The Forest House and other places of Abode

My first encounter with a ‘ghost’ did not take place in the Forest House...I speak of it now only because it coloured my perceptions of the ‘visitors’ who descended upon me when I lived in Forest…back in the seventies and early eighties.

My family…if you can call it that…had arrived back in Australia after a sojourn in India. The return trip had been harrowing because I had pneumonia…which I am not quite sure I survived. I was told that I had it in both lungs. Curiously my most vivid memory of that return trip was of a stopover in Hong Kong  and a family outing to a Chinese restaurant. I remember it because Dabios ordered fish lips.

Anyhoos…back in Australia…to Sydney and the house in Bondi Junction to be precise…my grandfather’s house…That first night back…I volunteered to sleep on the couch in the living room…a dark gloomy room  with a dilapidated old grand piano in the corner… because there were no other beds available…they had all been taken…I think other members of the extended family were visiting at the time. I was nine years old.

I remember waking up in the middle of the night and being scared beyond belief by the sight of an old hag…evil doesn’t even come close to describing this thing…standing at the foot of the couch just staring at me. I closed my eyes for a few moments hoping that it wasn’t real and that it would be gone when I opened them again. It wasn’t…it had moved up next to me and was looking down on me…and then I don’t remember what happened next.

When I told Marine about it the next day, she confessed that the room was haunted. I asked her why she didn’t warn me and she said that she didn’t think that it would be a problem since I didn’t know the room was haunted. Perversely she also told me that she would not dream of sleeping in there herself…and yet she had no qualms about letting me sleep there?

So fast forward a few years…we are now living in Canberra…the first house we lived in was 15 Grey Street Deakin…it was owned by the Rowland family…who were away on a diplomatic posting. My brother Simoney became friends with Andrew Rowland…a few years later… in the psyche ward at what was then the Woden Valley hospital.

My most vivid memories of that house are of it being infested with fleas…also of being very sick asthma…and of a poisoning incident where I had been given various types of medication that were… I believe the word for it is… ‘contraindicated’. I remember lying on the couch feeling like death while everyone carried on around me oblivious to my agony…I can truly say I have never felt that sick in my entire life...I don’t even know why I was given this medication in the first place…I wasn’t sick at the time…unless it was a deliberate poisoning…I probably died…I wouldn’t be surprised.

There was once incident where I was playing in the garden when Marine came rushing out at me… I grabbed on to a hose and tried to hose her down…so to speak…when Simoney rushed to her defence…I tried to defend myself and somehow ended up kicking him in the balls…which was not my intention…it was an accident…later that day…he had me down on the ground and was punching me out…in the back…which totally fucked my kidneys.

When I think back on that terrible day…I truly wonder…what the fuck was Marines problem?

We lived in a house on Golden Grove after that…memorable only for the fact that two wild dogs came into the back garden one night and ate my pet guinea pigs…one of whom was pregnant.

I was fourteen when we moved into the house in Forrest…number 50 National Circuit to be precise.

The first few years passed by without too much strangeness. I started high school…Telopea Park High…which was a nightmare because apart from anything else…I became infested with warts on my hands and face…it took a long time for Marine to deal with that little problemo…is all I can say.

In 1973 I left that school for another…Canberra Girls Grammar…on Melbourne Avenue…that’s when I met Rosie…and we soon became inseparable. It was just the two of us until Vanessa arrived…also Louise. Rosie and I drifted apart after that but not before completing the DeBorge Letters...a long and licentious saga about two extremely wayward young ladies and their amorous adventures in Victorian England or thereabouts.

To cut a long story short…I left the Grammar School during my final year following an altercation with the headmistress…Mrs Shaw…in the art room which had to do with her being outraged at us listening to the radio…anyway I was suspended for back chat or something…can’t really remember…I never went back…I left the school and then left home…well I was more or less kicked out of home…and after Dabios tried to strangle me…well enough was enough…that’s when I went to live in Jardine street.

The weirdness at the house in Forrest began after I had moved back there at the beginning of 1978…

Simoney was in and out of mental hospital and was deteriorating rapidly…not from his supposed mental condition of schizophrenia…but as a result of the cocktail of toxic drugs that he was taking.

Marine thought he had gone mad because she saw him stoned one day… ‘he was catatonic’ she said. She made several lame attempts to have me diagnosed with this same mysterious illness…without success.

Marine thought anybody who was the least bit unusual was mad. I remember telling her a funny story about the brother of a friend of mine who was a bit of a character and she said…he’s mad. It was her favourite word.

