07/02/2025
Further to the story of the ghost woman with a baby that I posted this morning.
Somewhere on the Hawkesbury - now it's revealed where she was seen.
She was known as the Ghost of Greenman's Inn. There are men still living who claim to have seen the ghost. They say it takes the form of a young woman in night attire carrying a newly-born infant in her arms.
Unlike other ghosts, this spectre, appeared in broad daylight.
Mangrove Creek.
One of the most picturesque tributaries of the Hawkesbury, wends
its way to the main river through sheer sandstone cliffs over 800 feet in height. In the early days of the settlement at Mangrove Creek a quaint-looking hotel, known as Greenman's Inn, nestled at the foot, of the cliffs.
The Inn was built by convicts, and its walls of massive stone were three feet in thickness. A crumbling mass of masonry overgrown with blackberries, the haunt of black snakes and deathadders, is
all that remains of Greenman's Inn nowadays.
In the heyday of its fame the Inn was a notorious place, and sinister stories are woven around its banquet hall. Knife play and cowardly assaults were only too common and more than one murder is alleged to have been committed within its jail-like precincts.
'There were few women visitors, though it is said that the girls, barmaids and chambermaids, who waited upon the rough
customers, were brought to Mangrove Creek, drugged and kidnapped.
Lynch law was the order of the day, and a youth from up the river for an alleged serious offence upon one of the girls of the
Inn was tied down to the rocks by the river bank at low water and gradually drowned by the incoming tide. His dying struggles were watched by an interested group of bush lawyers.
MEN MURDERED?
Mysterious disappearances were quite frequent and there is ample evidence to support the theories that men were murdered
and their bodies weighed down with stones and cast into the Creek for the hordes of ravenous sharks to devour.
The strange death of a girl, barely out of her teens, excited unprecedented interest. She was found dead with a newly born
infant in her arms.
What became of her body no one seemed to know. It disappeared before it could be buried. Perhaps, like other corpses, it was weighed down with stones and cast to the sharks.
Although the girl died nearly eighty years ago, the menfolk of the Hawkesbury were never allowed to forget it.
For forty years, her ghost—so the old
pioneers of the River will tell you — haunted Mangrove. Dozens of men claim to have seen it, and the remarkable part about the story is the fact that most of these people were once revellers at the Inn.
Of course, there are exceptions—Russian Bill, for instance. Russian Bill, well-known as a timber getter on the creeks — one who
worked for Mr. B. Crossland, father of the present proprietor of Crosslands Flats, Berowra Creek. One day he left Berowra Creek
with his heavy pulling boat, laden, with provisions and tree-felling tackle, and set off for Mangrove Creek, with the intention
of camping there for a week and cutting a supply of boats' knees.
He had heard that the Creek was haunted, but told his employer that he was not afraid of ghosts and insisted upon camping by the creek instead of rowing down the main river every night to the recognised timber cutters' camp.
Five days later Russian Bill came back from his Mangrove Creek camp. He did not mention ghosts but said he wanted a rest,
he was not feeling too well.
Refreshed, he returned, to the creek, and camped for another three days, and then came back a physical wreck.
'What's the matter, Bill?' asked Mr. Crossland.
'My God, I can't stand that woman with her kid walking about with me all day long,' burst out the timber getter.
'When I turn in at night I see her standing over me with her baby. I wouldn't mind if she'd been a live woman, but she's a ghost woman in a pink nightdress.'
Russian Bill would never go near Mangrove Creek again, and up to the time of his death turned pale whenever the ghost of
Greenman's Inn was mentioned.
I wonder if this woman is still haunting that area?
