The Thumping Ghost of McCormack Street, Port Melbourne

In late 1914 a family arrived from Tasmania and moved into a house in McCormack Street, Port Melbourne. It was a large wooden structure. The household was big. A mother, a father and twelve sons and daughters.

The father had found work as night watchman on the excursion paddle steamer Hygeia. Every night, he was away. The noises began soon after he started.

It started with "rattlings of the key in the front door" in the early hours. The family rushed out each time, "hoping to surprise and capture the intruders". They never caught anyone. In the end they left a light burning by the front door, and the key fell silent. Then the lights came. "Flashes of light danced around the main sleeping room in the early hours of mornings," the report said.

About a fortnight before the story reached print, the whole family was woken at once. Something was at the side of the house. There was "violent rapping, pushing, and shaking of a side door and window". One of the sons took up the family revolver and threatened to fire, "and the ghost desisted". By then three windows in the house had been cracked.

The police were called. Two constables were assigned to the family. One of them, Constable Walsh, was told to spend the night in the house. In the early morning he was startled by "three heavy thumps" that seemed to come from the side of the house.

He went outside. There he felt and heard "three heavy bumps at my very feet". The whole house shook. Neighbours two doors away heard the sound too.

The story ran under the headline "A Thumping Ghost", with the subtitle "Port Melbourne Mystery". It crossed the Tasman and was reprinted in New Zealand on 25 February 1915, where it survives today in the Papers Past archive. The report claimed the house was converting the "shipping suburb" to spiritualism. Neighbours, and even "stolid police constables", were said to be convinced that ghosts were nightly visitors.

No hoax was exposed in the surviving text, and no official conclusion has been found. The family's own first thought was human intruders. Some details fit that reading. The key stopped rattling once a light was left on, and the side door fell quiet when a revolver appeared. Yet nobody was ever caught.

The ending of the article has not been recovered. The original Melbourne report has not been traced either, and the family's surname remains unknown.

The thumping ghost of McCormack Street left almost no mark on later ghost lore. It sits beside other Australian press hauntings of its day, such as the empty house in Padbury Street, Perth, reported in 1914 with "mysterious noises" and "stones come from nowhere". For now, the Port Melbourne case lives on in a single reprinted column. A large wooden house, a family of fourteen, a policeman in the dark, and three bumps at his feet.