This Christmas, we're doing something different on Strewth.

The Victorian English had a tradition of telling ghost stories around the fire on Christmas night, long before it became all tinsel and shopping, it was a time for sharing tales of the unexplained. We're reviving that tradition with three spooky Australian accounts that never made it into our regular episodes.

Over the past year, I've collected dozens of firsthand testimonies while researching cases, witness statements and personal experiences that didn't quite fit into the main episodes, but are no less fascinating for it. Tonight, you'll hear dramatised versions of three of these accounts: a teacher's terrifying encounter during a school hiking trip in the Victorian Alps, spiritualist Ben Davey's hair-raising experience at the infamous 1921 Guyra séance, and Bongo's disturbing radio call about what happened to him in the Pilliga Scrub in 1978.

Three witnesses. Three encounters with the inexplicable. Three stories that'll remind you the Australian bush holds more mysteries than we like to admit.

Sources:

Bongo's radio call - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUjtoXMAvKs

Haunts of Brisbane - Ben Davey seance report - https://hauntsofbrisbane.blogspot.com/2012/05/guyra-ghost-australias-very-own.html

The teachers report - https://www.reddit.com/r/melbourne/comments/vl306f/does_anyone_have_any_stories_about_the_button_man/

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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Two ghosts haunt the same stretch of Australia's Central Coast.

For fifty years, drivers on Wilfred Barrett Drive have reported picking up a young woman in white who vanishes from their back seat near Norah Head Cemetery. The legend says she was murdered by five men in the 1970s, and that all five died mysteriously afterward. It's one of Australia's most famous ghost stories.

A second ghost seems to be from an earlier period, a time when shipwrecks were common along these treacherous shores.

There is also real tragedy at Jenny Dixon Beach. In 1950, two sisters, Grace and Kathleen Holmes were brutally murdered near Tuggerah Lakes. Their graves went unmarked for 64 years. Their killer was never found. And while a ghost became famous, the real victims were forgotten.

This is the story of how urban legend intertwines with actual horror. How shipwreck folklore mergew with a fabricated murder. And how the wrong victims ended up being remembered.

The truth at Jenny Dixon Beach is stranger and sadder than any ghost story.

Sources:

Newcastle Herald - (February 2024) - https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8523178/ghostly-hitchhiker-of-wilfred-barrett-drive/

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Legends and Their Meanings (1981)

Jenny Dixon Beach - Full Movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDNxQlkgcXo

Goss, Michale. The evidence for phantom hitch-hikers (1984)

True Hauntings Podcast - Episode 25 (April 28, 2021) https://open.spotify.com/episode/10iNaJBCTwzMrV2EMWFRPO

Casefile True Crime Podcast - Case 32 - https://casefilepodcast.com/case-32-grace-kathleen-holmes/

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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Contact us: strewthpodcast@gmail.com

It's 4 AM on the most isolated highway in Australia. The Knowles family are driving toward a fresh start when they see a light on the road ahead.

Within minutes, they're fleeing at speeds approaching 200 kilometres per hour, but the glowing object matches them effortlessly. Then something lands on their car roof with a heavy metallic thud. Faye Knowles reaches up to touch it and what she feels defies description. Black ash fills the cabin. Their voices distort impossibly. The dogs go into a frenzy.

And then the car lifts off the road.

Six days before Australia's Bicentennial, the Knowles family encountered something on the Nullarbor Plain that police took seriously, scientists struggled to explain, and witnesses never forgot. Physical evidence was collected. Independent corroboration emerged. But nearly forty years later, we still don't know what happened that night.

Something real occurred on that desert highway. But what?

Sources:

• A.T. Brunt The Skeptic, 1989
• Keith Basterfield - UFO Research South Australia
• The Skeptic, Volume 8, No I (Autumn 1988)
• UFO Research Queensland - https://uforq.org/the-knowles-family-ufo-incident-1988/

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

Strewth Social Media Links: https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast

Contact us: strewthpodcast@gmail.com