Ghostly T(r)ales No 2. The haunted house
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(micro)
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Professionally camouflaged micro cache. Otherwise not hidden.
Because it is is such a small cache there is no room for swaps. There is a scroll/pencil to put your tags and the date on. It would be beaut. if you could exchange, via the logsor an e-mail a ghost story(doesn't have to be original) of your own.
There is nothing to see now, but if you look up the hill to the transportable house in the big gum trees, you are looking at the site of what was probably the most infamous house in the district. Even today, if you ask any old timer from around the area they are likely to have a tale or two to tell about the haunted house. As children, every time we drove North from Lincoln, our father would tell us tales from the "ghost" house. Grown men were afraid to go near it after dark. Over the years, many had seen or heard the ghost. She was a woman: weeping wailing and crying out. Eventually, no one would live in the house and it became a repository for bales of hay. In the big fire, which burnt from the Tod to the sea in the summer of 74/75 the haunted house was burnt to the ground. This is where my story starts.
In 1982 we moved into a house across the valley from where the haunted house had stood. It had been saved from the fire, although the fence posts still bore scorch marks from where the flames had burnt through the paddocks.
Not long after, I was playing cards with some of my family one night, when I saw, reflected in a mirror, a woman approaching the house. Getting up to greet her, I could see no one, even though from our house you could see for miles in all directions. It was only on reflection that I considered how strangely dressed the woman was. Tall and slender, she had, in my brief sighting, seemed to be wearing a long white dress and a funny cap. For some years after we would hear at times a woman's voice calling in mournful tones, "Where are you?" or "Open the door." As I told this story over the years, I was mostly greeted with scepticism or derision, but others comented on similarities with the haunted house and told me more of the story, until gradually I had pieced this together.
In the 1860's and 70's great diptheria epidemics swept the local area. Many died, including a frightening number of children. The woman who lived in the ghost house was well off, but this offered no protection. She lost all her children, about 6, all under the age of 10. Inconsolable she hung herself, either on the verandah, or in her bedroom.Her ghost was particularly active and seemed to be seeking her children. She would haunt the verandah and bedroom mostly, but moved throughout the house. She wept and moaned a lot, but also called out as if lost and looking for her children. The haunting was so active that, as stated earlier, the house became uninhabitable. Oh, and did I mention: those old timers I talked to told me that when seen, she was wearing the clothes she died in, a long white night dress of the era, and a bed time bonnet to keep her hair in.
When her home burnt down, did she widen the area of her search, and come looking for her children? If so, she moved on eventually.
Ironically we lost our house in the fire of 05.
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