00:04This rickety wooden bridge in a secluded part of the Palmerville Heritage Park in
00:10Mackellar has a reputation for being one of Canberra's spookiest locations.
00:26The hawthorn, oak, elm and poplar trees around here are some of the oldest exotic trees in
00:32Canberra planted not long after convicts were housed in nearby barracks from the late 1820s.
00:40It's dark in here even during the middle of a sunny day.
00:47But it's not just the light that makes this spot so spooky.
00:52Some people claim to have seen shadowy figures glide through here and down near the main channel
00:58of the Ginadera Creek as well as hear phantom footsteps crunching on the gravel behind them.
01:07Whether you believe in ghosts or not, this is a place of tragedy.
01:11For not far from here on the 20th of September 1892, two men drowned.
01:18Keen to get home to his nearby Gungahlin homestead and against all advice, Edward Crace convinced
01:25his coachman, George Kemp, soon to be married, to try and cross the creek which was in flood
01:31following a sudden spring downpour.
01:33The coach became bogged and, despite hollering for help, rescuers arrived too late.
01:41Both men and the horse drowned.
01:46Crace's body was found about midnight, while searchers using poles and rakes
01:53to probe the flood debris took ten days, yes, ten long days to find Kemp's body.
02:02Both are buried in St John's graveyard in Reed, Edward Crace in his family plot, and George Kemp,
02:09who had no family in the colony, with a headstone funded by his fellow servants from Gungahlin.
02:17Kemp's fiancée Margaret McPherson never forgot her first true love and, despite marrying Thomas
02:23Reed of Duntroon, was buried in the same grave as her beloved George in 1940.
02:29Kemp's father's body.
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