The Ghost Train Fire: Part 2 - Australian True Crime
Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery PodcastShow Notes
The Luna Park Ghost Train Disaster - Part 2 of 2 For years the most talked about aspect of the Luna Park fire was a photograph of a six year old boy standing next to a man in a horned mask, taken hours before he died. People called it the Luna Park demon. But the material that actually mattered was being collated for over thirty four years by the artist who painted the face over the front gate. The contents of this collection inspired an ABC documentary that brought the truth to light in 2021. In this episode we analyse the documents, the witness testimony and the other evidence that has been unearthed to try to answer the question that has haunted a nation: What started the Luna Park Ghost Train Fire? Exposed - The Ghost Train Fire - https://iview.abc.net.au/show/exposed-the-ghost-train-fire Subscribe now to Strewth Premium on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/StrewthPodcast Strewth social media links - https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast Contact me - [email protected] Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay Sources: Anderson, K.S. (Coroner), Fire Inquiry and Inquests: Luna Park Ghost Train, Coroner's Court of New South Wales, Glebe
Tiffen, R. and Masters, C., ABC Editorial Review 25: Exposed: The Ghost Train Fire, August 2021.
Meldrum-Hanna, C., Begley, P., Karagic, A. and Balendra, S., "Accident or arson? The mystery of Sydney's Luna Park Ghost Train fire", ABC News, 16 March 2021.
Meldrum-Hanna, C., Begley, P., Balendra, S., Karagic, A. and Barilla, N., "'Luckiest boy alive': Luna Park Ghost Train fire survivor breaks his silence", ABC News, 10 March 2021.
Bramston, T., "Allegations Wran involved in Luna Park fire condemned", The Australian, April 2021.
Muller, D., "How Ghost Train Fire exposed remarkable police corruption, yet also failed ABC's high journalistic standards", The Conversation, 2021.
"Luna Park Ghost Train fire: Coroner asks police to review evidence", Sydney Morning Herald, April 2021.
More from Strewth - Australian True Crime and Mystery Podcast
The Unsolved Disappearance of Bevin and Brad Simmonds
What happened to Harold Holt? On a Sunday in December 1967, the Prime Minister of Australia went for a swim off a beach near Portsea and never came out. More than three hundred people searched the water for him, and no trace of his body was ever found. Fifty-eight years later, depending on who you ask, Harold Holt drowned, was killed by the CIA, ran off with his lover, or was dragged under by Chinese frogmen and carried away to Beijing in a submarine. In this episode of Strewth we work through the theories, from the frankly ridiculous to the one a coroner finally signed off on in 2005, and ask why a man who had nearly drowned off that same beach seven months earlier swam straight back out past the breakers. Subscribe now to Strewth Premium on Patreon - https://www.patreon.com/cw/StrewthPodcast Strewth social media links - https://linktr.ee/strewthpodcast Contact me - [email protected] Theme Music - Jesse Frank on Pixabay Sources: National Archives of Australia. Harold Holt's disappearance, Fact sheet 144. https://www.naa.gov.au/help-your-research/fact-sheets/harold-holts-disappearance
The Murder of Maria James - Part 2 of 2 In 2013, a council electrician named Alan Hircoe opened a newspaper and saw a photograph of a priest. He recognised the face. Years earlier, he said, while working at the presbytery of St Mary's in Thornbury, he had seen that priest come in from the garden with blood on his face and hands. The priest was Father Anthony Bongiorno, and he had tried to force his way into Maria James's bookshop on the afternoon she was murdered. But he had an alibi, and police believed the DNA had cleared him.
The Murder of Maria James - Part 1 of 2 On 17 June 1980, John James rang his ex-wife, Maria, at her bookshop in Thornbury, Melbourne. She asked him to hang on. He heard voices and a small scream, and then the line went quiet. He strained to hear the muffled conversation being carried out in the shop. Then the voices became louder, more aggressive. Then she screamed again. Forty-six years and two inquests later, nobody has been charged with her murder.
The Pilliga Yowie In the spring of 2010, a mother pulled into a roadside rest stop south of Coonabarabran so the kids could swim at Hickey's Falls. The car park was silent. Another car was parked by the trail with every door open, and somewhere up the hill a child was crying. What happened next has become one of the best-known yowie encounters in the country, and it rests on the word of one woman who has never given her name. This is her account, set against the long and strange reputation of the Pilliga and the highway that runs through it.