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Tuesday 22 June 2010
Paranormal activity at Prospect: Ghosts rule the grounds
Murray, Tuesday 22 June 2010 - 06:13:08 //



BELIEVE it or not. These photos have been provided to us.

Are they an illusion or is there really something out there?

The first photo was taken during one of the St Bartholomew’s Church and Prospect Cemetery ghost tours.

Photos: Ghostly images captured at St Bartholomew’s Church and Prospect Cemetery

It was taken by a photographer of the paranormal while the door was open to the vestry on the Great Western Highway side of the church.

The first question asked is how could someone be up that high, because the windows are abnormally high from ground level.

The photo was sent overseas for authenticity tests and they said to look above the face of ``child’’ at what appears to be an abnormal apparition of another face.

The second photo was taken by the same photographer about seven years ago.

It was taken at the foot of Dianne Groat’s grave from an angle that should have the trees at the rear of the church and the street lights.

Something is blocking the view.

Click here for more on this story.







Sunday 23 May 2010
I hear dead people: Lorelle Trickett's sixth sense put to the graveyard test
Murray, Sunday 23 May 2010 - 10:46:36 //


POLICE have no time for clairvoyants and psychics. They dismissed Sydney mum Lorelle Trickett when she told them she knew they could find the body of missing Newcastle Knights junior Ryan Sainty.

So to this extraordinary experiment this week to test her abilities. Trickett has never been to Waverley Cemetery in Sydney before, she is not told her destination in advance.

The Daily Telegraph then gives her three names from the 80,000 people interred in 50,000 plots over 16ha.

Her tools are welding sticks, divining rods: "The rods are just conductors that help me. I feel electrified, my body is full of electricity." This 60-something retired welfare officer says she has had the gift of hearing the dead since childhood. She is not seeing those she is seeking in the cemetery but feeling their power.

"I feel an energy source
coming from them, although they are dead and some of them long dead, I still feel the pull, this energy pull."

It takes her seven minutes to find the grave of Captain William Foskett who has lain here since November 21, 1929, dying at 91.

She's drawn to the second name minutes later: Patrick Lafferty, who died in October 1940 aged 69.

Eerie, magic, a con or coincidence? Trickett says it happens because she has an open mind.

"I was brought up with religion. There was Jesus and the devil," she says. Talking to the dead was devil's work, so she hid it for years. Now she wants to help the police find dead people and give their families closure.

"I really believe in my heart and my mind that I can do it," she says.

Her divining rods have begun to move in backwards and forwards.

"That means it's searching."

The third dead person, Margherita May Thomson, isn't communicating with her: "She doesn't want to be found," says Trickett. We tell her that close to Margherita is buried a woman called Blanche. "Please Blanche, let me find you. Lead me to Margherita," she says as her divining rods lead her in the general direction.

Five minutes later she stops at a grave. It is not close to Margherita but across the top is one name in prominent writing: Blanche.

It is the resting place of Blanche Cohen, who died July 25, 1914 at 41, buried with her infant, also Blanche.

She continues searching and soon stops again. "It's pointing in here," says Trickett. There lies the grave of Margherita May Thomson, who died January 13, 1924.

Trickett then turns to a neighbouring grave. "Thanks Blanche, you helped me." It was the grave of Blanche Marie d'Alpuget who died September 5, 1963


Friday 26 March 2010
Bill Chalker, the Aussie X-Files agent who says the aliens have landed
Murray, Friday 26 March 2010 - 02:50:16 //



MEET the Aussie Agent Mulder - a man whose job it is to investigate Australia's X-Files and work out whether aliens exist.

Bill Chalker, who has spent 35 years investigating alien abductions, believes the sighting of a UFO above Sydney by mother Fiona Hartigan is almost certainly genuine. He's not the only one.

Scores of Australians contacted the Daily Telegraph yesterday with reports of multiple sightings in the Blue Mountains or strange lights hovering over rural NSW.

