an almost terrifying ghostly figure, even if they hadn’t heard the scary stories beforehand.

More recently:

One night in 1993 the Pilliga Princess was hit and killed by a truck. The trucker who hit her said she had been wandering across the road and he hadn’t seen her until it was too late. He told how as she was lit by the headlights, she turned to look directly at him and ran toward him, arms outstretched. The last thing he saw of her alive was the white hair flaring out around her wild-eyed face and the expression was one of manic glee.

Since then other truckers swear they have seen her walking her trolley at night, just as she had done for years before she was killed. One truck driver even claimed to have hit her trolley, but with no Princess in sight.

If you are from that region, or have driven through there and have seen anything unusual, I would love to hear from you. Thanks to the person who emailed me the following image from the Australian Cemeteries Index, we now know the name of the Princess.

The grave of one Pilliga Princess

There are many more Pilliga stories from truckers, and there are a couple in particular that I’d like to include here later.

*update [July 8th, 2010]: This story has been featured on Local Legends, one of Australia’s best myth and legend story sites. Recommended reading.

30km outside Narromine, NSW Australia
1985

For a long time my father worked for a man who owned a lot of land. One particular property of his is called ‘Arrabree’. 3,000 undulating acres with a huge, old but well-kept house, machinery sheds, stock yards, shearing sheds, grain silos and more. The farm needed caretakers, and since it was only a few k’s from the boss’s place, Dad agreed to move us all out there.

I loved it. At a time when most of my friends were playing football and following their dicks around, I was spending days and nights alone in the pine forest on the next property, making campsites, sharpening knives, tracking foxes and fantasising that I was the only person ever. I was a bit of a strange kid I guess, but I wouldn’t change those years for anything.

So one day, I set out on a long walk across to the far side of the farm. I left at around 11, took lunch and water, but not really planning to go anywhere in particular. I did a lot of thinking and planning on these long walks. Thinking about how I wished we had forests like European forests in the stories. Dense and black with trees you can live in. There was no way I could get lost on this farm, I could only dream about it.

After some hours, probably around 3 in the afternoon I came to the back fence of the property. From there I could see the neighbour’s farmhouse and a dog tied up near the fence with a half 44gallon drum for shelter. It was a female blue cattle dog and she didn’t say anything to me. Her bowl was overturned so I thought I’d go and put some of my water in there for her. I walked closer and she looked at me without getting up, just a slight thump of the tail on the ground. I flipped the bowl over, emptied my water in there and she came over for a drink. As she drank I looked up at the house and there was no movement or sound. I thought I’d just go to the gate and fill up my water at the tap.

I walked toward the house and noticed that the front door was open, but no sign of movement coming from within. I refilled my water bottle at the front tap near the gate and stood for a moment, waiting for some sign of life. None. The only sound was an old windmill rattling in the breeze nearby, and the occasional truck on the road not far from the house. I went to the door of the house and called inside. No answer.

It stank in there, sort of damp and mouldy but some other nameless stink, I couldn’t think what it was. I called out a few more times before I stepped inside. There were clothes and papers everywhere, and some cardboard boxes. They were all dry so I thought maybe some plumbing might be leaking under the house and rotting the timbers or something because that smell was all I could think about. Urk. I came to a room at the back where the sun was streaming through a large window. The window was broken but there was no glass inside. I walked over to it and looked outside and the glass was all over the ground out there. Something had smashed the window from the inside.

I was looking at the yard which was overgrown with grass, thistles and weeds. There was an old lawnmower amongst the grass but its days were over. I was already feeling quite a bit uneasy, but now the feeling that crept over me intensified, becoming unbearable. I wanted to turn and run. The smell seemed worse in this room, despite it being almost empty, save for an old vinyl armchair. I was about to turn and leave when something on the concrete path, outside caught my eye. It was a solid black line of ants marching. With my eyes I followed the line of ants to where they disappeared under a low shrub.

