Series · Regional desk · Australia & New Zealand
Strange lights, phantom airships and night noises from Australia and New Zealand, read through the two national newspaper archives: Trove (National Library of Australia) and Papers Past (National Library of New Zealand). It is the ledger’s international comparison shelf.
Australia's most famous ghost story says Frederick Fisher's spirit sat on a fence rail and pointed to his own grave. The 1826–27 newspapers report the murder, the search, an Aboriginal tracker and a trial, but no ghost. The apparition first appears in print in an anonymous poem in 1832, and in 1841 the man said to have seen it denied it.
A skull found on the Lower Murrumbidgee in 1846 was hailed in the Sydney Morning Herald as proof of an unknown animal. Five months later, in the same paper, a naturalist identified it from its milk teeth as a malformed foal. Then the skull disappeared.
In May 1851 a Memphis paper reported a giant, hair-covered “wild man” chasing cattle in Greene County, Arkansas. Within five weeks the item had run from Little Rock to Vermont, and by December it was in a Wellington newspaper. That's a lot of reprints, but every one of them goes back to one story.
In 1873 a Dunedin paper announced that a live moa had been seen “alive and in the flesh” in Southland. The runholder wrote in to say his shepherd hadn't said “moa” at all. Eighteen months later a Christchurch paper printed a letter about two moas roped near Browning Pass. They then “escaped,” and another paper called the whole thing a hoax.
At noon on 23 July 1909 schoolchildren in Kelso, West Otago, watched a boat-shaped “airship” circle over their school. A reporter got six drawings that he called “dumbfounding to all sceptics.” Within three weeks the scare had spread nationwide, and the papers were finding fire balloons, a lantern and a confessed hoax.
Six days after Kelso, 23 children at an Invercargill school said they had seen the airship in broad daylight. The local paper printed two of their drawings. The Press Association's verdict went around the country: the drawings were “not a bit alike” and the children's testimony “need not be taken very seriously.”
In the last hours of 1978 a TV crew on a cargo flight filmed bright lights off New Zealand's Kaikōura coast, and air-traffic radar logged returns. A government cable from January 1979, now at Archives New Zealand, shows scientists debunking one film, stuck on the other, and guessing at Jupiter or Venus.
In the winter of 1905, Christchurch papers reported a masked man in a luminous coat frightening women at night. By October the scare had reached the Hutt, where a local paper investigated one sighting and found an old white cow in the moonlight.
For a couple of years, a 'tiger' was blamed for killing sheep in South Australia's south-east. When a shooter dropped a large canid in August 1895, the local experts called it a European wolf. A modern historian says wildlife experts now think alpine dingo.
Listed in event order, oldest first.
