Ghost hoaxing blog posts

https://www.buriedsecretspodcast.com/ghost-hoaxing-19th-century-australia/

Victorian Ghost Hoaxers: Part 1

Note: This contains mentions of vigilantism and angry mobs.

Did you know that in late 19th century Australia, ordinary people would dip sheets in toxic glowing paint and run around at night pretending to be ghosts?

I dug up this oddball story way back in 2020, and my then-cohost and I did a whole podcast episode about it. (Which you can listen to wherever you get podcasts.) Since that was a while ago, I wanted to revisit the story in a few blog posts. So buckle up; it’s a weird one.

The story involves a angry mob chasing a preacher; a protective mom siccing her dog on a creepy dude; calls for vigilante justice; hallucinogenic moonshine and a “very fine” draper’s dummy; a lady dressed up in a glow-in-the-dark wedding dress and playing guitar on a rooftop, and more.

A Plea for Ghosts

The year is 1882. The place: Victoria, Australia.

Ghost stories abounded in 19th century Australia, particularly in the state of Victoria: places like Melbourne, Ballarat, and Bendigo had become hotbeds of spiritualism by the 1870s.

There were plenty of reasons for that. Among them: In the 1850s, a lot of immigrants moved to the area to mine gold, which brought a lot of new folklore and beliefs to the area. In the 1860s, a handful of orators gave lectures about how it’s so sad that science has vanquished the idea of ghosts. The general argument seemed to be that people had lost the sense of the sublime.

One speech, “A Plea for Ghosts,” was given by David Blair of Melbourne, caused a stir, inspiring newspaper articles and letters to the editor. It seemed to really hit home because it resonated with folks’ concerns about the spiritual health of the area. At the time, there were tons of ghost sightings, exorcisms, and known hoaxes. There was also that very 19th century tension between religious and scientific ideas.

An editorial published in the Argus, a Melbourne newspaper, said:

It is a noticeable symptom of the reactionary movement against the materialistic philosophy so much in vogue at the present day that ghosts, after having been objects of contempt to the educated and intelligent classes for some generations, are beginning to grow again into favour. We are not now alluding to the phenomena of spiritualism, which some years ago threatened to make the spirits of the dead quite as common as, and a great deal more commonplace than, the persons of the living. But outside the obscure regions tenanted by this creed, there are distinct signs that ghosts, which we thought were laughed out of existence by the robust common sense of the eighteenth century, are creeping back into the world, revisiting again the glimpses of the moon, in these rather sickly times of the moribund nineteenth century.

In 1881, 400 people gathered at the Galloway monument in Ballarat to listen to speakers discuss ghosts and spiritualism. However, when a preacher denigrated spiritualism and claimed that ghosts were agents of the devil, an angry mob chased him down the street. So that was the vibe at the time.

Also adding to the haunted atmosphere were numerous (fiction and “true”) stories about headless horsemen, women in white, headless animals, and ghosts of murdered victims. That being said, most of the articles I found were skeptical, tongue-in-cheek pieces. Many stories claimed that the ghosts were all hoaxers trying to rob people and cause mayhem.

Vigilante ghostbusters

By the 1890s, people complained of the “ghost nuisance” because of the amount of public time and money that was expended to investigate reports of ghostly occurrences. It didn’t help that fast-growing cities like Ballarat didn’t have widespread street lighting.

Some editorials suggested that armed constables and vigilantes patrol abandoned buildings and cemeteries and shoot all ghosts on sight (with buckshot). They reasoned that real ghosts wouldn’t be hurt and pranksters would learn a lesson.

Hallucinations

There did seem to be tons of pranks, or at least false alarms. One tale of a headless, ghostly dog was revealed to be a cat with its head trapped in a lobster tin.

A stockman was terrified of a female headless horsewoman (who he mentioned had “a fine body”). It turned out that the ghostly “woman” was nothing more than an abandoned draper’s dummy lying next to an old log. It turned out that the witness may have consumed adulterated alcohol and hallucinated the spirit.

At the time, a lot of alcohol was poor quality and laced with opiates and toxic substances that could cause hallucinations. So some of the ghost sightings in the area could have just been people tripping out.

This post doesn’t link to sources as comprehensively as usual, because it’s based on an old episode of Buried Secrets Podcast. I wrote this based on the original episode notes, which I penned when I was worse at adding specific in-line citations. But all of the sources I used are linked at the bottom of the episode shownotes page. The main source that I used for the episode was “Playing the Ghost” by Dr. David Waldron.

Victorian Ghost Hoaxers: Part 2

Note: This contains mentions of colonialism and people being attacked.

