The Victoria Park tunnel ghost: the Spectre of York's Hollow

Victoria Park lies on the northern edge of central Brisbane. Its Turrbal name is Barrambin, meaning "windy place". In 1882 the railway was built through the park, and a pedestrian underpass ran beneath the line near an ornamental lake. In 1988 that lake was officially named York's Hollow.

November 1965. A hot week. Local children had heard rumours about the tunnel, and the next night they went ghost hunting. One boy lagged behind. In Jeff Belanger's telling, he was accosted by a "misty green, armless, legless, headless apparition that seemed to materialise from the wall of the tunnel." He was "mesmerised". His friends feared he had been possessed, and dragged him to the nearby Royal Brisbane Hospital.

Another account speaks of two schoolboys. A ghost emerged from the wall of the underpass and chased them. They described "a misty, bluish-white thing", like a human torso, with no head, no arms and no legs below the knee. One boy was treated for shock. No account gives their names.

The Courier-Mail carried the story on 23 November 1965. Then Brisbane came to look. Up to 5,000 people filled the park, the playing fields and the golf course. Torches, car headlights and television lights lit the scene. Families brought picnics. Food sellers set up stalls. A dozen police vehicles stood by.

After about 10 pm the families left and gangs of youths took over. There were brawls. Police cars were stoned and trains were "belted with rocks". Motor oil was poured on the lake and set alight, and bonfires were lit to draw the spectre out. One account tells of a man who arrived with a flame-thrower.

Many people spent the night in jail. Dozens were treated for minor injuries. A Brisbane City Council spokesman said it plainly. "This ghost does seem to bring out the worst in people."

Older residents said they had seen it before. In 1903 it looked like "a three-metre tall nun in a grey habit", and the 1965 Courier-Mail recalled that "special police squads were assigned to control vast crowds gathered to glimpse the ghost." In 1922 and 1932 it returned as "a shimmering grey form". These earlier sightings are known only through that 1965 article.

Within a week a local paper printed "the answer to the riddle". A photograph of the tunnel showed "a vaporous mass rising from an open drain in the floor of the tunnel", blamed on gases from rotting vegetation. Liam Baker of The Haunts of Brisbane later pointed out the photograph used "a considerable long exposure". And gas from a drain cannot explain 1903, 1922 or 1932.

Others looked for a death behind the ghost, such as Walter Alexander Hall, beaten to death in 1952. Karl David Dinass, a Swedish seaman who threw himself under a train near the underpass on 29 November 1960. Ann Smith, killed by a train on 2 June 1885. Baker found problems with several of these, noting Hall's death happened some distance away, at the golf course pond. Darker Brisbane could not say whether the story is "merely an urban legend created around the events of 1965" or truth.

Belanger's Encyclopedia of Haunted Places retold the case, and Jack Sim gathered local versions. Baker's tours still tell of "The Spectre of York's Hollow". The underpass was renovated, and the Inner City Bypass now cuts through the park. Since 1965, the tunnel has been quiet.