Great Australian Ghost Stories (3 page)

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?

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-eight
passengers, a crew of seventy-two and a thoroughbred racehorse named Moonshine on board. Minutes later the harbourmaster 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
.

 

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 ended up as the
Alkimos
.

Any sailor will tell you some ships are jinxed, destined to an inglorious history of mishap and tragedy from the day they are launched. The
George M. Shriver
was such a ship. Built in the Kayser Shipyards in Baltimore in 1943, the 7300-tonne oil-powered freighter was one of the thousands, hastily assembled in American shipyards and called Liberty Ships, which ran the gauntlet of German U-boats in the Atlantic and carried much-needed supplies to worn-torn Britain.

The Kayser Shipyard prided itself on the speed with which it assembled hulls; ten days was the average. The
George M. Shriver
took
six weeks
. Its prefabricated sections didn't fit, equipment broke down and there were numerous accidents among the workers, who struggled to complete their task and rid their slipway of what was already being called a jinxed ship.

The
George M. Shriver
's World War Two service record was largely undistinguished and it was in dry-dock more often than at sea. In 1943 the ship was sold to a Norwegian company and given a new name,
Viggo Hansteen
, but if it was hoped the change of name would bring a change of luck, that hope was never realised. In the years after the war when it passed into private hands, the ship was involved in all sorts of mishaps and needed constant repairs. In 1961, for example, it collided with another vessel in Bristol harbour and was out of service
for eleven months while its bow and its superstructure were rebuilt. After that the Norwegian owners decided they had had enough of the costly ship and sold it to a Greek company who renamed it
Alkimos
, the name it carries to this day.

In March 1963 while en route from Jakarta to Bunbury in Western Australia the
Alkimos
struck a reef off lonely Beagle Island about 120 kilometres south of Geraldton. Local crayfishermen circled the stricken ship and reported its predicament to the maritime authorities in Perth but, inexplicably, the commander of the
Alkimos
, Captain Kassotakis, did not request assistance for three days. A tug was eventually sent to try to refloat the freighter but the captain decided the winches on
Alkimos
were more powerful. For two days the winches ground, the ship writhed and shuddered and moved not a centimetre. A salvage expert who was flown up from Perth flooded the stern of the vessel, raising the bow, and the
Alkimos
finally refloated.

Half-filled with seawater and in danger of sinking at any moment, the disabled ship was towed into Fremantle harbour but, if the captain thought his troubles were over, he was wrong. Repairs began immediately but, in May, a mysterious fire almost gutted the ship. The chief officer was fined 100 pounds for misleading an official inquiry into the grounding, writs for amounts totalling 25,000 pounds were served on the captain for failing to pay for earlier repairs and the ship was impounded. The owners paid up but cancelled plans to repair the battered and charred ship in Australia and engaged a local tug operator to tow it to Hong Kong.

The tug
Pacific Reserve
set out on 30 May with the
Alkimos
secured on a 600-metre towline. The sea was calm at first, but on the second day out an unforecast westerly gale whipped up mountainous seas. Fifty-seven kilometres north of Fremantle
and twenty-four kilometres off the coast the towline snapped. The crew of the
Pacific Reserve
tried desperately to secure another line but the sea was too rough. The
Alkimos
began to drift helplessly towards the coast. For the second time in three months the ill-fated freighter ploughed into treacherous reefs and the boiling surf impaled it on Eglinton Rocks.

Several attempts to salvage the vessel were made but all ended in failure and the
Alkimos
's jinx touched every one of them. Tugs were damaged, lines snapped, equipment failed, accidents and illness plagued the salvage crews and the crippled ship stayed wedged in rock and sand. Salvage attempts were abandoned when the winter storm season arrived, then in December a team from Manila arrived to try their luck, but the boilers on their tug, the
Pacific Star
, suddenly and unexpectedly showed signs of bursting and the owner of the company collapsed and died.