Mother-of-two Anne Hamnett said she witnessed a bizarre incident at her isolated property near Gloucester on Sunday night.

She and her children were out the front of the house just hours after Ms Hartigan's sighting when two brightly lit objects appeared.


They stayed in the area for about 30 minutes before disappearing.

"I've never believed UFO stuff before but I haven't ever seen anything like this," she said.

"They were orange-red in colour and perfectly in line with each other - I just can't explain it."

Mr Chalker will add Ms Hamnett's experience to a giant dossier cataloguing hundreds of sightings dating back to the 1800s.

A secret backer funds the full-time investigations, some of which take months to complete.

Mr Chalker, a scientist, visits the scene of reported sightings, interviews witnesses and takes soil samples from landing sites.

"The best are often those where physical traces are left behind - marks on the ground and that kind of thing," he said.

"I'm only interested in the hard evidence cases, the ones that aren't readily explainable. Most sightings tend to be explainable but some of them just don't seem to make any sense or fit into anything obvious."


Sydney news alerts More UFO alien sightings revealed
Murray, Friday 26 March 2010 - 02:47:07 //




FIRST a woman photographed strange flying discs descending on a busy Sydney street - now Daily Telegraph Online reporter Dora Tsavdaridis has told how she spotted a UFO while on a beach holiday.

Mother-of-two Fiona Hartigan captured the imagination of the nation after sunset snaps taken in Chipping North on Sunday were printed in the Daily Telegraph today.

Read the original story here

"As I was about to take the picture this black object appeared and then it started to move," she said.

"It started off about 800m away but it came closer - to about 400m - and then two other little round things appeared from this bright orange light above.

"There was no noise. It was calm and peaceful but it was very weird."

And she's not alone. Ms Tsavdaridis says she will never forget her own close encounter on the Greek island of Mykonos.

Blogging with the DT Online she said: "It was about the size of a star and it looked like it was far away. At first I thought maybe it was a plane, but there were no blinking lights, just this one red light. Plus, it was too far away to be a plane.

"It definitely wasn’t a bird or Superman either.

"The sky and the area around us was so dark, the red spot was very clear as it travelled horizontally across the sky for about three minutes and then disappeared.

"We were all blown away by it, we stood there for a few minutes trying to grasp what we saw.

"At the time we thought it was most likely a comet or something similar but after looking into it, there were no reported comets that were visible to the human eye on that date. Plus I’ve seen a comet and they usually have a tail of some sort - this definitely didn’t."

UFO spotter or space cadet? Read her blog here.

UFO Research NSW spokesman Doug Moffett says there are between 1000 and 1500 UFO sightings in Australia alone every year, "but that is just the tip of the iceberg".

"It could be some electrical anomaly that no one has ever seen, it could be an extra-terrestrial craft, it could be something else," he said.

"Why would anyone make these stories up? They are setting themselves up for ridicule."

Readers were quick to inundate our website with theories on Ms Hartigan's find, with some insisting her camera was simply dirty - while others are adamant it was the real deal.

Al Yorke, of Wollongong, reckons he saw the mysertious objects as well.

"I saw three objects that match this description well enough," he said. "On Saturday night about 8.15pm in Woonona they were elevated at about 30 degrees off the coast horizon and moving slowly southeast and upwards.

"They were similar shapes to what has been described here but being at night, I could not identify any surface area - they were all emitting the same orange glow that resembled a naked flame viewed at distance. The furthest one began slowly descending and disappeared, the next two followed suite shortly after.

"I witnessed them for about two minutes. I mentioned it to my wife and a mate, and didn't think much of it until I see this in the paper today! What the? I can't explain what I was looking at."

And Marta, of Moorebank, added: "I live near there and I must admit you do see some strange things about in the night sky - and they're not planes landing. I'm not surprised by this lady's pics."

But Patrick, of Sydney, was a touch more downbeat, saying: "Probably the Government has something to do with this, wasting all our money with all these nonsense. No wonder we're struggling economically!"