Dr. David Waldron, a folklorist and historian at Federation University in Ballarat, is an expert in the subject of Victorian ghost hoaxers. In his paper “Playing the Ghost”he talks about the disaster of colonialism in Australia, as well as colonizers’ misguided attempt to pretend that Australia was England:

Even in the Australian climate with its scarcity of water and blistering heat, people attempted to create a British environment. They wore formal suits, even in summer; they created English dinners; they imported English animals; and the Acclimatization Society of Victoria was formally established in 1861 to make the environment more familiar, more English . . . English building styles were used, even though totally inappropriate for the Australian climate, and British farming practices were introduced with disregard for the alien landscape, often with disastrous consequences . . . Displacement was endemic, which made nineteenth-century Victoria a fertile environment for the advent of ghostly experiences and ghostly conjuring.

English colonizers were creating a ghostly landscape, destroying the existing culture and land in an effort to summon the spirit of the place they’d left behind. But that was obviously impossible:

Australia was a world turned upside down. This was in part due to the gold rushes, but also because it was a country where emancipated convicts could rise in the ranks of government and become landowners, and where aristocrats could be found working the gold mines alongside emancipated convicts and commoners.

Waldron goes on to talk about how ghost hoaxing almost acted as a release valve, a way for otherwise respectable people to behave badly:

The people who participated in colonial goldfields ghost hoaxing were often the representatives of the rational, respectable, and safe community: school-teachers, housewives, and public servants, even though they were described as riff-raff and working-class ‘larrikins’ in the print media. (‘Larrikin’ is a popular term used to describe mischievous working-class pranksters and troublemakers.)

Rich kids up to no good

The paper compares the Australian ghost hoaxers to a group of young aristocratic men in England in the early 1700s, who prowled around London and attacked people of all genders.

The group of rich, bored sons were such a problem that in 1712, the royal court put a 100 pound bounty on their heads

Waldron writes:

This appears quite distinct from the populist perception of the ‘prowling ghosts’ of England from the same era, who in the public imagination were primarily young aristocrats. These perceptions had their origin in earlier panics surrounding the ‘Mohocks’—well-dressed, affluent, aristocratic young men with too much time, wealth, and boredom on their hands—who had been terrorizing the inhabitants of the cities in the gloom of England’s poorly lit urban streets .

This post doesn’t link to sources as comprehensively as usual, because it’s based on an old episode of Buried Secrets Podcast. I wrote this based on the original episode notes, which I penned when I was worse at adding specific in-line citations. But all of the sources I used are linked at the bottom of the episode shownotes page. The main source that I used for the episode was “Playing the Ghost” by Dr. David Waldron.

Victorian Ghost Hoaxers: Part 3

Note: this post contains mention of sexual assault, vigilantism, poisoning, mental asylums, cancer, and injury/illness.

Late nineteenth century ghost hoaxing, or “playing the ghost,” became so common that it happened several times per week in Ballarat, Australia, during its height. It seemed that dressing up as a ghost became a convenient way to disguise oneself while committing crimes.

The Wizard Bombardier and other hoaxers

According to Dr. David Waldron in his paper “Playing the Ghost”, the source I’m quoting in this post, men and women would dress in “elaborate costumes” and scare or assault people walking by:

 Many of these individuals displayed quite a theatrical flourish in their costuming and activities, leading to the characters receiving fanciful nicknames from the local press. One man was arrested by local police and fined two hundred pounds for damages after assaulting a police officer’s daughter while dressed as a ghost . . . Another young man received the nickname of ‘Wizard Bombardier’ due to his costume of white robes with a tall sugar-loaf hat. He would scare workers and passers-by between Ballarat and Kilmore with eerie screams and rock-throwing, and seemed to enjoy the cat-and-mouse game with local vigilantes and authorities as they set off in pursuit . . . He was, in the end, discovered and beaten by two local residents in an act of vigilantism.

Green-glowing phosphorescent paint had just been brought to Australia and quickly grew popular. Hijinks ensued: people would vandalize buildings with glowing skulls-and-crossbones or paint angels and tombstones in the cemetery.

Lazy ghost hoaxers could soak a sheet in phosphorescent paint and don that, but some people got creative. Waldron reports that:

One man dressed himself in a knight’s costume with a glowing breastplate featuring the words ‘Prepare to meet thy doom’ . . . There were also examples of costumes that copied outfits from antiquity, with skins and claws being quite common accessories, although luminous paint was still a prominent feature.

Unfortunately, all this ghostly “fun” came at a high price, because the phosphorescent paint happened to be real toxic.

It could cause, to quote Waldron “severe symptoms including cardiovascular and respiratory disease, gastrointestinal dysfunction, diarrhoea, incontinence, blurred vision, hypertension, anxiety, tremors, seizures, ataxia, coma, and death.” 

Waldron observes that by pretending to be the ghosts of dead people, people might unknowingly have caused their own death (or at least illness). Some people ended up with brain damage; a number of them were sent to asylums.

Later, they used radium paint instead, which of course was radioactive and caused cancer. So not exactly an improvement.

