Ghostly goings on spook staff, patrons: My pub’s haunted

A POLTERGEIST with a knack for scaring the daylights out of people has staff and contractors spooked at Geelong West’s Irish Murphy’s pub.
“Mary”, as the ghost has been named, has apparently been up to all sorts of tricks since Barb Smoorenburg took over the pub and started making renovations 18 months ago.
Witesses have reported glasses hurled across rooms, urns moved, doors slammed, menu dockets spat out of printers, phones set ringing and terrifying voices hissed into the ears of staff and drinkers.
The former Argyle Hotel, built in the 1856, was once known as the Strangler’s Arms for the killing of a woman upstairs in the 1950s. Nobody knows whether the victim was Mary or an earlier inhabitant.
“My daughter Victoria was working here alone one night and rang me almost hysterical after one Mary incident,” Ms Smoorenburg said.
“The salt and pepper shakers started jiggling all on their own and someone said something quite clearly in her ear. She was so scared she couldn’t remember what they said.
“I said ‘Stay on the (walkabout) phone and go upstairs and turn off the lights’. Then while I was still on the phone with her I had a call come through from her mobile – which she’d left downstairs.
“I really got the creeps. I didn’t tell her until later.’’
Ms Smoorenburg’s first apparent run-in with Mary was the day renovations started, when four glasses flew sidewards from a table into a nearby wall.
“Then we had dockets spewing out of the kitchen computer like something from a Hollywood movie, hitting the wall and all.
“The building supervisor came back one night when lights were noticed on – they’d all been turned off – and heard a commotion in the toilet. He was too spooked to investigate.”
Ms Smoorenburg called in ghost-buster Jo Howell who suggested Mary was unhappy with changes to the pub and with herself for staying.
Then the ghostly incidents stopped.
“But then one regular here was drinking at the bar when he she tapped him on the shoulder. I saw him look suddenly over his shoulder then turn to me and say ‘She’s back!’’’
Since then the eerie incidents have resumed.