Screams From the Darkness - Australian Mystery
Somewhere in the Outer Barcoo, on a remote cattle station in central-western Queensland, there is a waterhole that terrified a district for sixty years.
Station hands abandoned a hut they would never return to. Shearers fled in the middle of the night, leaving their swags behind. Two men went out armed with rifles to settle the matter once and for all. They came back without answers, and with their weapons discharged.
The sounds they heard were described consistently, across multiple independent accounts spanning six decades. Wailing, screaming, something that built from silence until it filled the whole night. Something that, by the repeated testimony of people who had spent their lives in the Australian bush, could not have been made by any animal or bird they knew.
It stopped around 1925. Nobody knows why. Nobody heard it again.
Sources:
• Bill Beatty, "The Wilga Waterhole Ghost," Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1947, p.10 (Trove article #18004435)
• Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 14 February 1947, p.4 (Trove article #98205020)
• S.W. Cleary, letter to the editor, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 4 March 1932, p.5 (Trove article #98921925)
• Bill Beatty, A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales and Traditions (1960), chapter "Here's a Queer Tale"
• Philip Shields, "In Search of the Wilga Ghost," Ontology Site (19 August 2017): https://ontologysite.wordpress.com/2017/08/19/in-search-of-the-wilga-ghost/ Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay
Strewth Social Media Links: https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast
Contact us: [email protected]
Station hands abandoned a hut they would never return to. Shearers fled in the middle of the night, leaving their swags behind. Two men went out armed with rifles to settle the matter once and for all. They came back without answers, and with their weapons discharged.
The sounds they heard were described consistently, across multiple independent accounts spanning six decades. Wailing, screaming, something that built from silence until it filled the whole night. Something that, by the repeated testimony of people who had spent their lives in the Australian bush, could not have been made by any animal or bird they knew.
It stopped around 1925. Nobody knows why. Nobody heard it again.
Sources:
• Bill Beatty, "The Wilga Waterhole Ghost," Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 1947, p.10 (Trove article #18004435)
• Western Star and Roma Advertiser, 14 February 1947, p.4 (Trove article #98205020)
• S.W. Cleary, letter to the editor, Narromine News and Trangie Advocate, 4 March 1932, p.5 (Trove article #98921925)
• Bill Beatty, A Treasury of Australian Folk Tales and Traditions (1960), chapter "Here's a Queer Tale"
• Philip Shields, "In Search of the Wilga Ghost," Ontology Site (19 August 2017): https://ontologysite.wordpress.com/2017/08/19/in-search-of-the-wilga-ghost/ Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay
Strewth Social Media Links: https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast
Contact us: [email protected]