Great Australian Ghost Stories Read Online Free Page B

at Mackay received a report that a fierce tropical cyclone was bearing down on the coast, directly in the path of the Yongala . Without radio it was impossible to warn the ship.
    At 6.30 that evening the Yongala was sighted battling mountainous seas and gale-force winds at the northern end of the Whitsunday Passage. Later that night or during the early hours of the next morning the Yongala sank with the loss of all on board.
    Mailbags and wreckage (including the body of the racehorse) came ashore south of Townsville but the wreck was not located and identified until 1958, twenty-three kilometres east of Cape Bowling Green. In 1981 the Yongala was declared an historic wreck under the Commonwealth Shipwrecks Act. And so the official file closed on one of Queensland’s worst shipping disasters, but long before then the ill-fated Yongala had entered the ghost lore of the sea.
    In 1923 a party of local fishermen from Bowen were trying their luck in a small boat off tiny Holbourne Island (near the main shipping channel the Yongala would have used) when a large ship hove into view from the south. The fishermen had seen the ship before and they all recognised her — it was the Yongala , steaming steadily by in the bright sunshine twelve years after her sinking.
    The steamship’s sleek blue-and-red hull was now encrusted with millions of barnacles, the white-painted superstructure was rusted and draped with seaweed and the ship’s once-proud funnel was twisted and stoved in. Of crew or passengers there was no sign. The bridge appeared unattended, but as the ship seemed to be bearing on a definite course, the watchers speculated that unseen hands must have been guiding it.Wisps of smoke also trailed from the broken funnel, signalling the presence of phantom stokers toiling below decks.
    The small boat bobbed dangerously in the swell caused by the larger vessel and the fishermen abandoned their fishing to watch the spectacle in amazement. Any doubts that it was a phantom ship they were observing were dispelled when the Yongala disappeared behind the southern tip of Holbourne Island then failed to reappear at the northern end. The fishermen raised anchor and sailed around the island, but could find no trace of any other vessel. The phantom ship had vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared.
    Until the discovery of the wreck of the Yongala ninety kilometres further north in 1958, many believed the ghost ship had appeared to the fishermen to indicate that it lay off Holbourne Island. Today its location is beyond dispute; and if any of those fishermen were still around they would swear that their sighting of it was equally indisputable.
    There are two interesting postscripts to this story. A Mrs Lowther, who lived in Mackay until 1969, recounted her own strange experience at the time of the wreck. She was booked to sail on the Yongala on its final voyage but at the last moment had a premonition of disaster and, although she was halfway out to the ship on a tender, refused to go aboard and demanded to be taken back to shore.
    That same fateful night a family staying in a hotel at Eton, west of Mackay, also had a vision of the disaster. There was a kerosene lamp on the table in their room and suddenly one of the children pointed to it and said ‘Look at the big ship!’ The flame had blackened a portion of the glass creating the clear image of a large ship riding a mountainous sea. As the fascinated family watched, the picture faded and was replaced by another — the distressed face of a girl.
    The next day news of the Yongala ’s disappearance broke and, while the father was walking down a Mackay street he saw a poster for a touring theatrical company with the face of the young girl on it. He later learned that she had been among the unlucky passengers on the Yongala .
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    Prior to its sinking the S.S. Yongala had a long and proud history, but not so the ship that started life as the George M. Shriver and