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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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

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In February 1944, after ten years floating in a bath of formalin, the Pyjama Girl finally got a name. Two teeth fillings mysteriously appeared at the bottom of her preservation bath, just as Police Commissioner William MacKay desperately needed to solve his department's most embarrassing cold case. Within weeks, Antonio Agostini, a recently released wartime internee working as a waiter, confessed to killing his wife Linda.

But the confession didn't match the autopsy. The dental evidence was based on memory, not charts. And Agostini maintained until his death in 1969: "That's not my wife."

This is Part 2 of our investigation into what may be one of Australia's most disturbing miscarriages of justice. Where a broken man confessed to a murder he may not have committed, and a woman was buried under a name that probably wasn't hers. Sixty years later, a criminologist would expose the case as police corruption and fabricated evidence. But by then, everyone involved was dead, and the truth was buried in an unmarked grave.

Join us as we examine the suspicious 1944 "breakthrough," the trial that made no sense, the lenient verdict that suggests even the jury had doubts, and the modern forensic analysis that reveals how solving a case became more important than solving it correctly.

Warning: This episode contains discussion of violence against women, wrongful conviction, and the unethical display of human remains.

Sources:

• New South Wales Police: Original investigation files and witness statements (1934)
• Coroner's inquest: Death of unknown woman, Albury, NSW (September 1934)
• The Argus (Melbourne): Front-page coverage, September-December 1934
• Sydney Morning Herald: Extensive reporting, 1934-1944
• Evans, Richard. The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies. Deakin University Press, 2004.
• Gilling, Tom. The Pyjama Girl Mystery. Text Publishing, 2004.

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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September 1, 1934. A farmer walking his prize bull along a country road outside Albury catches the smell of kerosene. In a concrete culvert, he discovers a woman's body, shot, beaten with eight savage blows to the skull, and burned. What she's wearing shocks Depression-era Australia as much the violence.

Silk pyjamas embroidered with a Chinese dragon.

For ten years, her body floats in a bath of formalin at Sydney University while thousands file past hoping to identify her. Artists sketch her distorted features. Police make death masks and distribute doctored photographs. A £1,000 reward is offered. Filmmaker Rupert Kathner defies a police ban to create Australia's first true crime film about the case.

But despite 125 women investigated as possible matches, despite a decade of intensive forensic examination, despite the grotesque spectacle of public display, no one can say who she is.

This is Part 1 of our two-part investigation into the Pyjama Girl Murder, exploring the crime, the investigation, the ethical nightmare of preserving a body as public entertainment, and the institutional pressure that would eventually produce a convenient solution to an impossible mystery.

Warning: This episode contains discussion of violence against women, graphic descriptions of murder, and the unethical treatment of human remains.

Sources:

• New South Wales Police: Original investigation files and witness statements (1934)
• Coroner's inquest: Death of unknown woman, Albury, NSW (September 1934)
• The Argus (Melbourne): Front-page coverage, September-December 1934
• Sydney Morning Herald: Extensive reporting, 1934-1944
• Evans, Richard. The Pyjama Girl Mystery: A True Story of Murder, Obsession and Lies. Deakin University Press, 2004.
• Gilling, Tom. The Pyjama Girl Mystery. Text Publishing, 2004.

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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

Contact us: strewthpodcast@gmail.com

On March 20, 1993, a homeless woman named Clare Wibson was struck and killed by a truck on the Newell Highway through Australia's largest forest. The driver's official statement described her final moments in chilling detail: "She turned towards me, arms outstretched in a hugging-like gesture, and ran towards the truck. The last thing I saw was the white hair flaring out around her wild-eyed face and the expression was one of manic glee."

Since that night, hundreds of travelers have reported seeing an elderly woman with white hair and a shopping trolley walking the same desolate 120-kilometer stretch through the Pilliga Forest. Truckers who've never heard the legend stop in nearby towns to report an old woman on foot in the middle of nowhere. Some describe hitting a trolley on the road, only to find no damage and no wreckage. Others speak of a figure that appears in their headlights, arms outstretched, before vanishing into darkness.

