Vintage Scary Stories for the Modern Ghost Volume 2

A Ghost from the Sea

By J.E. Preston Muddock

Towards the latter half of the fifties, Melbourne, in Australia, was startled by an extraordinary and terrible crime. It was at the very height of what was known as the ' gold fever.' A year or two before, news had spread like wildfire that gold had been discovered in enormous quantities in various parts of the country. That news literally seemed to turn people mad, and young and old, the halt, the lame, and even the blind, rushed away for the fabled regions of El Dorado.

Whole families, who had been content to jog on quietly year after year, earning fair wages, and getting all the necessaries of life, were seized with the fever, and, selling up their belongings rump and stump, invested in billies, 1 tomahawks, spades, pickaxes, washing-pans, 2 and other etceteras, and shouldering their swags set off for the mysterious regions, where it was rumoured gold was lying on the surface of the ground in big nuggets.

Fortunate, indeed, were those who had any belong- ings to sell in order to provide themselves with the plant re- quired for roughing it in the bush ; for many had nothing at all, save what they stood upright in, but, imagining that they were going to gather in the precious metal in sackfulls, they started off with the rest, only to perish, it may be, miserably of starvation, disappointment, and broken hearts.

This period in the history of our Australian colonies is a startling record of human credulity, human folly, wickedness, despair and death. The fever was confined to no particular class of people. Clergymen, bankers, landowners, shipowners, mer- chants, shopkeepers, sailors, labourers, classical scholars and ignoramuses alike fell under the fascination.

The worst passions of our nature manifested themselves ; hatred, envy, jealousy, greed, uncharitableness. The parsons were no better than the paupers ; the classical scholars than the ignoramuses. The thin veneering of so-called civilisation was rubbed off, and the savage appeared in all his fierceness at the cry of ' Gold ! gold ! '

It is at such periods as these that the moralist finds his pabulum, and those good but weak-minded people who think that human nature has improved with the advance of time have only to get on the house-tops and utter the cry of ' Gold ! ' again, to prove that we are not a whit better than our ancestors were three thousand years ago.

This may not be very flatter- ing to us, but alas ! it is true. In those days of Australian gold rushes the bush was a veritable terra incognita. Ex- plorers had attempted to penetrate into the mystic interior, but many never came back again, and to this day it is not known where their bones moulder.

Those who did return were gaunt, famine -stricken, hollow-eyed, for they had looked upon death, and the stories they told were calculated to appal everyone but the most daring and reckless. But the report of the gold finds so turned the heads of people that, forgetting all about the dangers and privations they would have to endure, they started off into those unknown regions, and thousands literally perished by the way. The experiences of some of these unfortunate people are in themselves amongst the most pathetic and moving of human stories.

Melbourne at the time of this narrative was not the Me. bourne of to-day. It was then simply a collection of canva and wooden huts and houses, with a few buildings of a mor substantial character. One of the most imposing houses i the place was that known as ' Jackson's Boarding-house It was built partly of wood and partly of stone, and was kej by a man. and his wife named Jackson.

Very little, if anj thing, was known of the Jacksons' history, beyond that the had come to the colony a few years previously. Jackson wa a nautical man, and had purchased a schooner with which h traded up and down the coast, though with indifferent success.

At last his Schooner was wrecked, and Jackson and his wife, who had always sailed with him, built a wooden shanty, in what was then known as Canvas Town — -now Melbourne — where they sold liquors and provisions. They seemed to have done fairly well, for very soon they erected what was then quite an imposing building, and they called it 'Jackson's Boarding-house.'