“Who’s the old lady dressed up on the stairs?”
That’s a question former Gumeracha Hotel publican Ben Carter was used to hearing in the early 2000s.
The problem was, there wasn’t anyone – staff, guests or locals – who looked anything like the woman that people claimed to see.
But one day, one of Ben’s patrons noticed an old photo on the wall.
“This lady came in one afternoon, had lunch, then came out and says ‘who’s the old lady on the stairs?’,” Ben recalls.
“I tell her, ‘I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about’ and she replies, ‘well, she’s in this long white dress’.
“Then she looks up at one of the old photos and goes, ‘that’s her, she’s in that photo’.”
The photo was taken in the early 1900s and captured a distinctive-looking woman of the era.
Not long after that interaction, the ‘old lady dressed up on the stairs’ became known as “Aggi”.
Today Gumeracha is famous for its Big Rocking Horse, but some locals who drink or stay at the pub will tell you Aggi still looms large in the local imagination.
Bar regular and current hotel resident Phil Verrall says his experience with the lady on the stairs was in the form of a very unwelcoming encounter.
“I was just sitting there one day watching TV and my suitcase just picked itself up and fell on the floor,” he says.
“I’m going ‘there’s no way that could happen’ – it was before I came down to the bar too, mind you.”
Phil says the suitcase was full and quite heavy and had been sitting securely on the shelf for days.
“I picked it back up and put it back, and it would have been 10 minutes later, it did the same thing,” he says.
“I sort of mentioned it to (current publican Mark Warren) and he says ‘yeah right, here’s another beer’.”
But Phil says the mysterious suitcase manoeuvre was also witnessed by one of the hotel’s cleaners when she was alone in his room.
“She told me, ‘I’m not cleaning your room again, Phil; that’s bullshit’.”
Phil says he had another encounter when he saw a woman exit the shower and walk down the hallway in the morning.
He originally believed it was Mark’s wife, Amanda.
But she was out of town that morning and no one else, besides Mark, was in the hotel at the time.
Phil describes that apparition as the “worst one”, but says none of them were really sinister – it was more like Aggi was “messing” with him.
Not everyone at the pub is a believer, though.
Current publican Mark says he doesn’t buy into the hype – that after running the pub for nearly eight years, the most supernatural thing he’s experienced is a few paper cups falling over.
“We live upstairs and I haven’t seen anything, heard anything,” he says.
His wife, on the other hand, is less sceptical.
“So many different people have a story to tell about the hotel, so you can’t really ignore that,” she says.
While conceding she hasn’t had any major paranormal experiences herself, she says stories from guests, and even her own children, make her question whether there is some truth to the legends.
“But everyone’s said that Aggi’s a good ghost, and she loves women and children; and playing tricks on men,” she says.
This year the hotel celebrated 165 years since it opened as the District Hotel in 1861.
Etched into the hotel’s soft sandstone walls are the names of more than 1000 people who made memories there over more than a century and a half.
Before the exterior etchings were covered with modern render to avoid heritage listing, the collection of names was spruiked as ‘Australia’s biggest visitors book’.
The venue has also held a mirror to the town’s joys and griefs, including the death of publican Patrick Corcoran in 1926 – who had only run the pub for about a year before dying from an illness – and the tragic death of part-time hotel employee William Crook during the 1929 Gumeracha well disaster.
Reports from the Western Argus of WA and The Mount Barker Courier and Onkaparinga and Gumeracha Advertiser tell the story of how Crook raced to the aid of his friend G. Parley who was killed by an explosion while overhauling a pump in a well on his property.
After descending into the well to try to save his friend, Crook was overcome by fumes, which then also claimed the life of Mounted Constable George Smith who went down the well to their aid.
Whether either of those tragic stories have any connection to the modern happenings within the hotel’s walls is up for debate.
But former publican Ben is among those who believe there’s more to the pub than meets the eye.
One night in the early 2000s as he was pouring one last beer for a regular before closing up, he experienced something that left him white as a ghost.
“It’s near the end of the night and I’ve got two customers yakking away as I’m getting ready to close up … and a regular customer is like, ‘I’ll have another schooner of West End thanks’,” he recalls.
“So I get the schooner out, stood (at the bar taps) and started pouring the beer.
“Out of the corner of my eye, all I could see was a beer glass … (about shoulder height) in mid-air.
“The customers were sitting there, they’d gone white, and I’m like, ‘what?’ and as I’ve turned around, the glass has gone bang on the ground.
“And I’ve gone, ‘okay, I think it’s time to close’.”
