The Ballarat Ghost and the police sting on Herbert Patrick McLennan

Ballarat had a ghost problem. Not a haunting. A craze. From about the 1870s until the First World War, people across central Victoria went out at night in sheets, masks and glowing paint to frighten their neighbours. Historians call it ghost hoaxing. At the time it was "playing the ghost".

Phosphorescent paint had become widely available in the 1880s. It made a costume shine in the dark. On 15 June 1886 the Ballarat Courier reported one ghost sighting. A few days later the paper printed a reply from the "ghost" itself.

Early 1904. Outside Ballarat railway station, where sex workers gathered, a glowing figure appeared after dark. The Courier described "a phosphorescent bodysuit with a cat o' nine tails whip". Later it wrote of a "long frock coat and Indian rubber boots… brandishing a cat-o'-nine-tails whip and covered in phosphorous paint". ABC News added a white slouch hat with a feather, and a mask.

He accosted young women at night between Mair Street and Lydiard Street and exposed himself to them. He was said to prowl the rooftops of the city centre. Then he wrote to the mayor and signed the letter "the ghost". The threat was blunt: "the first man I see with his hand in his pocket...I will plug a bullet through him." He would shoot, he said, anyone he suspected of being a police officer or vigilante.

Ballarat City Council offered a £5 reward, about a week's wages, for catching "the Ghost of Ballarat" in the act. Public meetings followed. The police chose a quieter plan. Young constables dressed as women and waited. Historian David Waldron put it plainly: "Police stopped him by dressing in drag and waiting for him to come out, arresting him in the act."

The man under the paint was Herbert Patrick McLennan. Some reports spell it McClennan. He was a senior clerk on Lydiard Street and lived on Drummond Street. The arrest was reported around 30 and 31 May 1904, as far away as the Launceston Examiner.

He was charged with indecent exposure, found guilty and sentenced as a "rogue and a vagabond" to one year's hard labour in Ballarat Gaol. The Courier later reported that he was released early on appeal. For Waldron, the unmasking of "a well-respected man about town was shocking".

Nobody at the time thought this ghost was supernatural. Waldron links ghost hoaxing to the rise of spiritualism and to British hoaxes such as Spring-heeled Jack. A costume gave anonymity, and anonymity let people "enact subversive things". The press blamed working-class "larrikins". Yet many of those arrested were teachers, clerks and middle-class women. Some hoaxers were sent to Ararat Lunatic Asylum.

"For many of them we don't know their names, they are in the papers the way we describe superheroes," Waldron said. McLennan is an exception. On 23 May 2024 his story was played live at Ballarat Town Hall as Spectral Schemes and the Mystery of the Ballarat Ghost, a Call of Cthulhu game for the Ballarat Heritage Festival.