A convenient disguise

Many of these ghost hoaxers were men who sought to harass and assault women. Those included a man with “a skull and cross-bones painted on his bare chest above the word ‘Death’” who “was accused of exposing himself to passers-by at the Ballarat cemetery.”

Other assailants included a man sporting “a white overcoat with a glowing phosphorescent-soaked suit,” another man dressed in “white clothes with a coffin lid strapped to his back, his face and limbs covered in glowing phosphorescent paint, and a man “wearing a costume of high India-rubber boots with a long white coat and carrying a cat-o’-nine-tails.”

That last man had real supervillain vibes. He sent the mayor a letter that said:

Dear Sir,

I see that you and your bally councillors have fixed a reward of £5 on my head, but you didn’t say whether dead or alive; and, furthermore, you said you would have me plugged with a lead on sight.

Mr. Mayor, I give you warning that the first man I see with his hand in his pocket, or otherwise looking suspicious, I will plug a bullet through him. I hope you will caution the ‘Rakebite’ portion of your council of my intentions.

Yours truly, The Ghost.

When “The Ghost” was eventually arrested, he was revealed to be “a well-known and respected elocutionist and senior clerk.” Go figure.

This post doesn’t link to sources as comprehensively as usual, because it’s based on an old episode of Buried Secrets Podcast. I wrote this based on the original episode notes, which I penned when I was worse at adding specific in-line citations. But all of the sources I used are linked at the bottom of the episode shownotes page. The main source that I used for the episode was “Playing the Ghost” by Dr. David Waldron.

Victorian Ghost Hoaxers: Part 4

Note: This post contains mentions of physical attacks, vigilantism, mental asylums.

In the last post, I wrote about some of the men who dressed up as ghosts in 19th century Australia in order to commit crimes. But women did it too, albeit more often for crimes that you might describe as a bit less violent.

Their transgressions ranged from ordinary to creative. One woman played the ghost to protect herself while stealing chickens and eggs.

Another would dress as a man, visit bars, and chat with men before exposing herself as a woman. (She was charged with indecent exposure). After spending time at the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, she began dressing as a monster in a hideous papier-mâché mask and a white sheet soaked in glow-in-the-dark paint. She would hide under a bridge and jump out and scare people. Waldron argues that the woman would have been told she was a monster and a deviant in the lunatic asylum and by dressing as a ghost she was “in a sense, becoming this thing she was told she was.”

One woman would wear a glow-in-the-dark wedding dress, paint her face and arms white, and then play guitar on the roof of a building.

Fighting the ghosts

Now, the citizens of these cities didn’t take these ghostly crimes lying down. There are plenty of reports of people fighting back, shooting them (in one case, shooting a man in the rear with a shotgun loaded with rock salt); hitting them with canes; sending dogs after them; and flogging them. One woman played dead while being attacked, and then when the assailant got close, she slashed his face to ensure that he could be found and arrested later.

Newspapers egged on anti-ghost vigilantes, calling the practice of attacking “ghostly” attackers as “laying the ghost.” A sort of exorcism, I suppose.

Why play the ghost

Waldron argues that while people certainly played the ghost to make crimes easier to commit, there was more to it than that.

He suggests that “there is a correlation between the phenomenon of ghost hoaxing and unbidden experiences of the paranormal,” since they’re both about boundary crossing and breaking taboos. He also points out that “ghost hoaxing creates psychic disturbance, a term which in Jungian parlance means that the psyche of the individual is troubled by that which it cannot fully comprehend.”

The Victorians were known for stifling social mores; dressing up as a ghost and running amok was one way to rebel. It’s no surprise that so many of the ghost hoaxers’ crimes had to do with “invert[ing] traditional gender roles and [breaking] sexual taboos through dress, public exposure, sexual assault or harassment, and foul language.”

And of course liminality, our old pal when it comes to all things paranormal, is in play here:

By cloaking oneself in the symbols of a superstitious and Gothic past, one could gain a sense of empowerment and anonymity. Hoaxing occupied a liminal space in which a person could break taboos and engage in a carnivalesque inversion of morals, beliefs, and behaviours.

The story of Australian ghost hoaxers is fascinating to me from a historical standpoint, but also from a paranormal one: How many of these ghost sightings were real paranormal experiences? Did that behavior whip up paranormal weirdness? (After all, if you’re “playing the ghost,” might you summon one?)

We’ll never know, but this is a prime example of trickster elements in the paranormal. And it suggests the possibility hoaxes might occur around real paranormal happenings in a way that ensures that no one can detangle them; you can’t really sort the mundane from the paranormal in a story like this.

This post doesn’t link to sources as comprehensively as usual, because it’s based on an old episode of Buried Secrets Podcast. I wrote this based on the original episode notes, which I penned when I was worse at adding specific in-line citations. But all of the sources I used are linked at the bottom of the episode shownotes page. The main source that I used for the episode was “Playing the Ghost” by Dr. David Waldron.

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