DIARY OF A GHOST HUNTER

Stay with me on this one - you will find out the significance of the number 61 soon!!! It's a proud moment and I really want to share it!!! Would you believe that I had never head of the words ' piffle' and 'bosh' until the day I woke up with them in my head? That was the first day of my first paranormal blog post. PIFFLE - means 'nonsense', 'rubbish'. It's a noun that tends to make something less important, small, inconsequential. BOSH - means 'rubbish' 'silliness'. It comes from a Turkish word meaning empty .😊😊 So, it's quite interesting, and spooky, that I was led to to take on these two unknown words that, in effect, mean the same thing, when I did not know them in the first place. But, what I was trying to do was to create something that mirrored my writing style, random bites, stories that attracted me to them, slices of history, interesting facts and my own adventures and put them together to make s

Norfolk Island is a ghost hunters paradise. If you can get past the lack of great internet and many of the other tourists being of a more graceful age and totally not interested in anything remotely related to ghosts you will have an absolute hoot investigating this pearl just 2.5 hours from Sydney. Measuring just 8km long and 5km wide Norfolk is covered by rolling green hills and a rocky shoreline. It is a tiny volcanic outcrop located just over 1000 kilometres off the shore of Australia but it could not be any more different. My own fascination with the island came about because of its connection to Newcastle, where I live. Convicts were bought from Norfolk to Sydney and then some came to Newcastle to serve their time. We go back to the very late 1800's. In fact some of the graves in the cemetery are dated even before Newcastle was even settled by the English. As a paranormal investigator I was intrigued with the ghosts of the island and the stories behind the l

Maria Windeyer moved into Tomago House in 1847 and the story goes that she still keeps a close eye on her homestead in the Hunter Valley. Visitors and also volunteers have claimed they can feel her and her family's presence at the site over a hundred years after her death. A few years ago big storms did loads of damage but they also revealed some surprises - during the renovations two trap doors were discovered in Maria's bedroom! "Until the storm, this floor was covered by carpet," says Marjorie Biggins from Friends of Tomago House. "I knew it was there because it creaked - it's a proper little room. We think she used it because there were still bushrangers ... and wild aboriginal tribes and she was a lone woman." The underground cellars, trapdoors and attics all tell stories about the social history and status of the Windeyer family. Maria became the mistress of Tomago House after her barrister husband Richard died just before they w