Haunted Hostelries

The Dorset Hotel in Main Street, Derby, still harbours memories of a catastrophe of more than 60 years ago, when there were disastrous floods across the whole of Northern Tasmania.

The Briseis mine, named after the winner of the Melbourne Cup in 1876, was the most important tin-mining operation in the North-East. Large quantities of water were needed to get at the tin which, at that time, was in huge demand all over the world. A storage basin, known as the Briseis Dam, was built in the Cascade River a few kilometres from the mine workings.

Early in April 1929, during a time of torrential rains, this dam burst its banks. An immense wall of water nearly 20 metres high swept down the valley. At the Briseis Mining Company offices William Beamish saw it coming and gave up his life in a desperate effort to warn his men, a number of whom drowned.

Four homes near the mine workings were broken up by the raging waters and swept away and 25 horses perished. Today a large lake behind the town of Derby shows where the once prosperous Briseis mine was situated.

Seven or eight years ago, Mrs. Edwina Pargiter and a psychic friend from interstate, Mrs. Ann Ferguson, stayed overnight at the Dorset Hotel in Derby. They were shown to a small back bedroom.

Since her friend felt fatigued, Mrs. Pargiter left her for ten minutes or so while she went to put the car away and fetch a few pieces of luggage. When she got back, she says, she found her friend sitting on the edge of the bed, white-faced and shaken. Mrs. Ferguson then told of a strange experience she had just had.

The walls of the small room had appeared to widen and change; there was a brown dado on the lower half. This larger room was full of people dressed in an old-fashioned style. They were mostly men ranging in age from their early twenties to their late forties. One by one they came up close to her and loomed into her face. She counted 13 men, two women and two children. They all seemed sad and angry, but not threatening.

Then the room closed down again and resumed its normal appearance.

Mrs. Ferguson felt so shaken by this astonishing experience that the two of them decided to go downstairs for a brandy. Seated at the bar was a man whose face Mrs. Ferguson instantly recognised as resembling one of those she had seen in her vision.

The bartender told her the man's family had lived in the district for several generations.

A little later a young Scottish bus-driver came up and spoke to the two women. He asked them how they liked Derby.

"It's a most dreadful place," exclaimed Mrs. Ferguson with an ill-disguised shudder.

"Oh, you've seen them too, have you?" he said matter-of-factly. "You know, sometimes they even get on the bus with me."

The next day the two women left Derby and went on to Winnaleah, where they visited a friend who lent them a small book of local history entitled Of Rascals and Rusty Relics.* The following night, in a hotel at Pioneer, Mrs. Ferguson was reading it in bed when she suddenly sat up and exclaimed, "That's them!" She was reading for the first time about the people who had perished when the Briseis Dam burst in 1929.**

According to this account, the Dorset Hotel at Derby was used at the time of the disaster as a temporary morgue for the dead.

*Miller, G. & S.: 'Of Rascals end Rusty Relics. An Introduction to North-East Tasmania' (OBM, Hobert, 1979)

** Reports of the number of victims very from 'more then e cozen ' to 14 end 15.