In the grass under the shrub I saw the ants crawling. They covered a person’s face. It was an old man lying on his back, his face turned up with his eyes open. He was dead, probably for a couple of days. My body tingled all over and I turned and ran. As I fled from the room, I crashed full-faced into something soft. It was an old lady and she stank. The smell, it was her all along. She cried out as we both fell on the floor in a heap. I got up and bolted outside, across the yard, past the dog and jumped the fence. I ran for home.

I ran for as long as I could and eventually slowed to a walk. I forced myself to calm down and to stop reliving the whole thing over and over in my head. I don’t know why, but didn’t want to tell anyone. It was probably about 5:30pm when I saw the headlights of dad’s Land Rover coming towards me. Mum had been worried about me (again) and when dad got home from work, she’d asked him to go looking for me. I got in the Land Rover and he asked about my day. I didn’t tell him what happened, I told him that I’d just done my usual wandering and exploring.

Some days later, dad mentioned that the old man’s body had been found but the old lady and her car were missing. The farm was searched but she was nowhere to be found, and the car is still missing to this day. I told mum and dad. We went to the police and gave a statement, some investigations were held and I told my story to a local journalist on the condition that she kept my name out of it.

As far as I know, the case remains unsolved. The old lady was never found and it’s one of the big unsolved mysteries of the region.

Trangie, NSW Australia
May school holidays, 1979

Back when there were only three school terms per year in Australia, I would stay at my cousin’s house every May school holidays. He lived in Trangie, which is the next town west of my home town, Narromine. Incidentally, it was around this time in my life when my grandmother (who lived next door to my cousin) told the story of The Water Tank to us.

My cousin’s name is John. The age difference between us is three weeks, him being the elder. Back then I considered him my best mate, but he probably didn’t think the same.. looking back, I guess the relationship was a bit like an older brother, who was slightly intolerant of the younger, but it was a good relationship nonetheless. I guess I admired him for his charisma (he had lots of friends, played football, swore and spat like a 18yr old), and he admired my brains and drawing ability (I was a clever little bastard, always drawing and inventing projectile weapons).

Anyway, at the age of 8, together we were a bit of a handful. Day after day, without telling anyone where we were off to, we would disappear from sunrise to sunset, riding old beat-up push bikes, making slingshots, making bow and arrows (“Let’s make a barren arra!”), chuckin rocks, climbing things, getting bitten by things and walking all day. Every day we did something different, and come home in the afternoon covered in sweat, dirt and scratches. It’s times like those that, as an adult, you look back thinking that they were the best times of your life.

Now over the years, both of our families have seen a lot of strange stuff, and through the generations we’ve all told each other stories of weird lights, ghosts, crazy people, injury and death. On the odd occasion that the whole family gets together, I love to soak up all the stories as they fly out of everyone’s faces. Well like many others in the family, I have a few stories of my own, and for John and I, this one belongs to both of us.

One day during the May school holidays, it was getting late in the afternoon and being Autumn, the daylight was beginning to fade. John and I were walking toward his house and we shortcut through a laneway. One of the buildings that backed onto this laneway was the Trangie Town Hall, and built onto the back of the Hall was a kind of storage shed on stilts. We jumped the fence (back then, fences were made for jumping) and decided to find out if we could see what was in the shed. There was a short flight of old wooden stairs that lead up to two doorways: a rear door to the Hall, and the shed door beside it. We crept to the top of the stairs and found both doors locked. There was a big padlock on the Hall door, but on the shed door, a keyhole.

We couldn’t see through the keyhole because it was blocked with thick spider webs, and within, I could see a chunky little black spider waiting. I found a piece of fencing wire under the stairs, cleared the keyhole and looked through. Beyond the keyhole was a room which, despite the low afternoon light, was quite well lit by a curtainless window on the facing wall. The room, the window and all the room’s untidy contents were covered in dust and spider webs.