The help of a Roman Catholic priest was sought to dispel the jinx and it seemed for a time that his intervention had worked when a heavy swell lifted the crippled vessel and it miraculously floated. The
Pacific Star
, with its boilers repaired, took the
Alkimos
in tow but, a couple of kilometres from Eglinton Rocks, another vessel pulled alongside, arrested the tug's captain for unpaid debts in Manila and impounded his boat. Unable to give further aid to the
Alkimos
, the crew of the
Pacific Star
anchored the rusting freighter between the reefs off Eglinton Rocks but, true to form, it snapped its anchor chain in a heavy swell and drifted shorewards. The
Alkimos
finally came to rest about four kilometres south of Yanchep Beach, where it lies to this day, split apart, covered in barnacles, a home to fish and a very active, sinister ghost.

Two crew members from the
Pacific Star
were stationed on the
Alkimos
to guard the wreck. For the two men it promised to
be a few weeks of light duties and relaxation at their company's expense while the legal wrangle over the
Pacific Star
was sorted out, but it turned out to be a living nightmare. After a day or two the men sensed they were not alone on the vessel. Tools left in one place would be found in another, a heavy hose they tried to move suddenly felt lighter as though another pair of hands was sharing the load. Strange smells of food cooking came wafting up from the disused galley and the sounds of pots and pans banging could be heard, but when they went to investigate the smells and sounds were gone. Finally, on a hot evening when the two men were on deck trying to catch the slight breeze that rose at sunset, they saw their fellow ‘passenger': a giant of a man dressed in an oilskin coat and a sou'wester, who strode across the main deck then straight through a closed steel door.

The two Filipinos were replaced by other caretakers, all of whom had stories to tell about their encounters with the ghost. One pair claimed that it came charging towards them in a narrow gangway one day and that they felt the power of its baleful stare as it thrust them aside, knocking one unconscious. Another of the Filipino caretakers claimed that the ghost threw a kettle of boiling water at him.

No one had any idea who the ghost was and so, for want of a real one, he was given the name ‘Henry'. A young American exchange student spent six days on board the
Alkimos
in July 1963 and recorded in his diary that he was stalked by terrifying footsteps the whole time and the door of the captain's cabin was slammed shut behind him by unseen hands. Sightseers and fishermen claimed to have seen Henry at night and in broad daylight moving about the decks of the ship in his oilskins and sou'wester. Local tour operators cashed in on the stories by organising ghost tours of the wreck; and a Dutch
clairvoyant visited the ship. She spent half a day on board and reported the area beneath the foremast was ‘a very evil place' where she believed someone had met a violent death.

A local identity, the late Jack Sue OAM, highly decorated by the US and Australian governments for his work with Z Force behind enemy lines during World War Two, was sceptical about the stories of the ghost and organised a party to spend a night aboard the
Alkimos
. The party comprised Jack, his wife and some local divers. Jack's scepticism was shattered when he heard footsteps, sneezing and coughing coming from a deserted section of the ship and one of the divers felt something brush past him. Moments later ‘Henry' put in an appearance and, as the party watched in disbelief, the ghost strode purposefully across the deck and straight through a solid bulkhead.

The jinx on the
Alkimos
continued to reach out and touch the lives of all who came in contact with it. The pregnant wife of one caretaker slipped and fell on board and lost her baby. Two business partners, John Franetovich and Bob Hugal, bought the wreck for scrap but bad luck dogged them from that day: a tanker they owned collided with another ship and had to be scuttled; and Hugal, who until then had enjoyed perfect health, suddenly became seriously ill. Swimmers near the wreck were caught in currents that had not been there moments before, visitors to the wreck suffered injuries and motor vessels sailing near the wreck experienced engine troubles. Jack Sue became seriously ill soon after spending the night on the
Alkimos
and his wife died, tragically, in a car accident. One of the divers died suddenly and the fiancée of another was killed in a plane crash. The skull of a long-distance swimmer who had gone missing while trying to swim from the mainland to Rottnest Island was found in the hull of the
Alkimos
and identified by dental records.