Author Topic: Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW  (Read 703 times)

Offline KANACKI

  • Senior Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 4353
  • Kanacki ceisiwr o'r ateb
Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW
« on: June 08, 2022, 12:42:46 AM »
Once again hello and welcome to all lovers of the dark side. For many of us in reality living in Cites, towns and suburbs we cannot understand isolation of such places in the wide open out back. To realms sky above earth below with perhaps few scrubby trees or low hills on the horizon, flies heat dust and not much else. Yet people other thousands of years lived out there in the out back, Then came the interloper tying to tame this wild desert lands in the name of progress. Only to discover its vastness daunting sun burnt country as hard as stone. So silent you can almost hear the earth whisper? Covered in stars at night like the eyes of millions of lost souls looking down on you.

Its emptiness is eternal and for those hardy souls that live in such regions have almost the station hands drovers their own ghostly folklore told not generally through books and papers but through the chin wagging around and open fire with a damper in the ashes and a billy on the boil.

The following ghost is thank once again to headless is story of women living in bush. A hard life of been a stock mans wife not generally given over to such stories from the other side.

Yet once such Women recalled her strange experience back around 1905 when lived in hut an out station of Meryula Station about 20 km out of Cobar New South Wales.

So grab a favorite and garb a comfortable seat around the campfire of lost ghost stories.....

To be continued.......

Kanacki

Offline KANACKI

  • Senior Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 4353
  • Kanacki ceisiwr o'r ateb
Re: Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW
« Reply #1 on: June 08, 2022, 12:46:41 AM »
The following newspaper Published by The Sydney Morning Herald NSW  Sat 26 Oct 1935  reported the follow story.

HORSE HOOFS OF MYSTERY

On Meryula Station, over 30 years ago, there was an outstation known as Coocoomah ( place of stumps ). Standing anywhere around its single hut like building, one's "view" was that of a sunburnt plain, with a far flung fringe of trees for a border, and, in the mid distance, a wire fence.

One day, being alone on the place (a fairly common experience for bush wives), I was sewing in the house, when I heard the sound of a fast galloping horse. Thinking it was merely someone from the head station, I did not trouble to put my sewing aside. I heard the sound cease, as if the rider were negotiating the fence gate, and then it came on with renewed vigour, and stopped dead at the side of the verandah, out of my sight, as though the horse were pulled up short.

When the rider did not put in an appearance at the door, I got up to see what he was doing, and, to my surprise, no one was in sight. I went around the house, but the plain was bare of any living thing. Completely mystified, I told my husband on his return, and was laughed at for my pains. "You dozed off and dreamed it." was his solution.

To be continued....

Kanacki

Offline KANACKI

  • Senior Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 4353
  • Kanacki ceisiwr o'r ateb
Re: Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW
« Reply #2 on: June 08, 2022, 12:48:42 AM »
On another occasion one of the men was awaiting his return, and the sound again recurred.
He said to me, "Here he is now," and went outside to meet him, only to come back again with his mouth open.

My husband was still inclined to treat the matter as a joke, until one Sunday, when we had nearly finished dinner, the "horse" was again heard approaching, and he said with a smile, "Just In time to be too late." I smiled also, because I had recognised the sound, and sweetly replied, "Yes, dear ! Go out and see who it is."

He went out, to come in again quickly, saying. "Well that’s funny."
“It is,"said I, "It's the horse I've been telling you about. But are you quite sure you did not doze off and dream it?"

To be continued.....

Kanacki

Offline KANACKI

  • Senior Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 4353
  • Kanacki ceisiwr o'r ateb
Re: Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW
« Reply #3 on: June 08, 2022, 12:52:25 AM »
The sound recurred a few times while we were stationed there; always exactly In the same way, finishing at the same spot. I cannot explain it. In conclusion, I might add that the usual old bushman's theory that it covered a murder, and that the body would be found buried where the horse stopped, was never tested out, at least not in my time; the ground was too hard.

Well that was the ghost as told by a hardy women of bush of 30 years later of these strange encounter. What or who was this ghost horse or entity?

To be continued........

Kanacki

Offline KANACKI

  • Senior Contributor
  • *****
  • Posts: 4353
  • Kanacki ceisiwr o'r ateb
Re: Ghost Horse of Meryula Station: Cobar: NSW
« Reply #4 on: June 08, 2022, 01:05:03 AM »
Looking back through old newspaper gazettes etc. Meryula Station had a rather benign history. No known murders suicides etc, There was the death of an old man that was ill and a timber getter that a tree branch fell on him in 1906. and another death by illness in 1911. So none really fitting the time frame of these ghost events around 1905.

However the Barrier Miner (Broken Hill, NSW : 1888 - 1954), Friday 23 August 1895, page 2 newspaper reported the following tragedy.

FATAL ACCIDENT AT COBAR. [BY TELEGRAPH.]

SYDNEY, Friday.

Miss Lewis, daughter of Mr. Hocking Lewis, of the Empire Hotel, Cobar, was riding the horse Gay Lad, winner of the first prize for ladies' hacks at the local show, from which, accompanied by a gentleman, she was returning. The horse was going at a gallop when she suddenly pulled him up. The girth broke and Miss Lewis was thrown violently to the ground. She was apparently only stunned and was removed home ; but she expired before the doctor arrived.

Was the terrible event some how connected  to the phantom horse?

We do not know for sure? But if so? Does the phantom horse still haunts Meryula Station?

Kanacki

 


SMF 2.0.18 | SMF © 2021, Simple Machines | Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy
SimplePortal 2.3.3 © 2008-2010, SimplePortal