Great Australian Ghost Stories Read Online Free Page A

cupolas repaired and the magnificent angel that crowns the central pediment given a new gold coating.
    Mindful and proud of their theatre’s famous phantom, the Marriners named their new foyer café ‘Federici’s’ and Elaine was rewarded by a personal encounter with the ghost. While walking through the dress circle one day with a friend, the friend felt something brush past her, then Elaine turned to see a hinged seat that had been raised a moment before turned down. ‘And they don’t stay down unless someone is sitting on them!’ Elaine told Who magazine in June 1996.
    In the same magazine Rachael Beck, then starring in the musical Beauty and the Beast , recalled how a few months earlier she had spotted a stranger in the dress circle during a rehearsal who clapped silently after each number. Later she asked who he was but found no one else had seen him.
    In 2004 Rob Guest told an ABC television crew how, during the run of Les Misérables , an usher had spotted him at the back of dress circle (in his nineteenth-century costume) and wondered why the show’s star was there when he should have been backstage. As Guest explained, it was not him. He was backstage, waiting to make his entrance in the barricades scene.
    And so the seemingly endless reports keep coming. And are they good for business? Of course they are. In the world of showbiz any publicity is good publicity and if stories of an elegant ghost add an extra ounce of romance and anticipation to a visit to the theatre, who would deny patrons that?
    Before we leave Federici there is one interesting sidebar to this story that deserves to be mentioned. In 1972 film producers George Miller and Byron Kennedy (of Mad Max fame) shot a short documentary film about Federici. At 7.30 one morning the crew recreated Federici’s funeral in Melbourne General Cemetery using nine actors. One of the crew took two still photographs of the scene while the cameras were rolling.There is nothing out of the ordinary about the first shot but the second, taken just a few seconds later, shows a tenth figure standing among the ‘mourners’.
    That figure is not visible even in the out-takes of the moving film. It appears to be a tall, semi-transparent figure wearing a monk’s black habit and cowl. Could it (opera-loving readers must now be wondering) be our old friend Federici in the disguise Mephistopheles wears in the church scene that preceded the last act of Faust?

3.
Ships of Doom
    I looked upon the rotting sea
    And drew my eyes away;
    I looked upon the rotting deck
    And there the dead men lay.
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    Most people have heard of the Flying Dutchman , that jinxed ship commanded by a tormented captain and condemned to sail the seven seas for eternity. The Flying Dutchman is said to pop up unexpectedly to this day and the lurid appearance of its blood-red sails and its phantom crew are said to be enough the scare the wits out of any seafarer. Equally well known is the Mary Celeste , the archetypical ghost ship, which was discovered sailing placidly along in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1872 without a living soul aboard.
    Much less well known are another pair of ghost ships, the wreckages of which lie just off the coast of Australia. Like the Flying Dutchman and the Mary Celeste , the first of these, the S.S. Yongala , appeared to a group of startled watchers, sailing the waters where it had met its doom a decade earlier. And the second? Well, the freighter Alkimos has a Greek name and its history is worthy of an Ancient Greek tragedy.
    The Adelaide Steamship Company’s 3700-tonne vessel Yongala , commanded by Captain William Knight, called at Mackay en route from Brisbane to Townsville. At 1.40 pm on 24 March 1911 it steamed out of Mackay harbour with forty-eightpassengers, a crew of seventy-two and a thoroughbred racehorse named Moonshine on board. Minutes later the harbourmaster