There was an old bed with some sort of a basket on it, a few squat trunks, some clothes racks, a chair or two and a few pairs of big old black leather shoes. There were other things that didn’t seem too out of place for a locked room full of dust and spiders.. but something caught my eye. At the foot of the bed, between some boxes lay a head covered in grey hair. It may be hindsight playing games with my memories, but as I looked at it, I distinctly remember it shifted slightly, and even now I’m certain I heard a little dragging noise at the same moment. I grabbed John’s shirt. He looked through the keyhole and saw the head, and we both ran.

When we arrived home, we were laughing our heads off.. I suppose at that age we didn’t really understand what we’d seen. I told my parents, John told his parents, and we both told our grandmother. We’re not sure if anyone believed us.

Narromine, NSW Australia
1983

One night in summer when I was 12 years old, our cousins came to stay at our home. The adults went out for the evening leaving me in charge of the other four kids. There were 5 of us: our two cousins, my sister and me, then my brother (nicknamed Mog) was the youngest at about 7 years of age.

We mostly watched telly and played monopoly as the night passed and later, a storm rolled in. It was no particularly violent storm, but the youngest two were frightened by the thunder, wind and the sound of the house groaning. A little frightened myself, I went through the house turning on every light in every room. The entire time, I was picturing something black following and watching me, hovering just above and behind me as I walked from room to room. With my neck hairs bristling, I ran back the others in the warmly lit living room and as I sat on the floor the power went off. At that very moment, there was a bright flash of lightning by which we all saw each other, wide-eyed and pale-faced. It was a scene from a nightmare, and one of our cousins let out a soft high-pitched cry.

More lightning flashed and thunder cracked louder and louder. Occasionally the room was lit as if the morning sun streamed in, and we all saw each other in our fear. A real fear it was. Not just a childish fear of the storm and the dark, but the awful feeling I had earlier was on us all. We sat talking softly for a long time. The storm eventually calmed and the wind died down, but the house stayed dark.

Although there was still some lightning and distant rumbling, Mog decided that the break in the storm was the perfect opportunity to go to the toilet. None of us would go with him. He was terrified but bravely left the room alone. Within a few minutes we heard the toilet flush and seconds later, his bare feet slapping quickly across the kitchen floor and into the living room. He sat quietly on the carpet with us and I could hear him breathing heavily.

Another hour or so passed and the living room was suddenly lit from outside by the headlights of the family car arriving home. The grownups opened the door and came down the hall and into the kitchen where dad opened a cupboard and took matches and some candles. Soon the house was lit with dim, flickering light that threw dancing shadows up the walls and across the ceilings.

Our cousins left with their parents, my sister went to her own room, and my brother and I went to our room. As we lay in our beds falling asleep, he told me that on his way back from the toilet, there was a flash of lightning that lit up the hallway.

He described to me in great detail what he saw in that flash. The body of a little boy. Dead and propped in a sitting position against the wall.

It was gone when another flash lit up the hall.

Green Point, NSW Australia
1997

Back then I lived about an hour’s drive north of Sydney on the New South Wales Central Coast. The suburb is called Green Point, and my house sat peacefully among others, at the foot of a mountain reserve called Kincumber Mountain. I signed over the house to my ex-wife when we split.

Back then, my job as an animator with Disney was in the heart of Sydney. The commute was two hours from door to door, each way. I had it all planned out: I needed to arrive at work early each morning so I could leave early in the afternoon. This would give me two hours to get home and disappear up into the forest for a few hours. I’d take nothing with me but a bottle of water and I’d arrive home at around 8 or 9pm. That was my routine for several years.

To be there in the forest at dusk, just listening to the creatures stirring and emerging from their holes is something I miss terribly. I usually left the track and walked into the thick scrub to explore, careful not to break anything or make too much noise. Often it was a bit of a challenge to find my way back to the track in the darkness.

One of the most enduring images I have of the place is from one particular evening, when I noticed a wall of thick fog gliding silently but very quickly through the trees towards me. It was simply a cloud moving over the mountain. Quite suddenly, the birds in the trees and the rustling in the grass seemed to stop and I just watched in amazement as this white wall came through devouring the forest, and me along with it. It’s not just the sight, but the whole experience that I long to have again.