UFO buzzes Sydney - and here's 'proof'
Murray, Friday 26 March 2010 - 02:42:03 //






* Mum snaps disc zipping though sky
* "It was calm and peaceful," she says
* Expert says object could be alien ship
* Pictures: The skies above

IT EMERGED from a blazing light in the clouds, descending on a busy street before zipping off silently into the sunset.

Just what - or who - propelled the strange flying disc across Sydney's skyline may never be known.

But while the close encounter was over in seconds, it was enough to convince mother-of-two Fiona Hartigan that she'd just seen a UFO.

And she has the photos to prove it.

Ms Hartigan yesterday said she had just got out of her car on Sunday evening to snap a few sunset photos when the amazing events began.

"As I was about to take the picture this black object appeared and then it started to move," she said.

"It started off about 800m away but it came closer - to about 400m - and then two other little round things appeared from this bright orange light above.

"There was no noise. It was calm and peaceful but it was very weird."

Ms Hartigan said the main UFO then shot off above Governor Macquarie Drive at Chipping Norton, with the smaller UFOs zipping away in the opposite direction.

"I don't know how to explain it - I'm still totally bewildered," she said.

To the sceptic, Ms Hartigan's photo might show a speck of dust on the lens or something small floating in the air close to the camera.

But close encounters like Ms Hartigan's came as no surprise to UFO Research NSW spokesman Doug Moffett:

"It could be some electrical anomaly that no one has ever seen, it could be an extra-terrestrial craft, it could be something else," he said.

"There does appear to be a blur around the image, which could just be the way it's shaped, or - and this is pure speculation - it could be due to its propulsion system.

"Whatever the case, it's an opportunity to learn something new."

Mr Moffett said there were between 1000 and 1500 UFO sightings in Australia every year, "but that is just the tip of the iceberg".

"Why would anyone make these stories up? They are setting themselves up for ridicule," he said.


Scientists unearth Australian T rex
Murray, Friday 26 March 2010 - 02:37:18 //




Australian scientists say they have discovered the first evidence that an ancestor of the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex once roamed across Australia.

The finding, published today in the journal Science, fills a major gap in the evolutionary history of T rex and overturns the theory the giant predator was a purely northern hemisphere animal.

It also puts a dampener on hopes of finding a unique Australian dinosaur, says Museum Victoria curator of vertebrate palaeontology Dr Tom Rich.

The discovery is based on a pubic bone found about 20 years ago at Dinosaur Cove, 220 kilometres west of Melbourne in Victoria.

It was made after Dr Rich took a number of isolated and unidentified bones overseas for identification.

Conspicuous feature

Lead author Dr Roger Benson, a research fellow in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, says he instantly recognised one of the bones belonged to a coelurosaur.

Coelurosaurs are the group of mainly small-bodied, predatory dinosaurs that includes birds at one end and tyrannosaurs at the other, Dr Benson says.

He says the identification was initially based on "one conspicuous feature".

Dr Benson says the far end of the pubic bone was expanded into a "boot" shape fore and aft, but was very narrow across.

"Basically, our [the Museum Victoria] pubis is almost identical to that of T rex, only much smaller," Dr Benson said.

The new species, which Dr Rich says would have been about one-third to one-quarter the size of T rex, shares other features with the giant predator, including short arms and powerful jaws.

"It's much more similar to T rex than one other tyrannosaur (Raptorex, from China) of slightly older age than ours," Dr Benson said.

"We know Raptorex had a robust skull and small arms and we know that our new fossil is from a tyrannosaur even more closely related to T rex. Thus it's most likely the general body plan of our new one was similar."

Surge in discovery

Until recently the only known tyrannosaurs were those like T rex - giant predators from Asia and North America that lived about 70 million years ago, just before the Cretaceous mass extinction, says Dr Benson.

However in the past decade a "surge" in discoveries has revealed diverse types and body sizes in the tyrannosauroid family from up to 170 million years back in the Middle to Late Jurassic.

