Wilgag ghost

In search of the Wilga ghost. Story by Phil and pictures by Phil and Mat . I have a theory that a book seeks you out. Particular books if you ignore them, tend to pop-up again and again. A book called "A treasury of Australian Folk Tales " written in 1960 by Bill Beatty found its way via various book stores and relatives to my attention. Inside it, a story called "here’s a queer tale" caught my interest. It tells of a screaming ghost, which apparently frequented the Wilga waterhole on the Barcoo river between the mid 1800’s and 1925. There have been many independent eyewitness accounts over the years, one interesting one states that during the height of the ear splitting phenomenon, the water on the surface of the waterhole remained undisturbed.
	As far as the legend goes, there are a few variations on the story. The one in the book says: "The story is consistent always, nothing but a series of terrifying, fiendish yells and screams arising suddenly and dying away mysteriously into silence". Most of the versions of the story tend to centre around the woman living in the house. The book’s version says: "A new hand employed at Ruthven station built a slab and bark hut near the waterhole. He brought his wife to live there. She was a typical bush woman, sensible, practical and accustomed all her life to the loneliness of the outback."
"The couple had been there for a short time when one night the husband arrived home late, having been delayed, to find his wife in a state of collapse. She could tell him of nothing she had seen, but the most appalling shrieks had come from the waterhole. Soon after this episode the station hand was away for two nights. On arrival home he found his wife hysterical. Crying and sobbing, she told him of the terrible screaming and wailing at the waterhole that had caused her to almost lose her reason". Needless to say they packed their bags and hit the track without delay. Another story relates that the woman killed her infant child and the screaming was her remorseful spook. Yet other tells of a boundary rider who was lost and his skeleton was found years later minus a leg, it was he who was screaming for the lost leg.
It was pick a story time, as Mat and I would be sitting out there miles from no-where, by our selves, in a place where the owner last visited three years ago. I decided to go with my personal favourite on this occasion, the book’s less gruesome account. The hole’s bad reputation regarding this rowdy spook grew and got better in the telling as the years rolled on. Still, I think you would agree that this industrial-strength banshee was worth a four-wheel drive trip to investigate. Unfortunately, the ghost’s reach extended all the way to Southern NSW. The little devil sent a bolt of lightning through my stop light wire the day I was to leave and promptly vaporised it from the rear of the Hilux to behind the dash. It took me three days to replace the wire and adjacent wires that had been melted. This was repeated again without warning at Cunnamulla but I had the job down to a fine art by then and it only took me four hours to replace the wire. This was really bad karma I thought, if it was trying to tell me something it certainly got my attention. I was beginning to think maybe there are some places a bloke shouldn’t go. I was ready to turn back, but with the urging of my son Mat, we decided to press on regardless.

In search of the Wilga ghost.