Graham Seal has cred both as a historian and a story-teller. Best Australian Ghost Stories, just published, is his fourteenth book and its sub-title, ‘
Seal does not deal just in the ‘ooh, ah!’ or ‘gee whiz!’ genre; his 80 vignettes in nine chapters are based on extensive sources set out in 30 pages of notes. Honest History has previously reviewed his Great Convict Stories and Great Australian Journeys.
Seal is Emeritus Professor of Folklore at Curtin University in Perth. We suspect his books experience an uptick in sales prior to Christmas but that by no means diminishes them: they are an easier read than the average Ph.D-based tome. Surely writing readable books is the name of the game.
We flipped through Seal’s chapter, ‘House Ghosts’, wondering whether the ‘Maretimo’ mansion at Portland, Victoria, had ever had spectral visits from our great-grandfather, Hugh John Munro Campbell MP, its owner from 1895 to around 1920. ‘Papa’ Campbell had some success in business and politics but great sadness also, losing his wife Harriet to illness in 1912, his favourite son, Syd, at Gallipoli in 1915, and ‘Maretimo’ when his debtors let him down.
‘Papa’ died in 1921. Perhaps he haunts Maretimo still, grieving for Syd – or advocating for conscription, as he did in 1916.
5 October 2025