Over the years a few things happened in that forest that occasionally come back and make me think. Some of them were perfectly normal things like the fog, but others were, to put it simply, a bit weird.

One particular evening I started a walk down into a low part of the forest where I hadn’t been before. It was a bit of a battle to get through the thorny scrub without breaking anything or getting scratched, but I descended into a small rocky clearing that had a little running stream. The water was only ankle-deep, and the rocks either side were covered with the thickest and softest moss I’ve ever seen. It was a nice place to rest, so I sat there and listened, pulling twigs out of my socks.

From where I sat, the stream trickled away from me and disappeared over a sharp drop, beyond which I could hear falling water. After a while I got up and went to the edge. I was surprised to see that the drop was about 8 feet and the water fell into a small sandy pool at the bottom. It was getting darker now and I knew that soon it would be difficult to see my way, but I climbed down the rock face using tree roots as hand and foot-holds.

I explored the area a bit, and it was one of the nicest little spots I’d seen there. I knew I’d like to come back, but the darkness was closing in so I decided to start home. I was about to climb back up when I heard a little rustling in the undergrowth, somewhere behind me. I hadn’t come across much wildlife as yet, so I decided to investigate. The rustling was accompanied by a grunting, snorting sound and after a little stalking, I saw an echidna. A few dead leaves were impaled on his spikes, which made me think he’d been rolling around in the undergrowth. He was minding his own business, turning over pieces of dead wood with his long nose and didn’t notice me, so I spent a few minutes just watching him eat ants and other insects.

Finally I decided that I really should get moving, the failing light was making it more difficult to see and I had a long way to go, uphill and through bramble and bracken in the dark. From where I had been watching the echidna, I had been standing on a fallen log that resembled a little footbridge over the stream. I looked down to watch my footing when suddenly I saw something in the wet sand that made me stop dead.

It was a tiny footprint, about the size of a two year-old child’s. At first I thought that this random depression in the sand looked a bit like a little footprint, but as I crouched closer I could see that this wasn’t random. This was a footprint, very real and very well defined to the point that I could see the chubbiness of each toe.

I stood up and held my breath, looking and listening around me, wondering if there could be a little child lost way down here in this part of the woods. Surely I’d hear something if there were, the footprint looked very fresh to me. I scanned the sand around for more prints, but there were none. The one print was very close to the water in the wettest part of the sand, which is probably why it was so defined, but it was the only one.

I wasn’t too concerned with getting back before dark, that night. I was more interested to see if there were little people in this untouched, deepest part of a suburban forest. For a while I regretted not having a camera on hand, but now I’m glad I didn’t. I would like to revisit the place one day though.

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Newcastle , NSW Australia
Told to me by my uncle in 1988

When he was in his mid 20s one of my uncles, Lionel, lived with a house-mate in a small apartment house in the suburb of Maitland, near Newcastle back in the late 80′s. I forget the other guy’s name, so I’ll just call him Dave in this story.

Strange things began to happen in and around the house, and Lionel tells me it all started when, late one evening while watching television, they both could hear a distant metallic banging. The noise quickly became louder and closer, and soon it sounded like heavy footsteps running across the rooftops high above. From the loudest point directly above their heads, the banging continued on and faded off into the distance. What made this even more peculiar is the fact that the rooftops of those tenement houses were high-peaked with very steep slopes.

Above: kinda like this, I guess

This happened irregularly, but always late at night… on several occasions Lionel and Dave dashed outside as the first few distant footsteps were heard, but they never saw anything. After a few weeks, the phantom rooftop jogger stopped.

While this wasn’t too scary in itself, the house became really creepy one particular weekend when Lionel was jolted awake by the sound of the radio in the living room blasting music at full volume. He bolted out of bed, into the living room and switched it off. Dave came out from his room and Lionel, thinking that Dave was to blame said angrily, “What do you think you’re doing??” Dave was just as annoyed however… he thought it was Lionel who’d turned on the radio. They both went back to their beds, putting it down to some kind of weird coincidence.

