Ghost hunter finds his ghoul
Phil Hammond  
May 16, 2006

Brisbane's history comes alive as the sun goes down, writes Philip
Hammond.
Hearse owner and self proclaimed horror historian Jack Sim was dressed
in black.
Standing among the weathered tombstones of the South Brisbane cemetery,
this powerfully built man in trilby and trenchcoat was difficult to see
in the darkness.
Sim's attire, he explains, reflects his admiration for celebrated 1930s
English ghost hunter, Harry Price.

As we descend the quiet terraces of the South Brisbane cemetery at
Dutton Park, on Brisbane's inner southside, the evening's chill
intensifies and Sim imparts a few anecdotes to set the mood.
"Back in the 1970s and '80s, a couple of grave diggers suggested they'd
heard the sound of chains or manacles. It's a little known fact that
prisoners from Boggo Road jail once dug the graves here," he says.

"Harry Price's opinion was that, rather than ghosts, some sort of
energy, which we don't understand, gets laid into time and space
. . . a piece of the past."
Perhaps that's also why, on certain late afternoons, the figure of a nun
is seen moving among the graves, Sim says. In the days when Dutton Park
was on the extremities of Brisbane and the Sisters of Mercy were busy in
the area, they often crossed the cemetery when visiting people in the
neighbourhood.

The lower section of the original cemetery has totally disappeared --
washed away in Brisbane River floods over the decades.
In the 1880s, this was a subject of attention for the police, because
grave robbers would sell jewellery suspected of having been taken from
exposed corpses.
Sim, notable for his theatrically diabolical laugh, warms to his
subject. "One bloke is said to have turned up at the pawnbroker's with a
ring, with a finger still through it," he says.

Because the loved ones who maintained most of the cemetery graves are
also long gone, the place is largely forgotten, he says.
So when Sim and his assistants bring in walking groups of 35 or more
people on one of his regular Ghost Tours, the cemetery benefits.
"The best way to counter vandals and those involved in illegal
activities is to get these places used for their heritage values," Sim
says.

One of the more memorable night visits to Dutton Park graveyard was when
his group chanced upon a coven of young witches, dancing naked around a
circle of candles.
"In 99 per cent of cases, it's women who ring to book a tour," he says.
"But for three months after the witches were seen, it was nothing but
blokes making the bookings."
Sim's mission is to get word out that Brisbane has a substantial
cultural history. Since starting his ghost tours in 1998 he has amassed
an impressive collection of gruesome yarns, chilling murders and
spine-tingling stories.

There's the story of a pedestrian in Queen Street fatally mauled by a
lion which escaped from the City Botanic Gardens zoo. And the gangs of
kids in the 1930s who would raid the city dump (where Suncorp Stadium
now stands) fired up by rumours of the location of a buried elephant.
There's Lilly, the vampire with shark-like teeth, said to appear in
Toowong Cemetery.
Sim says Captain Patrick Logan -- the commandant charged with the job of
transforming Brisbane from a notorious penal colony into a fledgling
town -- recorded in his diary a ghost sighting; the apparition of
William Swan, a dead convict whom he had once ordered flogged.

Sim doesn't rule out the possibility of apparitions.
"I know some of my clients have seen them," he says. "On our ghost tours
we avoid having people jump out to scare the clients, but a lot of
places we go to are naturally quite eerie.
"Over the past decade we have had quite a few clients say they have had
strange experiences: usually cold shivers, feeling the presence of
someone when nobody's there, through to seeing an apparition or two.

"Really strange things happen and after a while, you just have to accept
them."
Sim regularly sees overseas tourists who discovered his website and come
to Brisbane to find out more.
What they get is "the art of story telling and marvellous history".
Brisbane has several "really bad ghosts" and Sim also is regularly
consulted by real estate agents wanting to know why specific houses
change owners or tenants too often. He knows a few.

"There's one that was the scene of a nasty double murder in the 1950s."