The Glowing Cross that Astonished Australia

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(from Great Mysteries of the Modern World by John Pinkney)


The Glowing Cross that Astonished Australia

In September 1907 a young Australian railway worker died while courageously trying to halt a runaway train carriage. Eleven years after he was buried in a country cemetery the stone cross above his grave began to glow with a bright white light. As decades passed, the graveyard fell into abandonment and neglect. But amidst the dockweeds and wild grasses the cross steadily continued to shine. Not until 1978, after the phenomenon had quietly persisted for 60 years, were the nation's major newspapers and TV networks alerted to the story. Scientific experts visited the site and offered conflicting explanations. But the mystery of the glowing cross remains unsolved...

The NEW SOUTH WALES town of Lismore at the dawn of the twentieth century was an idyllic place to live and rear children. Built along the banks of the broad Wilson's River and edged by dense suptropical rainforest, the district, with it's rich volcanic soil, was home to farmers of all kinds, from dairymen and sugarcane planters to growers of tropical fruits.

William Steenson, aged 29, had spent most of his life in Lismore. On 30 September 1907 he died in a town nearby. Everyone agreed that the accident need never have happened. During a shunting procedure at Mullumbimby railway station a carelessly secured carriage ran out of control. In an extraordinary display of bravery Steenson tried to slow the runaway with his bare hands. He was thrown to the ground and critically injured.

William Thomas Thurling Steenson was to leave behind him a legacy more enduring than anyone, in their wildest imaginings, could have foreseen.

His family buried him beneath a large stone cross in North Lismore Pioneer Cemetery on the town's outskirts. For a long time his resting place appeared no different from the graves around it. Even the verse of an old hymn, which his wife ordered engraved on the headstone, seemed unexceptional. It was not until decades later that a local journalist would describe that hymn's words as 'prophetic'.

According to witnesses who were alive at the time, the 'strangeness' set in sometime around 1918 as World War 1 was drawing to a close.


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Without warning, or an apparent trigger event of any kind, William Steenson's cross began to glow, with a light that was sometimes so intense it bathed graves in a wide arc around it.

Local inhabitants struggled to find a rationale. Could it be reflected moonlight? No, because the cross glowed on cloudy nights with no moon visible. Besides, nothing else in the cemetery had ever been known to glow. Might the cross be reflecting artificial light from somewhere? Repeated investigation failed to identify a source of such light. And again, why did it 'reflect' from only one stone monument in a cemetery full of them?

For 60 years the Glowing Cross remained Lismore's 'secret'. It's very existence remained, to all intents, unknown to the world outside. Lismore's population contained few publicity seekers, but possibly there were two additional reasons behind the silence.

- Lismore was accustomed to the Glowing Cross. It had been a familiar part of the landscape for as long as most citizens could remember. It didn't seem at all 'new' or worthy of outside attention. As one student of the cross phenomenon opined: 'I guess nobody ever thought it important enough to report - not that a grave glowing inexplicably every night could be considered mundane.

- It was unlikely that any decent local would have dreamed of helping turn the cemetery light into a tourist circus while the descendants of William Steenson still lived in Lismore. (In 1984, long after the cross had become famous, Tom Steenson, William's grandson, told a newspaper that he and his father had paid quiet visits to the glowing graveside.)

But in Febrauary 1978 the six decades of silence were broken at last. A local woman, who had visited the cross with friends, happened to describe her experience to Alan Layton, a journalist with Lismore's Nothern Star newspaper. Layton was the author of a human interest column, Notebook. The woman wondered whether he would publish a brief piece discussing theories about why the stone emitted it's peculiar light. Undoubtedly imagining that he was writing (as usual) for local consumption only, Layton obliged.

But his words caught the attention of a Sydney daily's chief-of-staff - and the media frenzy began.

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Within 48 hours Lismore was aswarm with TV crews, reporters, photographers and the merely curious. The cross, the fully occupied cemetery around it abandoned and neglected, posed patiently for it's picture, glowing images that would travel, this time, around the planet.

Soon afterward the experts arrived: stonemasons, geologists, gemologists, physicists, refraction analysts and practitioners of many other disciplines. They offered a learned confusion of conflicting explanations, ranging from phosphorescence to radioactivity - but everyone's argument had a hole in it somewhere.

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According to one theory the glow was caused by a combination of the stone that formed the cross (Balmoral granite) with it's highly polished state. But that failed to explain why the base, made form the same material, did not glow also. At the end of all the measuring, analysing and opinionating, there was no definitive answer.

For the first time the people of Lismore themselves began to speak out. Some admitted that the graveyard spectacle had frightened them over the years. Albert Dann, who had moved to the district with his family 60 years earlier, recalled one Glowing Cross trauma. While he was still a newcomer, local children had taken him to 'the Ghost on the Hill' as they called the cross, and offered him a penny if he dared read the name on the 'shiny grave.'

In February 1978 Mr Dann told the Nothern Star: 'Forcing myself towards the main gate, suddenly, as I edged closer, a dazzling beam of white light flashed from the centre of the cemetery and struck me in the eyes.

'I was rooted to the spot with a horrible fear, still indescribable to this day. Somehow I remember forcing my unwilling body about and with every ghost and devil after me I sprinted back along the metalled road to the comfort of a gas lamp, beneath which the boys were howling with laughter and yelling, "You couldn't do it, you couldn't do it!"

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But most reactions to the cross were positive. Many locals entertained the idea that it might be sending some kind of supernatural signal, or a benign kind, from the long dead railwayman.

In 1986, following a long string of vandal attacks, someone removed the cross from it's pedestal. Despite a wide search by police and locals it was never recovered. One rumour suggested that the thief (or, because of the stone's muscle-wrenching weight) thieves, dumped it up-river.

The Steenson family erected a new cross in memory of their ancestor. It was carved to exactly the same proportions and in the same Balmoral granite as the original.

The new cross has never glowed.

Visitors to the replacement cross can still read the curiously prescient epitaph on the original 1907 headstone. The verse is from a hymn by Bishop Heber, published in 1811:

Sacred to the memory of my
Dear Husband, WILLIAM THOMAS
THURLING STEENSON, who died
At Lismore 30th September 1907; from
injuries accidentally received in execution
of his duty at Mullumbimby; aged 29 years

Though sorrow and darkness encompass the tomb,
Thy saviour has pass'd through its darkness before
thee...
And the Lamp of his Love
Is thy guide through the gloom.

http://i55.tinypic.com/19xr0n.jpg

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A story in the Today's News section about graveyard vandalism reminded me of this thread so I thought I'd give it a gratuitious bump.

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Thanks for this! It was fun to read... sad that it was stolen. :/

Would be awesome to go there at night and seeing a supernaturarly-glowing cross!

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Thanks for this! It was fun to read... sad that it was stolen. :/

More likely stolen by tptb than 'local vandals' methinks.

You can't leave compelling evidence for otherworldly phenomena lying around etched in stone like that.

It's probably a sacrificial altar in the basement of a Satanic temple nowadays.