EVERYONE loves a rattling good ghost story, don't they?
So, how about an unknown yarn then of a headless horseman from the colonial era once emerging from winter evening mists to gallop across Hunter River flats?
You're a little sceptical? Well, so was I, and still am.
With Halloween looming next month, I was recently reminded of this most bizarre yarn of the best phantom figure I'd never heard of. My memory was nudged by the reissue of a 2022 paperback on Aussie ghosts by author and comic Ben Pobjie. Titled 100 tales from Australia's Most Haunted Places, the book even has a brief chapter on Port Stephens, specifically Tomago House, entitled, 'The Watchful Widow' where it deals with supposed sightings of former owner Maria Windeyer on the premises.
But there's another yarn within the pages that caught my attention. It's entitled The Headless Horseman of Black Swamp, NSW, and at least it pointed me towards the origin of this Aussie folk tale gone feral.
But first, some background. Years ago, I'd dropped by a hobby farm outside Maitland, on an open day of some sort on a Sunday afternoon. I came across the property owner regaling his city visitors with a hair-raising local convict folktale. And all this told in broad daylight and delivered deadpan by the speaker. His audience was captivated, spellbound with the incredulity of it all.
I guess most people just love a scary yarn of something supernatural to freeze the blood.
What the speaker basically said was this. Back, probably in the 1840s, when Maitland was the hub of the busy river trade and the gateway into the interior of the Hunter Valley, a strange tale was given wide currency, probably by the few remaining Irish convicts still tilling the fields as free labour for landowners. These Gaelic-speaking felons were very superstitious, carrying a lot of baggage from their old country involving tales of death coaches and "the little people" etc.
Actually, the headless horseman seeking vengeance is a tale that goes back to the Middle Ages. According to the entertaining Mr Pobjie, its Australian counterpart can be traced back to a story told by drovers herding cattle along the flat Cobb Highway near Hay, NSW. Here, the saltbush plains are also known as "The Long Paddock" containing a network of stock routes and a tourist oddity. A majestic sculpture has stood proudly by the roadside here since 2009. Made of rustic red-brown iron, it depicts two drovers travelling down the track with a herd of cattle.
But behind the drovers is another, separate figure of a headless horseman chasing the cowboys into infinity.
The 19th century route was once very dangerous, with the likelihood of drovers encountering rustlers or bushrangers. It also seems one drover, called Doyle, lost his head to brigands, but his death was only the beginning of his story.
Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, drovers passing through the area began to experience something more terrifying than armed outlaws. While camping at night, they heard soft hoofprints approaching. A horse would appear in the gloom with a silent rider on its back. The rider had a long cloak, wrapped around his neck but had no head. Or rather, he was carrying it under his arm. All a bit unnerving.
Rumours went into overdrive. To see the headless horseman presaged your imminent death. Spooked drovers and cattle would both suddenly scatter.
According to Pobjie, a butcher from nearby Moulamein took advantage of the disturbing legend to ride his horse through drovers' camps, his head hidden beneath his cloak, causing the cattle to stampede. Later, he would round up a few loose beasts to re-route the meat through his butcher shop.
Writer Pobjie is obviously also a bit unimpressed by the original ghost tale, describing the modern sculpture as depicting the headless horseman "frantically trying to return a waffle iron to a close friend".
The Cobb Highway's tourist attraction sadly though has never achieved the international fame of its American counterpart.
Thanks to the popular cartoon Sleepy Hollow produced by Walt Disney in the late 1940s, a vengeful headless horseman chasing lanky, superstitious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane has never gone out of fashion, especially at Halloween, 204 years later.
The classic 1820 short story penned by Washington Irving used a man's real name and a real-life place, but the rest is fiction. It's considered one of America's first ghost stories. There's a real village called Sleepy Hollow in New York State's Hudson Valley and Irving was inspired by a real Hessian soldier decapitated by a cannonball during a battle around Halloween in 1776. (The cruel Hessians were imported German mercenaries hired by the British army to try to halt the American Revolution of 1775-1783.)
In the short story, the headless horseman chases the fearful Crane until he is able to cross a wooden bridge and safety. The horseman then hurls his head at the horrified Crane, but it turns out to be a pumpkin. The Hudson Valley? Maybe our Hunter Valley ghost tale was simply adapted from this overseas fable, especially as the past symbol for Maitland for decades was the pumpkin.
Meanwhile, it's a pity ghost author Pobjie has missed a marvellous opportunity by not including more Lower Hunter supernatural tales in his recent book.
If he had, we might have been reading about the ghost of the Civic Theatre, or of the colonial redcoat soldier still haunting the historic barracks inside the Watt Street asylum. And what's the truth behind a former Newcastle nightclub where a body is claimed to be buried in the wall? Security guards patrolling the place are always wary of going inside. Or so it's said.
So, maybe some things can't be explained. Take the case of when the fabulous treasures of a Dark Ages burial mound at Sutton Hoo, in Britain's Suffolk, were excavated on the eve of World War II.
The main find was a magnificent Anglo-Saxon helmet.
Archaeologists also found another 262 objects plus a 27metre-long burial ship on an estate owned by widow Edith Pretty. All items were given to the British Museum.
Strangely, stories persist that the widow was spurred to investigate the hillock because she and others reported seeing ghostly warriors with spears in the distance suddenly appearing at dusk on the site, as if saying: "Investigate here".