"It's these discoveries, mostly man-sized or smaller, that have filled in the story of tyrannosaur evolution," says Dr Benson.

"Since all discoveries have been from the northern hemisphere, tyrannosaurs have been considered as northern dinosaurs that might have just never made it down into the south.

"The new discovery shows that this is wrong and that 110 million years ago tyrannosaurs were probably global. This poses a question. Why did tyrannosaurs grow to giant size and dominance in the north, but apparently not in the south?"

Dr Rich says the new species of Tyrannosaurus also shows the likelihood of finding a unique Australian dinosaur is low.

"The picture that seems to be emerging is that dinosaurs were more or less cosmopolitan," he says.

"We are getting elements that look like those found in the northern hemisphere and we haven't found the dinosaur equivalent of the koala; we don't seem to have a unique dinosaur."


Thursday 18 February 2010
New YouTube clip sparks UFO debate
Murray, Thursday 18 February 2010 - 23:49:59 //


Melbourne: People believing in the existence of the extra terrestrial and UFO say a new video uploaded onto YouTube shows an alien plane either entering or leaving the Earth.


The anonymous researcher, who put up the video, claims the unusual cloud formation in Mexico could have been caused by a UFO wormhole.

"AMAZING FOOTAGE shows what may have been a U.F.O. ENTERING or LEAVING our EARTH," News.com.au quoted the YouTube entry, as saying.

The post further read: "Location as stated on the original posting is that of MEXICO. Stand by for further information."

However, some people are far from convinced.

A viewer said: "I? do believe the phenomenon you speak of is called a ... cloud."

The Mexico footage shows unusual cloud formations, which many other UFO watchers claim to have seen.

However, scientists say the unusual formations are Lenticular clouds, which form at high altitudes.


Saint Mary MacKillop Today?
Murray, Thursday 18 February 2010 - 23:41:46 //




Mother MacKillop is hoped to recieve sainthood later today.
Print Email this Share Permalink Just over a century after her passing, today may mark the day for the announcement of the canonisation of Mother Mary MacKillop to sainthood.

Pope Benedict XVI is expected to announce Mary MacKillop as Australia's first saint after a meeting in the Vatican City later today, just after 8:30pm ACDST.

Mary MacKillop's second miracle, helping an Australian woman recover from an inoperable cancer, was acknowledged recently, with her first miracle of curing a woman with leukemia recognised by the church in January of 1995.

Tim Fisher, Australia's ambassador to the Vatican, spoke with 891's Breakfast with the Bald Brothers this morning from the walls of the Vatican City to convey the building excitement of the Australian Catholic community.

"I think it is going to be a very special day for Sister Maria Casey [Postulator for the Cause], for the Sisters of St Joseph, Strand Irwin and many others throughout Australia, and for Penola and the Coonawarra wine region.

"The joy will be far beyond those who go to church; it will be an Australian wide thing because she was an outstanding leader in education and in many other fields."

Born in Melbourne in January of 1842, Mary MacKillop is best known to South Australians for her work with children and the needy after she worked in Penola as a governess to her uncle's children in the late 1850s.

After meeting Father Julian Tenison Woods, Mary MacKillop began working with Father Woods to provide religious education to outback children.

In 1866, she opened St Joseph's School in Penola and with the help of other young women formed the congregation of the Sisters of St Joseph.

In 1867, by request of Bishop Shiel, Mary moved to Adelaide to open another school, and soon took charge of an orphanage and founded a house of refuge and house of providence for women in need.

The Sisters of St Joseph congregation continued to spread around the country and internationally.

Sainthood has been sought (after) for Mary MacKillop for several decades, with the first application for beatification made in 1961.

If Mary MacKillop is granted sainthood later tonight Adelaide-time, a date will be announced by the Pope, on behalf of the Cause of Saints, for the official ceremony to take place later in the year.

"She is an outstanding Australian, every which way you look at it," Mr Fischer said.

It is also hoped a Canadian, Brother Andre, will be named for canonisation at the same time.


