AS HALLOWEEN approaches, terrifying tales of ghouls and ghosts abound.
But surely there are few as curious as the Australian tale of the ghost that solved its own murder.
It was 190 years this month that the bloodied body of Frederick Fisher was found in a lonely grave in Campbelltown, now a bustling suburb in Sydney’s south west.
Legend has it, after police became flummoxed at Fisher’s disappearance, it was the spectral remains of Fisher himself which led to a man being executed for his gruesome and violent death.
Today, the legend lives on with Campbelltown’s Festival of Fisher’s Ghost due to kick off on November 4.
John White, of the Campbelltown and Airds Historical Society, said in the 19th century the area would have been unrecognisable from today.
“Campbelltown would have been totally rural in the mid-1820s with maybe only 10 or 12 buildings.
“It was a pretty raw and rugged place,” said Mr White.
Into this ruggedness, probably around 1822, stepped Fisher, a man of fair complexion and brown hair who was raised in the London suburb of Greenwich
A stash of forged bank notes saw him sentenced to 14 year’s incarceration in Australia. But his clear intellect saw him employed by the colonial rulers and, with less than half his sentence served, he was freed on the condition he abided by all laws.
“He set himself up in Campbelltown and took possession of a couple of pieces of land, so the story goes,” said Mr White.
By 1825, Fisher owned four farms lying between the main road into the town and what was then called Bow Bowing Creek.
Having no buildings on his own land, Fisher rented a room with his neighbour George Worrell. He too had fallen foul of the law but Fisher considered him trustworthy and a good friend and the two were often seen in each other’s company at the local inn.
A fight, where Fisher pulled a knife on a business partner, saw him arrested. Fearful he would be behind bars for years, he assigned power of attorney over his land and possessions to Worrall.
Worrell bragged it was unlikely Fisher would ever leave jail and reportedly said of the land “it’s all mine now”.
But the judge said Fisher had been provoked and within six months he was back and reclaimed his land.
The night of the June 17, 1826 was deep winter. As the evening drew in Fisher would have felt the chill in the air, magnified by the area’s distance from the coast and its proximity to the mountains.
“Fred Fisher, George Worrall and a couple of other gentlemen had a very good drinking session at an inn in Campbelltown that night and when it was done they went their separate ways with Worrall and Fisher heading home,” said Mr Davis.
“That was the last time Fred Fisher was seen alive.”
The locals were baffled as to where he had gone. But there was no mystery for Worrall. He told everyone, Fisher had left Australia and headed back to England.
Once again, Fisher had given Worrall custodian ship of his property, Worrell said, and within three weeks his horse and personal belongings had been sold.
But people became suspicious and suspected Worrall of foul play.
“Eventually George Worrall was arrested but it was done before a body could be found,” Mr White said. Put simply, there was no smoking gun to prosecute Fisher’s neighbour.
Months passed and the mystery of where Fisher was deepened. Then, on a spring October evening a farmer called John Farley stumbled across something extraordinary that he would never forget as swear was true until his dying day.
“Farley had been out drinking and when he was coming home he spotted what he thought was Fred Fisher sitting on the railing of a bridge,” said Mr White.
He had appeared on a corner of the land owned by Fisher.
Farley tried to speak to Fisher, to ask him where he’d been all these months.
“But Fred Fisher didn’t say anything. And as Farley approached he realised it wasn’t Fred at all but a ghostly figure.
“The ghost then raised his left arm and pointed down the creek some distance away,” he said.
In fright, Farley panicked and the next day was found incoherent and only slowly began to reveal what he saw.
With no better leads to go on, the local police constable enlisted the help of a local Aboriginal tracker, named Namut, and searched the creek.
“They looked around the creek and discovered some blood and then, further down the waterway, they found a body buried in a shallow grave.”
The body was partially decomposed with “a saddened, death like sickly white”. The face was decomposed and unrecognisable but the clothes were clearly Fisher’s.
At the trial, it took the jury just 15 minutes to find Worrall guilty of Fisher’s death. He was executed in February 1827 and on the gallows admitted he had killed him by mistake thinking him a “horse in the wheat crop”.
The good people of Campbelltown were not convinced. Fisher had been killed, they said, so Worrall could sell off his belongings and take his land.
The tale of Fisher’s Ghost became the stuff of legend. “It spread completely around the world,” said Mr White.
A silent film of Fishers’ Ghost was made in 1924 and versions of the story appeared in compendiums of Victorian ghost stories complied by famous writer Arthur Conan Doyle.
That the ghost appeared so close to Halloween was pure coincidence, said Mr White. The annual event wasn’t even marked at the time in Australia.
But perhaps its most famous legacy is Campbelltown’s Festival of Fisher’s Ghost which began in the 1950s.
Mayor of Campbelltown, George Brticevic, told news.com.au that initially the plan was simply for an annual celebration to raise funds for facilities in the municipality.
“Different names were considered, but a spontaneous gathering of community members at that time, made the choice an obvious one for Council.
“About 1500 people gathered at Fisher’s Ghost Bridge — the spot where local farmer John Farley had seen the ghost 130 years before — hoping to see Fred Fisher’s Ghost reappear.”
Fisher’s Ghost would not reappear. In fact it’s never reappeared. It’s one role, it seems, was to point locals to the location of its own body and ensure the man who killed him was brought to justice.
But the name lives on not only in Campbelltown’s festival but also in the Bow Bowing waterway where he perished which today is named Fisher’s Ghost Creek.
The Fisher’s Ghost Festival, which includes a spooky street parade and fair, Fisher’s Flicks cinema and the Fishers’ Ghost Art Prize runs from the November 4 to 13 in Campbelltown.
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