Free Great Australian Ghost Stories by Richard Davis Page B

attached. Beside the body cowered a brindled sheepdog, nudging the lifeless hand that lay nearest to it and licking the bloodied face.
    A flash of lightning and a peal of thunder signalled the return of the spectral sawyers, now both at ground level and engaged in conversation. Between gusts of wind the man caught a few foul curses and a few callous words.
    â€˜He’s still got about fifty sovereigns on ’im … we’ll cut ’im up and burn the bastard.’
    â€˜I’ll ’ave ’is boots.’
    â€˜I’ll ’ave ’is breeches.’
    â€˜We’ll have to slit that bloody cur’s throat, too. It ain’t no good to no one an’ I’m sick of its bloody whining!’
    Both figures then strolled towards the body, each drawing vicious-looking knives from their belts. Another scream, so loud and terrifying that the lost man had to put his hands over his ears, then resounded through the bush, followed by a lightning flash close by that lit the area like the noonday sun and temporarily blinded him. Deafening thunder shook the air. The poor man closed his eyes and fell to his knees, overwhelmed by the natural and unnatural forces that were assailing him. When silence returned, broken only by the pattering of rain and the rustle of the wind as the storm receded, he slowly opened his eyes. The body was gone. So was the dog. The vision of the sawyers and their sawpit had vanished. The lost man was quite alone, surrounded by dark, dripping bush.
    If someone came forwards with a story like that today we would probably say it was caused by delirium, but the search party who found the man wandering several kilometres from the scene of his ordeal believed him. He was taken back to Berry’s property and cared for until his strength returned, then he guided a party back to the gully he described as a ‘glen’, where they found the remains of the shelter and the hollow log he had spoken of. Nearby they found signs of an old campfire and in it the broken and partially burned bones of a man with a shattered skull. Under a bush a few metres away was the skeleton of a large dog, the vertebrae of its neck savagely scored with a knife.
    The story of these ghostly visions quickly entered the folklore of the district, told and retold around cosy firesides and memorialised in the poem quoted at the beginning ofthis chapter. Farmers in the Gerringong region for decades after swore that the lost man was not the only one who saw the spectral sawyers and their human and canine victims. Whenever a violent storm coursed through the coastal ranges settlers trapped in it reported catching glimpses of the ghoulish tableau and hearing the scrape of that ghostly saw carried on the wind.
    The story of the spectral sawyers also became a popular moral tale, told to generations of children in the region as warning against trusting strangers and in a few cases to curb the antics of mischievous offspring. Many a child went to bed with the remonstration: ‘If you’re not good, them ghostly sawyers’ll cut you up into little bits!’; and many a child’s dreams were plagued with visions of severed heads, severed hands and saw blades spattered with blood.
    There is a curious codicil that gives credibility to this tale. About ten years after the murder an Irish timber splitter named Pat McAnnally shared a hut with another man called Jem Hicks at Bulli, forty kilometres up the coast. Hicks was a morose man with a reputation for violence. One stormy night when the two sat alone in their hut McAnnally commented to his mate that it was a good night for a ghost story and mentioned the ghosts in the glen at Gerringong. The reaction from his companion stunned the little Irishman. The much larger Hicks turned on him: ‘You hold your gab about that there Gerry-gong business … d’ya hear?’ Hicks shouted above the wind.
    The two men sat without speaking for several minutes. A