This episode explores one of Australia's most persistent modern hauntings, from the 2006 ABC Radio Overnights broadcast that brought the legend to national attention, to the disturbing 1978 account by a caller named "Bongo" who claimed something far worse than the Princess walks the Pilliga at night. With over 2.5 million TikTok posts and countless witness testimonies spanning three decades, the Pilliga Princess has become embedded in Australian trucking culture and folklore.

Is she a ghost? A collective hallucination born from highway hypnosis on one of the country's most isolated roads? Or something that defies easy explanation?

Sources:

• ABC Radio Overnights broadcast (2006) - witness testimonies
• Daily Liberal and Central Western Daily - official accident reports (March 1993)
• Museum of Lost: "The Pilliga Princess" - comprehensive case documentation
• Coonabarabran Lawn Cemetery records - grave marker documentation
• True Hauntings Podcast, All Aussie Mystery Hour, Belief Hole Podcast - witness interviews
• "There's Something in the Pilliga" (2014, dir. Dane Millerd) - documentary evidence

Content Warning: This episode discusses homelessness, mental illness, and fatal traffic accidents.

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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When Willi Koeppen's blue Kombi was found abandoned with keys in the ignition, police initially dismissed it as a man running from his problems. By the time they realised it was murder, crucial evidence had vanished into the dense Dandenong Ranges.

Part 2 follows the investigation that spanned five decades: the underworld confessions that couldn't be proven, the jealous lovers and mistaken identities, the mysterious vehicles seen in the pre-dawn darkness. But as detectives dug deeper, the most compelling evidence pointed not to criminals or strangers but to the tight circle of friends who surrounded Willi's estranged wife.

A doctor who brought psychiatric drugs "just in case." A mysterious phone call at 3 AM that only a handful of people could have made. An anonymous tip-off about a potential burial location and witnesses who, nearly 50 years later, still refuse to speak.

In 2018, a coroner finally ruled it homicide. Expert investigators agree the case is solvable, if those who know the truth would finally break their silence. But as witnesses age and die, time is running out for Willi's children, who have spent their entire adult lives searching for answers about what really happened that leap year night in the mountains.

Content warning: This episode contains references to suicide, alcohol abuse, and suspected violence.

Sources

• 2018 inquest finding by State Coroner Sarah Hinchey (July 11, 2018)
• "The Cuckoo affair: What happened to Willi Koeppen?" by Tammy Mills (July 13, 2018)
• Channel Nine "Under Investigation" "Where's Willi" episode (February 15, 2023)
• "Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule" Podcast - Episode on Koeppen case (October 3, 2020)
• Marrett Investigations - Case summary and ongoing investigation by Damian Marrett

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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

Contact us: strewthpodcast@gmail.com

On a cold February night in 1976, Australia's first celebrity chef vanished from his Bavarian restaurant in the misty Dandenong Ranges. Wilhelm "Willi" Koeppen, the man who brought smorgasbord dining to Australia and hosted the country's first televised cooking show, left behind a blue Volkswagen Kombi with keys in the ignition and the door wide open.

Part 1 reconstructs the final hours: a violent argument with his estranged wife, threats of suicide, hours of drinking with the local doctor, and a mysterious phone call at 3 AM. By sunrise, only his van remained, parked in the wrong spot, abandoned in haste. The window for his disappearance was just 90 minutes.

Nearly five decades later, his body has never been found. But the secrets of that night, kept by those who saw him last, may finally be unraveling.

This is the story of how a man can disappear in plain sight, and how the people closest to the truth chose silence over justice.

Content warning: This episode contains references to suicide, alcohol abuse, and suspected violence.

Sources

• 2018 inquest finding by State Coroner Sarah Hinchey (July 11, 2018)
• "The Cuckoo affair: What happened to Willi Koeppen?" by Tammy Mills (July 13, 2018)
• Channel Nine "Under Investigation" "Where's Willi" episode (February 15, 2023)
• "Life and Crimes with Andrew Rule" Podcast - Episode on Koeppen case (October 3, 2020)
• Marrett Investigations - Case summary and ongoing investigation by Damian Marrett

Title Music: by Jesse Frank from Pixabay

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

Contact us: strewthpodcast@gmail.com