Meet the Ghost Hunter

30 Dec 2017

Since encountering a strange creature in the Australian bush in 1994, Tim the Yowie Man has dedicated his life to investigating the paranormal.

Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of a crypto-naturalist. The job title didn’t exist until 22 years ago, when Tim the Yowie Man first coined it to describe his research into strange creatures, unexplained phenomena and things that go bump in the night.

 “I was in the Brindabella Mountains just south of Canberra,” Tim says. “It was late afternoon and out of the corner of my eye I saw this big, black, hairy, ape-like creature walking through the bush about 100 metres away from me.

 “I turned and ran back to my car. When I told my friends about it, they said I’d seen the yowie.”

The yowie legend has roots in Aboriginal oral history, though many people discount the creature’s existence. Tim, however, was determined to get to the bottom of his strange encounter.

He started out investigating the yowie, but quickly branched out to hauntings, curses and other spooky legends, all of which are documented in his new book Haunted and Mysterious Australia.

 “It covers not only ghosts and poltergeists, but also unusual natural things. There’s a pub in Captains Flat that people have been talking about for 50 years because there’s a beer glass in the corner that just hangs there with nothing holding it. It’s a quirk of physics.”

Tim has also investigated the strange case of fish rain in outback towns. 

In those cases, he says, the fish have been sucked up by weather events and dropped many kilometres away.

But not everything is easily explained by science. Tim recalls visiting the shipwrecked SS Alkimos in Western Australia, which is said to be cursed.

 “I went out and I said, ‘If there’s a curse come and show me’. It was a calm day but the moment I spoke a complete change came over the ocean. A big wave came out of nowhere and pushed me against a rock and I cut my hand.”

From that moment on, Tim says, he had a run of bad luck. He was head-butted unconscious by a camel and snapped his keys in a hire car in the middle of the desert. His grandmother passed away unexpectedly and his girlfriend told him she was moving overseas.

 “I was sitting at home thinking, ‘What have I done? Maybe there is a curse after all’. I went all the way back to the wreck and said, ‘I’m sorry’. From that moment on a calm came over the ocean and a calm came over me. My run of bad luck stopped.”

As for the yowie, that mystery remains unsolved. “To this day I can’t work out what that thing was,” Tim says. “It could have just been someone in a gorilla suit jumping out of the bush. But why would they do that?”