Captain Towns' Apparition in the Wardrobe at Cranbrook, Rose Bay, Sydney, 1873

Captain Robert Towns sat in the New South Wales Legislative Council from 1863 to 1873. His home was Cranbrook in Rose Bay, near Sydney, and he died there in April 1873. The exact date is disputed. His son-in-law gave 5 April, while the Australian Dictionary of Biography and the NSW Parliament give 11 April. The house still stands as Rawson House, the oldest building of Cranbrook School in Bellevue Hill.

About six weeks after the death, one evening at about 9 o'clock. Mrs Lett, Towns's daughter, had occasion to go to one of the bedrooms with a young lady, Miss Berthon, and the gas was burning all the time. On the polished surface of the wardrobe they saw the image of Captain Towns, barely half a figure, with the head, shoulders and part of the arms showing. It was "like an ordinary medallion portrait, but life-size." His face appeared wan and pale, as it had before his death, and he wore the grey flannel jacket he used to sleep in.

Their first thought was a reflection. Perhaps a portrait had been hung in the room. But there was no picture of the kind.

Then Miss Towns, her sister, came in and, before either of the others could speak, exclaimed, "Good gracious! Do you see papa?" A housemaid passing on the stairs was called in and asked if she saw anything. "Oh, miss! the master."

Graham, the Captain's old body servant, was sent for. "Oh, Lord save us! Mrs. Lett, it's the Captain!" The butler came, and then Mrs Crane, Mrs Lett's nurse. Both said what they saw.

Finally the widow, Mrs Towns, was sent for. She saw the apparition and advanced towards it, her arm extended as if to touch it. As she passed her hand over the panel, the figure gradually faded away. It never appeared again, though the room was regularly occupied for a long time after.

On 3 December 1885, more than twelve years later, Charles A. W. Lett set it all down in a letter. He had been in the house that night but did not hear when he was called. "It was by the merest accident that I did not see the apparition," he wrote. Two witnesses signed beneath it, Sara Lett and Sibbie Smyth, née Towns.

Edmund Gurney of the Society for Psychical Research added a note. Mrs Lett was positive that each recognition was independent, and neither sister had ever experienced a hallucination of the senses on any other occasion. The editors hoped for statements from Miss Berthon and Mrs Crane. No record shows they ever arrived. In 1886 the case appeared as Case 331 of Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore, among its collective cases.

No hoax was ever alleged. The limits are plain all the same. The account came more than a decade later, from a man who did not see the figure. Only two of eight witnesses signed it. Each newcomer walked into a room where others were already staring at the wardrobe, and the housemaid was asked if she saw anything. And the image appeared on a polished surface, under gaslight.

Later retellings added touches the letter does not contain, such as a frightened shout. Cranbrook School keeps its own tradition. Rawson House boarders have occasionally reported seeing Captain Towns's ghost wandering the halls, though no names or dates come with those stories. The wardrobe figure of 1873 remains on record as one of the collective cases gathered by the early Society for Psychical Research.