Friday 22 January 2010
Are these the ghosts of a boy and girl who died 60 years apart?
Murray, Friday 22 January 2010 - 02:39:47 //




DOES this photo show the figures of two children, born more than half a century apart, walking in their paranormal playground?

The family who took this picture while on a Picton ghost tour swear there were no children inside the St Mark's Cemetery.

Which begs the question: Who, or what, is out there?

Local legend has it that the two children are David Shaw and Blanche Moon, who died 60 years apart.

Blanche was crushed to death in 1886 when a pile of sleepers that she and a number of children were playing on slipped.

David was the son of a minister who died in 1946 from polio.

Renee English, the woman behind the lens of this mysterious photo, said she was "a sceptic" before undertaking the ghost tour on January 9.

"When we were standing at the bank looking into the cemetery I was just snapping away and making jokes about the whole thing," the Port Macquarie resident said.


"I know that when I took that photo there was no one else in the cemetery.

"The only people we saw were a family of four about 10 minutes later but those kids were clinging to their parents the whole time.

"When we uploaded our photos and saw the children all the hairs on my arm stood up and I just went cold all over. That night I couldn't sleep at all and I'm never watching a scary movie again.

"I wasn't a believer in ghosts but now I'm intrigued."

Local historian Liz Vincent conducted ghost tours in Picton, claimed to be Australia's most haunted town, until her death last year. Since then her husband John and daughter Jenny Davies have taken up the mantle.

"Picton's just so haunted," Ms Davies said.

"We find people always love to see their photos afterwards because most of these things aren't visible to the naked eye."

One of the tour's most popular figures is Emily, a lady who was hit and killed by a train in 1916 while taking a shortcut through the Redbank Range Tunnel, also known as the Mushroom Tunnel, to visit her brother.

Emily Bollard resided near the railway line and was a single woman aged in her 50s. Before taking her shortcut, she didn't check the timetable and was hit in the tunnel by a train coming from Thirlmere. She died instantly.

"She likes to move among the participants and loves to touch their hair and body, particularly their arms and legs," Ms Davies said.

"Those on the tour often say that they've also felt a cold wind blowing through the tunnel."


What to make of the Yowie?
Murray, Friday 22 January 2010 - 02:27:10 //




Like many people interested in cryptozoology (the study of animals - or alleged animals - known only from anectodal evidence), I'm of the opinion that the Australian Yowie is one of the most problematic of mystery beasts. It is, in fact, so ridiculous and inconvenient that it's difficult to take seriously. As if sasquatch, yeti and orang pendek aren't difficult enough*, what are we to make of antipodean reports of a hairy, bipedal, ape-like creature? Back in 2006 (oh my god, four years ago already), Tony Healy and Paul Cropper collated everything known about the Yowie for their book The Yowie: In Search of Australia's Bigfoot (Strange Nation, Sydney, 2006).

The Yowie may, or may not, have anything to do with North America's Bigfoot but, as the authors admit (p. 161), they had to use the word 'bigfoot' in the title 'in order to make the subject of the book more easily recognisable to non-Australian readers'.

* I don't reject the possible existence of these creatures out of hand.

While it's all very well saying that any and all reports of an ape-like creature in the Australian bush are nonsense and that the phenomenon can hence be rejected without question, the problem is that at least some Yowie accounts really do sound extremely intriguing at the very least. Maybe all the reports represent misidentifications, hoaxes and the manifestations of cultural stereotypes or something, but even if this is so, there's still an interesting phenomenon here that's worthy of investigation. Those of us predominantly interested in zoology sometimes forget that cryptozoological reports might tell us more about folklore, psychology, witness perception and/or cultural transmission than anything else (see Meurger 1995, Meurger & Gagnon 1988). As a result I still think that investigation of subjects like the Yowie is worthwhile, and within the remit of science. Please remember this as you read the following: I'm nowhere near happy with the idea that the Yowie might be real, but - whatever the phenomenon represents - it's interesting.