Above: a rough floorplan of how I picture the house.

Following that night it happened four nights in a row, and each time it was in the small hours of the morning between about 2:30 and 4:00 am. A couple of times it was not just the radio, but the television and the lights in the living room as well. One of those nights, the radio came on and Lionel ran out into the bright living room and turned it off. In the silence that followed, he found that Dave wasn’t home. He was still out on the town partying, and the grim realization dawned on Lionel that he was alone in the house!

Now the house was an old place, so you can understand that one could not walk in a straight line without a few dozen floorboards creaking. Walking from the front door, down the hallway past the bedrooms and into the living room, it was impossible to do it silently.

Well, one particular night, a week or so after the radio/television incidents, Dave had gone to bed an hour or so earlier than Lionel. It was around midnight when Lionel finally turned off the television and the lights, and went to his own room.

Just as he was dropping off to sleep, he heard the hallway floor creaking. He looked and saw a tall, dark shape moving along the hall, past his doorway. Lionel was suddenly convinced that it was Dave sleepwalking, on his way to the living room to turn on the radio. He thought he would catch Dave in the act, so he crept to the door and peered down the dark hallway. Nothing and nobody was there. He started to creep toward the living room, when suddenly Dave emerged from his bedroom behind Lionel and turned on the hall light.

Above: Lionel creeping up the hallway

“So it’s you!” Dave accused him. Lionel leapt with fright and as he turned to face Dave, there was a loud crash out in the kitchen beyond the living room, like a window smashing. The first obvious thought was that someone was in the house, and was escaping now through the back. However, a check of the kitchen turned up nothing. No intruder, nothing broken.

When Lionel told Dave what he’d seen walking past his bedroom door, the two of them finally began to consider that the house may be haunted. As they went back through the living room to the hallway and stood talking, they gradually became aware of how cold the hallway had become, and no sooner had Dave commented than a dreadful smell filled the air. It smelled like rotting meat and Lionel told me it’s easily the worst thing he’s ever sniffed.

The creaking hallway happened a few more times after that night, and each time both guys could smell that dreadful cold, rotting meat. Not long after that, Dave had enough and decided to move out the very next weekend. Lionel decided that if he couldn’t get a new house-mate within a week or so, he’d move out too.

He put the word out to his friends, but no takers. Now it starts getting worse, because Lionel was now living alone in this horrible place. Surprisingly, not much happened for a few nights after Dave left, and Lionel began to think that maybe whatever it was, had played its tricks and moved on.

As you might expect though, Lionel was asleep one night when he heard a board creak in the hallway. He thought to himself, ‘This is it… I’m never going to get any peace unless I confront it’. He gathered a heap of courage, got out of bed and stepped into the cold, and now stinking hallway. He walked toward the front door and switched on the hall light, then began to walk back toward the dark living room. He stood at the entrance to the living room for a moment, and was about to reach for the switch when he heard a board creak behind him. He turned quickly to see a man towering over him, and as he spun to face it, Lionel’s elbow passed quietly through the man’s torso. He later told me that as his elbow passed through the man, it was cold like ice. The man was well over 6-feet in height, he had light-blue eyes, shoulder-length blonde hair, and wore only a pair of dark trousers. Lionel stammered, “what do you want?” and instantly the man vanished.

Above: my impression of the ghost, or the Cold Man.

Terrified, Lionel went to his room, left the light on and sat on his bed until sleep overtook him. When he was telling me this story, I found it very hard to understand how he could possibly stay in that house for another night, but he stayed there for several nights after.

The next day was a Friday… in the afternoon he arrived home from work, showered and went out clubbing with friends. He returned very late with a large group of them, and they continued drinking and partying in the house until dawn. The same happened on Saturday night, so the Sunday night was Lionel’s first night alone in the house since the appearance of the ghost three nights before.

