2012, October 2012: Ghosts of the Canberra Air Disaster

On August 13, 1940, three members of the Australian Cabinet [one of the governing bodies of Australia] and the Chief of the General Staff were being flown from Melbourne to Canberra to attend a Cabinet meeting when their plane somehow stalled on the landing approach and crashed into a hill, killing all crew and passengers instantly, and greatly weakening the governing body of Australia at a critical point during World War II. Now known as the Canberra Air Disaster, the location of the crash is marked by a memorial... but according to some, there are other memories of the crash still around as well.

        On October 12, 2012, an article was posted in the Traveller website by "Tim the Yowie man", that included the site of the air crash on a list of the most haunted places in Australia (which was clearly meant to be a 'go and look!' sort of advertisement). The article claims that strange flashing lights have been seen near the memorial; that people have reported hearing the sound of a plane crashing when, clearly, none was; and that young couples driving out to the memorial site at night (you can guess why) were reporting seeing ghostly figures darting across the road ahead of them. Most spectacularly, the article claimed that a teenage girl had run from the woods screaming of being followed by an airman on fire.

        Unfortunately as far as I can determine at the moment, the tales all started with Tim's article in the Traveller website. Ignoring that not enough detail was given to allow any of the claims to be double-checked -- no name is given for the teenage girl nor is a date given for when she had her encounter, for example -- there appears to be simply no other report of the phenomena described previous to or after, Tim's report (other than repeats of his report, of course). For this reason I'm marking this account as "Unreliable" unless I find outside sources for the details... I don't actually have enough evidence to mark it as a "False Lead," a story that was never true to begin with, but it wouldn't surprise me if that was the case.