Fisher's Ghost, Campbelltown, New South Wales

On 17 June 1826, Frederick Fisher disappeared from Campbelltown, a farming settlement south-west of Sydney. Fisher was a former convict. Born in London on 28 August 1792. Transported in 1815 for forging bank notes. Now a landowner in the district.

An 1825 fight with carpenter William Brooker had led Fisher to give power of attorney to a neighbour, George Worrall. Now Worrall said the missing man had sailed "home" to England. Then Worrall began selling Fisher's belongings. On 17 September 1826, Worrall was arrested.

The legend adds one witness. John Farley was a local farmer, described as respectable and well-off. One night, the story goes, Farley ran into the local hotel "in a very agitated state." Farley had seen Fisher.

The figure was sitting "on the rail of a nearby bridge" over the creek. It did not speak. It "had merely pointed to a paddock beyond the creek, before disappearing." Another telling says it pointed to a paddock down the creek, then faded away.

In Andrew Lang's version, Farley, "returning from market, saw Fisher sitting on the fence of his paddock, walked up to speak to him, and marked him leave the fence and retreat into the field, where he was lost to sight." The tradition places the bridge on Queen Street. The sources disagree on when. Four months after the disappearance, says one. Six weeks later, says another. October 1826, says a third.

25 October 1826. Boys crossing Fisher's horse paddock from the creek saw blood on the rail of the fence between the Fisher and Worrall properties. Searchers turned up a lock of hair and a tooth. Police brought in Gilbert, an Aboriginal tracker from Liverpool. Gilbert "tasted water in the marshy land and proclaimed 'white fellow's fat there'," then led police to a shallow grave on Worrall's land.

Worrall was tried in Sydney on 2 February 1827, convicted and hanged three days later. He confessed on the morning of his execution. No ghost evidence was given. Later retellings say supernatural testimony was not admissible.

The ghost appears in no surviving police or court record. Its first known appearance is an anonymous poem, "The Sprite of the Creek!", printed in August 1832 in Hill's Life in New South Wales. An 1846 printing places the phantom on "the rude structure that spans the deep creek." It reads: "On its pale, ghastly visage, was seen the red streak." The poem has no pointing gesture. That detail came later, in prose. One account credits the verse to James Riley, known as "Harry Dashboard." Another suggests the pen-name "Felix" hid a teenage John Lang. On 5 March 1853, John Lang told the tale in Dickens's Household Words, and it reached an international audience.

Contemporary records never explain how the authorities knew where to search. Perhaps Farley invented the ghost to conceal another source of knowledge, such as an informant, though this cannot be confirmed. Perhaps Farley saw the murder. In 1968, Cecil Hadgraft and Elizabeth Webby identified the 1832 poem as the origin. In 2001, Joe Nickell examined the case in Skeptical Inquirer, noting that the ghost appeared "to just one man on one occasion." Nickell reads it as a later literary creation.

In 1924 Raymond Longford filmed Fisher's Ghost on location in Campbelltown. It is now a lost film. John Gordon's operetta followed in 1960. Since 1956, Campbelltown has held the Festival of Fisher's Ghost every November. Fisher's Ghost Creek still flows under the railway line near the grave site. Frederick Fisher lies in an unmarked grave in St Peter's Anglican churchyard.