He was sleeping soundly with the light on, when he was woken by the sound of the floor, and that dreadful smell. When he opened his eyes, he was facing the wall and could feel that someone was in the room. He turned his head to look over his shoulder and the ghost was standing beside the bed, that expressionless face looking down at him. Lionel froze, staring at the man’s face and after a second or two it vanished silently once again.

Knowing that it was certain to happen again, Lionel got his instant camera (remember this was long before digital cameras) and held it beside him in bed. Just before dawn, he was woken again and the man was standing, this time at the foot of the bed. He quickly pointed the camera and as the flash fired, the man vanished. That morning, he went to his brother’s house for breakfast, vowing never to sleep in that house again.

Lionel took the Monday off work and moved all his stuff over to his brother’s house, where he stayed until he found somewhere else. He told the photo processing house to print every exposed frame in the film. When he got the photos back, the one he’d taken at the foot of his bed showed nothing but white.

Lionel now lives on Queensland ‘s Gold Coast with a wife and kids.

Approx. 1am on a deserted country road.
1973

In his prime, my father was a Rugby League football hero and played for the ‘Country’ team against ‘City’ in the early to mid 70′s.
On one occasion, the entire team travelled by bus to a town called Queanbeyan, and this incident took place when my mother (Von) and another footballer’s wife (Judy) were travelling together by car to meet their husbands and see them play. They had been driving for maybe 6 or 7 hours and it wasn’t to be too long before they would arrive.

Anyone who has ever driven at night on an empty country road would know that whatever falls under the headlights are the only things you can see outside the car. Apart from that, the occasional bright star on clear nights and the glow of distant town lights over the black horizon.

I love night driving. Every time I travel out to the country to visit my parents, I always like to stop the car at least once along the way and turn off the headlights, just to experience the clear country sky and the sounds of open space at night (something you just don’t get in the city)

…but back to 1973…
On this particular night, there was a bright half-moon rising behind the car. Outside of the headlight pools they could see a rolling, pale landscape striped with long black tree shadows. The landscape was slightly hilly and the road gently winding. The women had been talking for most of the way, but after a few hours even the most talkative people fall silent. And they did. As the car moved through solid hill shadows and speckled tree shadows, Von was lost in her own thoughts while driving and Judy was on the verge of sleep.

They rounded a corner and there on the side of the road sat a small group of kangaroos. At sight of the car they scattered, some cleared the nearby fence in smooth leaps, but a few bounded across the road straight into the path of the car. Von hit the brakes and narrowly missed hitting one of them.Suddenly both women were wide awake and buzzing with adrenaline. There’s nothing quite like a roo on the road to snap a driver back to attention.

A few short comments passed between the two women but no sooner had the pulse slowed, when cresting a small hill and then down into a dip, both women saw clearly in the light of the headlights a large face on the road, larger than a car and as wide as the road itself.

It was the face of a dirty-looking man with a black beard and long straggly hair, the eyes looking off to one side. At first glance it appeared to be painted on the road, but as the car came towards it, the eyes moved to look directly at the women, then the entire head turned to face them as the car moved over it at speed.

Von gasped sharply, and Judy screamed. At that moment, both women knew that it wasn’t a trick of the eyes. The fact that they had both seen it and it appeared real, frightened them both even more. There was no bump under the car so it was definitely a flat image, but it had appeared photographic in it’s detail and had moved with life-like clarity. They didn’t stop the car, and continued on until they reached the motel where they told their husbands all about it.

In hindsight and among other details, they described the fact that it was just the head, no shoulders or neck. Also that it was in colour, which ruled out the possibility of tree shadows on the road playing tricks. My mother once drew a picture of the face as she had seen it on that night, but it’s long gone. Should get her to do another one huh?

psst! The big scary character in my hitchHiker movies is designed based on my impression of ‘the face’.

