Lying out in the Australian wilderness, about 100 km south of the town of Longreach, in central Queensland, is a fairly unremarkable water hole along the Barcoo river called the Wilga Waterhole. It is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and is so inconspicuous and mundane that most people would walk right on by it without giving it a second thought. Yet, this particular waterhole has achieved quite the reputation for being an ominous and haunted place that has terrified locals and travelers for hundreds of years with its eerie wailing and other strange phenomena.
The Wailing [Australia]
A new hand employed at Ruthven station built a slab and bark hut near the waterhole. He brought his wife to live there. She was a typical bush woman, sensible, practical and accustomed all her life to the loneliness of the outback. The couple had been there for a short time when one night the husband arrived home late, having been delayed, to find his wife in a state of collapse. She could tell him of nothing she had seen, but the most appalling shrieks had come from the waterhole. He felt she had imagined the cries of some nocturnal bird to be ghostly shrieks and yells. Soon after this episode the station hand was away for two nights. On arrival home he found his wife hysterical. Crying and sobbing, she told him of the terrible screaming and wailing at the waterhole that had caused her to almost lose her reason. He arrived at the hut early on the morning of his return to find that his wife was in a semi-demented condition. Again she told between fits of hysterical sobbing of the shrieking and wailing and screaming from the waterhole. Forthwith he took her away from the hut and after that no one ever lived in it again.
Over the years the sightings and accounts would continue, and there would be many attempts to explain what was causing the wailing and screaming at the Wilga Waterhole, with various stories put forth, most of them involving ghosts. In another tale a boundary rider also went mad and murdered his wife and kids, after which his restless spirit lurks about screaming out of either despondency or madness. Still another is that a young man was mobbed and lynched to be thrown into the Wilga Waterhole. One is that a woman who lived at a shack near the hole went insane and killed her child, and that her remorseful ghost now wanders about screaming out in torment over killing her baby. There is at least some corroborating evidence that at least the shack really did exist and that the murder of the child might have really happened, as author Phil Shields investigated the Wilga Waterhole personally and wrote of the shack:
A dramatic rescue emerged on Tuesday when a woman was captured on video pulling a badly burned and wailing koala from an Australian bushfire. The marsupial was crossing a road that had erupted in flames near Long Flat in New South Wales when it was spotted by a passer-by, who ran and wrapped the animal in her shirt and poured water all over it.
Dozens of sights, sounds and smells are indeed seared into my memory. The severed hand I nearly trod on in the wreckage of the Sari nightclub in Bali. The more than 150 bloated bodies I counted in a mosque in Banda Aceh after the tsunami. The wailing that pierced the Baghdad office on the morning of July 12, 2007, when word reached our Iraqi staff that photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, had been killed in an attack by a U.S. Apache helicopter.
A lyrebird named Echo has picked up a peculiar song during his zoo's Covid-19 lockdown: The wailing of a crying baby. Keepers at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, tweeted a video of Echo, a seven-year-old male, making the sound on Tuesday. Watch him here:
"The birds weren't able to fly and were lying on the ground wailing in pain," King told the BBC. "Some birds were bleeding out of their mouth. That immediately made us think of poisoning, which we've seen before." 2ff7e9595c
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