Great Australian Ghost Stories by Richard Davis Page B

breathing man that he had seen and spoken to many times, but Fisher’s ghost. The pale, ‘fuzzy’ form was bathed in an eerie white light and there was blood dripping from an open wound to its head. The ghost looked straight at James Farley, its dead eyes holding the living man’s in a hypnotic stare. Next it let out a long and terrifying moan which Farley described as like the howl of a wounded beast. Then it raised its right arm, extended a quivering finger and pointed in the direction of the creek that flowed behind Fisher’s farm.
    Farley, by his own account, fainted at that point and when he came to the ghost was gone. Greatly distressed, Farley staggered home and collapsed again at his own front door. He was put to bed and there he lay in a state of shock for ten days. When his senses finally returned Farley sent for William Howe, the local police magistrate, and told him the story.
    Knowing Farley to be a reliable man, Howe immediately ordered a search of the creek. Bloodstains were found on the fence where Farley said the ghost had appeared and a ‘black tracker’ led the police to a spot beside the creek where he said (after scraping the surface of the water with a gum leaf and tasting the scum for ‘white man’s fat’) the body was buried. The police dug and, less than one metre down, came upon the body. It was identified by its height and build and by its clothing as the remains of Frederick Fisher. There was not enough of the face left to identify. The lower part was battered to a pulp, while the forehead and the back of the skull had been holed with some heavy, sharp implement like an axe or a pick. What the murderer had not finished decay had. The local doctor, Thomas Robinson, described how, when he lifted one of the corpse’s hands, the flesh came away and stuck to his skin.
    George Worrell was arrested for Fisher’s murder and sent for trial by jury at the Supreme Court of New South Wales on 2 February 1827. The trial lasted just one day. Worrell was found guilty on a Friday and executed at the Dawes Point Battery the following Monday. On the morning of his execution Worrell confessed to a clergyman that he alone had killed, mutilated and buried Frederick Fisher.
    There was no mention of a ghost at Worrell’s trial or in the newspaper reports of the proceedings but, by then, the story of Fisher’s ghost had entered the folklore of Campbelltown and would soon spread far and wide, across the colony and the world.
    It was recorded in Martin’s History of the British Colonies , published in London in 1835, and in Tegg’s Weekly , a Sydney journal published in 1836. Tegg’s version was attributed to a Mr Kerr, a tutor employed by Police Magistrate Howe. Charles Dickens included it in the journal he edited, Household Words , in 1853 and versions appeared in French and Italian.
    From the beginning, distortions occurred — almost every aspect of the story was changed and romanticised so that truth became indistinguishable from fiction.
    So, was there ever a ghost? Well, James Farley was a respected man, sober in his habits and God-fearing, according to his contemporaries. Sceptics suggest the ghost story was an invention by him to ensure Worrell got his just deserts but that would mean that Farley knew the whereabouts of the body, which implicates him.
    A Campbelltown barber claimed responsibility for the ghost some years after these events, saying he had been tipped off about the location of the body and had felt an obligation to point the authorities in the right direction. The barber claimed he had donned a white cloak to create the appearance of a ghost and a black cloak to make it disappear, but others dismissed his claims as an insult to Farley’s intelligence.
    James Farley lived to a ripe old age and a little known sequel to the story tells of a friend named Chisholm asking Farley on his deathbed whether he really saw Fisher’s