Gold Coast, Queensland Australia
1991

I was living in a caravan on Queensland’s Gold Coast from 1989-1991, and in that time I worked in a steel factory. One day while operating a giant mesh-welding machine, my glove caught on a spinning shaft and pulled my arm into the machine. As my arm was wrapped around the shaft, both bones broke near the wrist and my elbow rammed into a sharp metal edge. All this resulted in three months of free time, fully paid. Which was nice!

Lucky it was my left arm, because during these three months I would sleep all day, and draw all night. When I got tired of drawing I would go for a walk along the beach which was about 5 miles long. I never walked the entire length of it though, only wandered for an hour or so, before turning back. At that time of night (around 2 – 4am) there was nobody else on the beaches or roads. Amidst the most touristy part of Queensland with the fastest growing population in Australia, all that space was dark and empty. I truly felt like I was the last person on the face of the planet and these are probably the most amazing memories of my life.

One night, I was walking and thinking about flying, when above the sound of the wind I heard a distant splash. I peered out and saw movement on the water. There were the lights of Surfer’s Paradise across the water, and silhouetted in the reflections of those lights I saw a man’s head and shoulders. He was just wading there in the water and looking about. Reaching up to wipe his face, push his hair back, stuck his finger in his ear, just looked like a normal guy.

But there was something wrong with what I saw and I didn’t notice it straight away. He dived under and resurfaced further from shore. Now I noticed. From where I stood and judging the distance, all the reflections and ripples around him seemed quite a bit too small.. It appeared to me that he was too big. I’m not talking about a man of six, seven or even eight feet high. I’m seeing this guy and his head and shoulders look about three feet high.

My stomach did a backflip and I suddenly felt the throbbing in the ears and the tingling of the scalp. I quickly crouched down. If I could see him in the dark water, he could probably see me on the white beach. I was at least fifty metres from him though, and he didn’t appear to have noticed me at all.

I watched him for about a minute, before he dived again. I sat still, holding my breath and peering into the darkness, waiting for him to resurface. I didn’t see or hear anything for probably five more minutes. I thought for a moment that he might have seen me and I had these visions of him leaping from the water in front of me and dragging me back into the sea.
Gah, scared..! I got up and started to leave.

Suddenly I heard a big splash right behind me and with the fear in me, I sprinted across the soft sand toward the street without even looking. I made it to the stairs and halfway up, I turned to look. There was nothing. Earlier, I was certain I’d seen a giant, but as I walked back home along the road I began to doubt what I’d seen. How could I possibly trust my judgement in that light? He was probably a lot closer than I’d judged, not fifty metres. My fear slowly left, and over the next couple of days I dismissed it as an illusion.

A couple of weeks later on another night walk, I was walking along that same stretch and I was thinking about what I had seen. Suddenly, in the same spot it all seemed real again, but I told myself it wasn’t. I kept walking beyond where I had seen the man in the water and my thoughts turned to other things.

Fifteen minutes later, I was walking along a particularly dark section of beach, where two suburbs are seperated by a few acres of scrub, and I heard some bushes rustling.
I was walking close to some large rocks and the rustling sounded nearby, so I crouched in the sand at the base of a boulder. It was too dark in the scrub and I couldn’t see what was making the noise. I had no idea what I was hiding from or why, it was probably a cat or dog. As I was thinking this, another rustling sound made me peer into the darkness.

What I saw next, I will remember on my deathbed.

A man in his late twenties, naked, impossibly tall and with black hair down to his elbows came striding out of the trees. He walked in a direct line from the scrub toward the water’s edge and I shrank against the boulder as he walked past me. He turned his head and for several long strides, gazed silently at me as he passed, but he didn’t stop. He continued on to the water’s edge and waded waist-deep, before diving under.

I sat for a long time, frozen to the spot with fear, staring for long periods of time at the water, and the footprints he left behind. I eventually got up and measured the footprints with my hand. Just over three handspans long.

When I got home I measured three handspans in centimetres. It was 66. Based on this, I estimated him to be nearly 4 metres tall.

In the map below, A is where I lived and B is where I saw him.

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