3 case files, newest first.
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.
The last known thylacine died in a Hobart zoo on 7 September 1936. Two years later an official party was searching western Tasmania for survivors, and eighty years after that the state government was still logging reports of striped animals crossing roads at dusk. This case follows the records, not the animal.
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.
