New Lambton had it's own ghost sighting in 1914.
Was it a ghost or was it just the creaks and knocks of a house settling after a hot day?
As a ghost hunter and researcher into the ghost stories of my local area I love these articles as they show me that ghosts and apparitions were on everyone's mind the moment strange and bizarre unexplainable things happened.
People have not changed - they are still intrigued by the noir and weird.
Here is today's story.
Singleton Argus (NSW:
1880 - 1954), Saturday 3 January 1914, page 8
"COTTAGE ON THE
HILL" MYSTERY.
Dry Weather or Ghosts
New Lambton is a suburb
of Newcastle, that, ordinarily, is quiet in the fullest sense of the word; but
for some days past the residents have been cised over mysterious sounds and
occurrences in a cottage on the hill near the public school.
Attention was first
called to the matter ; by some of the inmates of the house hearing distinct sounds
of tapping on one of the doors in the early evening.
The sounds wore only heard
when the door was shut —when it was open there was no evidence, material or
psychic, of any interference with this part of the house.
Thinking that they might
be mistaken in imagining that the sound , came from the door, or that someone
might be playing a trick on them, the inmates mentioned the matter to the
police.
However, when a
policeman and another watcher took a turn in endeavouring to unravel the
mystery, one sitting on either side of the door, they were nonplussed to hear
knocks on the woodwork. (Careful investigation was made around and beneath the
house, to find out whether strings or wires might lead to the door from a
distance, but nothing was discovered. The uncanny part about the matter was
that the sounds did not manifest themselves until darkness fell, and they
continued, at intervals, until about half-past 10 or 11 o 'clock.
Neighbours, as well as
police, have failed to unravel the mystery, and taken in conjunction with other
occurrences — such as finding certain articles misplaced in a strange manner,
and an egg boiling in a saucepan which no one in the house could remember
having placed on the stove—it has caused much nervousness amongst the
household.
As evening came on,
scores of people congregate about the house, and await with something more than
curiosity the "manifestations," some even expecting, though half-dreading,
that these may take too realistic a form. (However, no one has yet seen
anything, and if the judgment of the more practical residents of the suburb can
be relied upon, they are not likely to.
The explanation which
the practical ones give of the mysterious rappings is that the continued dry
weather has caused, the clay in the hill on which the house stands to crack
open. The heat of the day. further expands the cracks, and when night falls,
the cooling effect of the sea-breezes causes the earth to contract. In doing
so,it affects the woodwork of the house, with the result that there have been
sundry creakings and crackings that have dismayed the inmates. That this theory
is probably the correct one had, verification in part on Christmas Day.
Following on a very hot
day, the night was warm, and there was no cooling down of the Earth until well
after midnight. On that night, although there was the usual crowd of watchers,
there' was no "rapping."
However, if the above
very material explanation is the true one, there will l be more than one
disappointed person in New Lambton, for up to the present they are holding
fondly the I belief that their quiet, matter-of-fact suburb has of itself established
communion with the occult, and that psychic influences are to be felt there or
nowhere else in such a prosaic industrial centre as is that Newcastle district.
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