I am not quite sure of the year exactly…because everything becomes a bit jumbled at this point…I had a boyfriend called Max and he was a sweetie…we were inseparable for about a year and a half…it seems I might have been living in two or more places at the same time because while I was living in Forest…I was also living at Toad Hall and in Sydney where I met Charlie...and I also lived in Deakin for a while… ‘suburb of my first séance’…but when I look back…I think how could I have lived in all those places between the ages of nineteen and 21…and be living in Forrest with a boyfriend called Max at the same time…

All I can say is I was either 19, 20 or 21 years old and living in Forrest…Simoney by this time was an inmate at Kenmore Hospital…a notorious psychiatric institution in Goulburn that has since closed down.
One evening around about 10.00 oclock…I decided to ‘turn in’ early…Dabios and Marine were still up…and there were lights on in the house…

My bedroom was situated at the side of the house and was notable for the fact that it had opaque windows all around two sides of it.

I remember turning off my light and lying down on my bed…there seemed to be a bright light shining outside but I thought nothing of it.
Almost immediately I became aware that I was not alone…I could just make out the presence…if I can say that…of three humanoid beings…but when  I tried to turn my head to get a better look…I found myself to be completely paralysed…in my panic I tried to scream for help…but no sound would come out… there was this flurry of activity around me that lasted only a second or two and then I found myself falling at tremendous speed…the next thing I remember is being in a vehicle of some kind…travelling at great speed…

I might be wrong about this…but I feel sure that we were travelling along that road that goes past Lake Burly Griffin in Yarralumla…I have a vivid memory of an incident involving me and five boys from the Boys Grammar School.

I don’t know if this incident is connected with that one or not…all I know is this…it was the middle of winter…a freezing dark night…I find myself in Western Park naked with five boys from the Grammar School…for some inane reason we decide to swim across the lake and then walk back across the bridge to Weston Park to retrieve our clothes….I don’t remember crossing the bridge…all I remember is that I am naked walking along a highway with these boys and running from tree to tree so as I did not want to be caught in the headlights of the passing cars in such an embarrassing situation.

I don’t remember anything after that…whether we made it back or what?
Can you imagine my dilemma…if I told Marine and Dabios about it…they would have said I was mad.

Things got worse after that…every night became a nightmare. I moved out of that room into a little room next to it…that used to be my sisters room.

Many nights I would be woken by the bed violently shaking or the wardrobe would be…invisible people would come and sit on my bed…I know this because I would feel the mattress give way under their weight. One night an entity came into my room, grabbed my doona and threw it across the room.

I would also…frequently…find myself jolted out of my body…literally ejected from it…as a result of electrical shocks to my head. Simoney at that time was receiving electric shock therapy at Kenmore…could these incidents be somehow related?

On the odd occasion when I was able to overcome the paralysis that often accompanied these incidents…I would run into my parents room and curl up on the floor at the foot of their bed.

I did try to talk to Marine about the situation…once…but she just dismissed it as the product of an overactive imagination. I was also wary of giving her too much ammunition for fear that she would think that I too had gone ‘mad’.

I should say at this point that I had no idea of what was happening to me…the notion that this incidents were ‘alien’ in nature did not even cross my mind…

The visitations gradually subsided as the months wore on and life returned to normal again. As the years passed I put them out of my mind. It was easy to forget that it had ever happened…that is until they came back in 1995.

Two weird occurrences are worth mentioning here...

A young man…an acquaintance of my brother Simoney…who he knew from the psyche ward…came to stay with us for a while…he was a really charming, very engaging character. I was very drawn to him.
One afternoon, sitting on my front porch in the Forrest House…he held out his arm to show me his veins… “Look…I’ve got kangaroo blood”, he said.

Another time...it was evening…Marine and Dabios were out for the night…my little sister…Sarah…who would have been around eight years old at the time was there…as was Simoney. Simoney was acting strangely…walking in and out of the house and acting sort of deranged.
There was a knock on the front door…I opened the door to see a rather thin bedraggled looking man…aged about thirty…. with stringy long hair standing there with a little girl aged about five…she was thin, pale little thing with thin blonde hair wearing a summery cotton dress...little raggedy girl… She had with her a basket and inside the basket was a white rabbit. I invited them into the house to my regret actually because…the guy was obviously deranged…he told me he had an axe and that he was going to kill someone that night. I tried to humour him…I thought …he can’t be serious….Anyway they were gone the next morning. I don’t remember how the night ended.

Simoney had a friend…a boy called Ken Cowan…Ken was heart achingly beautiful…like an angel…and a sweet gentle soul…we all loved Ken…Vanessa, Rosie and me…

Ken was seventeen when he died… he was riding his bike over a bridge in Hoskingtown…one dark, winters night. It was pouring with rain and so the story goes…just as he was crossing a bridge…it gave way and he was swept away by the floodwaters.