Anyway... I really enjoyed reading Healy and Cropper's book, even though some of the material was, necessarily, repeated from their 1994 book Out of the Shadows: Mystery Animals of Australia (Healy & Cropper 1994). They discuss everything that's known about the Yowie, include virtually all relevant illustrations, and include a catalogue of the 300+ Yowie accounts of which they're aware. An early chapter reviews Aboriginal references to the giant, hairy, man-like creatures known variously as Dulugar, Yahoo, Devil-Devil, or Jimbra. I was interested to discover that a Yowie was reportedly seen by the three girls who star in the book and movie Rabbit Proof Fence during their 1931 escape from the Moore River Native Settlement [adjacent illustration of a 'wood devil' attack represents an event that supposedly happened near the Einasleigh River, Queensland, during the 1880s].

Colonial awareness of hairy, bipedal, primate-like creatures in the Australian bush goes back to the 1820s at least, and various 'Australian gorilla' accounts were reported during the late 1800s and early 1900s. We'll call this the 'historical phase'. For the most part, these early accounts sound much like modern ones (Healy & Cropper 2006).

Yowie reports went quiet for much of the 20th century (we'll call this the 'quiet phase'), though we do know that people in rural areas were still aware of the creature, and apparently encountering it (as demonstrated by recently discovered and long-overlooked accounts from the 1910s, 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s). Healy & Cropper (2006) suggest that there might be a few reasons for this 'quiet phase'. The Australian population became highly urbanised during this time, naturalists became less active, rural news became ignored or was deemed irrelevant by city-based newspapers, and Aborigines went through one of their most difficult periods ever and lost much of their cultural heritage.

During the 1970s, the Yowie became better known to white Australians. This was almost entirely due to the newspaper and magazine articles written by Rex Gilroy. As the authors state, Gilroy is a problematic character (search Tet Zoo for previous comments), and his contributions haven't exactly made mystery animal research in Australia all that reputable. Nevertheless, it would be wrong not to credit his contribution, and he's essentially responsible for getting the 'modern phase' up and running. Other Yowie researchers emerged soon after, and in the following decades, including Graham Joyner, Malcolm Smith, Healy and Cropper themselves, Dean Harrison, Gary Opit and Tim the Yowie Man (yes, really). You may have heard that Tim successfully fought against Cadbury's (the confectionary company) after they tried to get him to stop using his unique moniker (at the time, Cadbury's were marketing chocolate products called yowies: they're hollow chocolate figures containing toy animals. I collected these toys, but was only able to do so up to series 2, as shops stopped selling them after that!) [adjacent sketch produced by Katrina Tucker following a sighting made in Acacia Hill, NT, in August 1997].

Healy and Cropper's discussion of 'modern phase' eyewitness reports makes entertaining and fascinating reading. Among the most interesting accounts (for me) were Neil and Sandy Frost's from the Blue Mountains just west of Sydney. The Frost's accounts involve a prolonged history of sightings (many made at close range), the discovery of tracks and other field signs (namely, 'bites' taken out of tree bark), perceived interactions (viz, where something banged on the side of the house), and even attempts to capture the animals on film (they only succeeded in getting two photos of a humanoid face, obscured by darkness, peering in the camera's direction). It's fairly typical for writers to regard anecdotes as particularly impressive when the witnesses are of the 'reliable' sort (that is, they come from a trained background of some kind, and are somehow more trustworthy than 'average' witnesses). It's been argued that such perceived reliability doesn't count for much, and that hoaxing and misinterpretation can come from a 'reliable' witness as much as a 'less reliable' one. I know all of this, but I can't help but be impressed by the Frost's sincerity and credentials. In similar vein, Percy Window's daylight encounter of 1978 seems impressive. Window was a ranger for the Queensland National Parks and Wildlife Service, and claimed to have a prolonged, face-to-face sighting of a black, gorilla-like Yowie at a range of about 4 m.

