Everyone You Ever Knew Is Coming Back To Haunt You

On Ghosts, Fairies, Fakes & Album Birthdays

Ghosts are everywhere, all the time, not just on Halloween.

Emma Balfour told me a story when we were kids about seeing a ‘ghost baby’ with her little brother, in a big old house they were staying in, that to me was the proof I needed to verify that ghosts were real. Emma was very down to earth, I was convinced that if she had seen a ghost, then that was that, they were real.

Twenty years later, she released an exquisite book of poetry. One of the poems was about how she had a girlfriend who believed in ghosts, because she had made up a story about seeing one, but she’d lied. My whole paranormal belief structure crumbled. I was thirty two.

I was ten years old when Bon Scott died. He was one of my dad’s closest friends and was often at our house or in the studio with Peter when he was in town. He was funny and sweet and I loved him. There’s apparently a recording somewhere of Bon singing Peter’s song ‘Round & Round & Round’ with me caterwauling away in the background and destroying the take because I wanted to be the one singing it. Bon told me once that he saw our dead dog Harry’s ghost in our driveway, and that he looked happy.

I answered the phone call from Vince Lovegrove in London late at night to give us the news before it hit the papers. I was devastated by his death, probably because he was the first person in our community to die and so it was my first experience with death. I stayed home from school. My neighbours Gilda, Geraldine and I staged a little seance to contact him and send love to the great beyond, holding hands sitting in a circle on the floor in Gilda’s bedroom, but we heard an unexplained noise from somewhere and freaked ourselves out very quickly, breathlessly abandoning it.

My dad and his friends had a seance when the Big Bopper, Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens died and they experienced serious movement on the Ouija board, a glass flew up into the air and smashed.

My agent John Cann used to call me ‘The Evil Fairy At The Bottom Of The Garden’, I’m not exactly sure why, but I kinda liked that title. I grew up always hoping I might see a fairy too. We had the book of black and white Cottingsley fairy photographs taken by nine year old Frances and her sixteen year old cousin Elsie in 1917 that was touted as hard evidence fairies existed and I was very willing to believe, as was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the highly respected author of Sherlock Holmes, which lent the story much credibility.

Elsie and Frances loved to play in the ‘beck’ at the bottom of their English garden, the little stream that ran between steep banks, skipping across slippery stones, and generally ending up getting wet. They were forbidden from playing there anymore, which is hardly surprising when you consider the difficulty of laundry chores in 1917. But the girls couldn’t resist. When demanded they explain what lured them there, Frances finally responded that she went to see the fairies.

She was not believed and was very upset by that, so Elsie suggested they borrow her father’s camera to prove the fairies’ existence. The photograph they took was quickly developed in Elsie’s father’s home darkroom (he was an amateur photographer) and revealed Frances, seemingly surrounded by five dancing fairies. Over time they captured four more images of themselves with fairies, and even one with a gnome, to prove it wasn’t a fluke. Mr. Wright remained doubtful and became annoyed with the attention they were receiving but their mothers were convinced of their daughters’ honest natures. The girls maintained their stories and the photographs eventually caught the interest of noted Theosophist Edward Gardner, after Elsie’s mother presented them at a meeting. He had the original glass negative plates studied by a renowned expert in photographic fakery and by Kodak, and declared genuine.

Around the time of taking the photographs, the girls had also been reading about Theosophy, an esoteric ‘non-religion’ with a vague aim of universal brotherhood, blending Western thought with eastern philosophy that in part encouraged exploration of the ‘Unseen Universe’.  Theosophy was popular amongst progressive first wave feminists, amongst others, and is now regarded as precursor to New Age type philosophies, although its founder Helene Blavatsky was accused at some point of faking supernatural phenomenon to support her theories. Arthur Conan Doyle was a noted Spiritualist, which was also gaining in popularity at the time and shared some common concepts and interests with Theosophy. Doyle’s uncle was a highly regarded illustrator of book and magazine covers, with a particular penchant for sketching ‘little folk’, notably the book ‘In Fairyland’ in 1870, and his father also dabbled in illustrations of fantastical creatures, and was entranced by the supernatural world, before becoming an alcoholic and being committed to an asylum.

Doyle was shown the photographs and assured of their authenticity while he was writing an article about fairies for The Strand, a very popular literary magazine in 1920. He was so convinced that he followed up with a further article and then a book called ‘The Coming Of The Fairies’ in 1923. He declared ‘The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit there is a glamour and mystery to life’. He thought if the world could accept the reality of fairies, they would also be more open to the ideas of Spiritualism, including communicating with the dead, which he had been deeply interested in for many years, especially since the recent death of his son. 

Unfortunately, the world in general scoffed at both him and the existence of fairies. As years went by, Elsie stated that she believed it was possible they had photographed their very thoughts, if perhaps fairies weren’t real. Both possibilities excited me. In 1983, aged 83, Elsie finally admitted that they had faked the photographs by using pictures cut out of magazines mounted on hairpins. Frances continued to maintain that she had seen fairies, although she admitted to faking the first four photographs, until her death she asserted that the fifth one, titled ‘The Fairy Bower’ by Doyle, was genuine. She told her daughter that as far as she was concerned, fairies were just a part of nature, like wildlife. That does leave a little hope remaining for the glamour and mystery of life.

Aden photographed a ghost once, though he remains unconvinced of its veracity. He called me one morning from Adelaide where he was filming, staying in an old house. He’d stumbled into bed after a night on the town, and while settling down to sleep, had a strong and discomfiting sensation of someone else in the room. The hairs on his arm stood on end and he felt sure there was a ghost. To reassure himself there was nothing there, he picked up his Nokia flip phone and snapped three pictures in the dusky dark, then passed out. In the photographs he viewed the next morning, there is an unmistakable ghostly face at the end of his bed, that appears to be an old man howling. Each image is slightly different. He says maybe it was a trick of light, but it was night and there was very little light. 

Personally, I feel like the X Files were right, the truth is out there.

I released an album full of ghosts and mystery into the world on this date on 2015. My Halloween album. It’s called ‘Everyone You Ever Knew (Is Coming Back To Haunt You)’. Sam Worrad, Cec Condon, Ken Gormly and I whipped it up in a single day, with Wade Keighran at the controls, like how they used to make records back in the 50s and 60s. It was exhilarating and made with total, utter love. Jason Walker and Dan Marando added some finishing touches a little later - a wild pedal steel solo and divine backing vocals.

You can read about the ghost stories on this record if you want (if you dare), they are here on Global Texan Chronicles: GTC: Track by Track: Everyone You Ever Knew

Listen to the entire album here:

We made a music video for the titular single in the 300 acre grounds of the spook-tac-ular Meadowlark Gardens in Griffin, Georgia. I wanted it to look like those gothic 60s/70s Italian horror films that are mainly eerie strings and women in great dresses running from something in terror.

Aden indulged me, filming the whole thing over a couple of hours after a twelve hour day at work on Rectify, with Bruce McKinnon’s kind assistance. Sam, the lovely girl who babysat occasionally for us had given me this wild 70’s polyester dress that she felt compelled to buy for me the year before at the Christian Women’s Center Thrift Store for a few bucks, before she even knew if we’d be back. She is a very special girl with psychic fashion gifts.

One of my greatest joys in life is making playlists, here’s one that goes for three hours called Haunting Hymns, perfect for soundtracking your Halloween adventures. It’s mellow in a spooky way.

With love,

from Hall-Lo-Ween

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