Many other fascinating encounters are discussed in the book. Yowies have been reported by some witnesses to be unbelievably aggressive, and to pursue people with what was interpreted as predatory intent. Yowies have sometimes been reported to peer into windows, hang around the outsides of houses, and to approach cars on remote roads - all motifs that sound familiar if you've read the sasquatch literature. In further parallels with sasquatch, extremely bad, lingering smells have also been associated with Yowie sightings, and Yowies also seem to be good swimmers and waders.

Hoaxing has definitely played a role in the Yowie phenomenon: in fact, the earliest account on record (a 1790 handbill depicting a 'Monstrous Giant') was a hoax, and additional definite hoaxes have been exposed or revealed over the years. However, while I feel gullible saying it, the sincerity of many of the eyewitnesses, and the quality of their accounts, makes me think that many people have indeed experienced something.



[ Read the rest ... ]


Tuesday 12 January 2010
Meet Windale grandmother Kathleen Evans, Mary MacKillop's final miracle woman
Murray, Tuesday 12 January 2010 - 05:14:24 //




IF God had a reason for choosing Windale grandmother Kathleen Evans as the final miracle woman behind Australia's first saint, Blessed Mother Mary MacKillop, he hasn't told the miracle woman herself.

The reformed smoker who was 49 and had two months to live when her lung and brain cancer disappeared in 1993 after prayers to Mother Mary had no answer to the question "Why you?" at a media conference yesterday.

"When I finally do get upstairs [to heaven] that'll be the first question I'll ask, then you'll have to find me to find out," she said.

A buoyant Mrs Evans, mother of five, grandmother of 20 and great grandmother of two, spoke to the media for the first time after Pope Benedict XVI confirmed her cancer "cure" was considered a miracle by the Church, brought about because of prayers to Mother Mary.

The Windale grandmother's dramatic recovery without any medical treatment was the second miracle required so that Mother Mary can be canonised as a saint as early as next month.

Mrs Evans's husband of 31 years, Barry, their daughter Annette and son Luke were tearful as Mrs Evans recalled how doctors gave her no hope of surviving aggressive lung cancer that quickly spread to her glands and brain in 1993.

Told that chemotherapy would not help and radiotherapy would give her only a couple of more weeks to live, "I said 'Thanks, but no thanks.' I went back to my doctor and asked him to see me through until the end".

Then "all I had left was prayer".

A friend from the Hunter Valley gave her a picture of Mother Mary with a piece of the nun's clothing attached to the back which she wore on her nightie.

"It never left me," she said.

At the media conference yesterday she laughingly admitted she still kept it with her, attached to her bra.

Mrs Evans said despite being "in a bad way" as prayers were said over her, she felt peaceful and, surprisingly, very happy.

"There was a sense of peace in the house and I was very happy, and I'm not a person to be happy when I'm sick," she said.

She began to feel better and two weeks later, attended a weekend retreat at the Sisters of St Joseph, Lochinvar, where a priest prayed over her to Mother Mary.

It was 10 months after she was told she would die that tests revealed all of her cancer had gone and only scarring remained.

"My response was 'Oh wow. That was wow'," she said.

Kathleen and Barry Evans left Windale four years ago to travel Australia and live at Lightning Ridge to keep their secret until last month's Catholic Church ruling of a miracle was confirmed.

Mrs Evans told the media conference yesterday she had "absolute faith that I'll never get cancer" again.

"I'll die of a heart attack," she said.


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On the tail of a tiger in Tasmania Murray @ (10 Jan : 15:23) (Cryptozoology)
Brisbane Arts Theatre is Queensland's most haunted site Murray @ (10 Jan : 15:09) (Ghosts and Hauntings)
Paranormal Activity - The Movie Murray @ (08 Dec : 08:07) (TV and Movies)
Extinct Tasmanian "tiger" DNA has clues to demise Murray @ (28 Oct : 22:41) (Cryptozoology)
Ghost hunter’s grave concerns Murray @ (16 Sep : 00:32) (Ghosts and Hauntings)
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