Bush legends: Kaye Crafter reveals the ghostly ‘link’ between Jack the Ripper and Southern Cross’ Palace Hotel

With a trademark cackle, Kaye Crafter starts to tell her story about the ghost of Southern Cross. Not everyone in her Wheatbelt hometown agrees that the female spirit does indeed lurk in the shadowy upper halls of the historic Palace Hotel. But they are largely united behind her assertion that Southern Cross was the final residence of the man she thinks murdered her — the most notorious serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper. “Our murderer ... he was the boss of the mine and the townsfolk loved him because he could sing,” Mrs Crafter said of the villain whose moniker is as instantly-recognisable as she is by locals in Southern Cross’ main street. “There was no way he could murder anybody.” But Fredrick Deeming, also known as Baron Swanson or Albert Williams, was arrested in Southern Cross on March 12, 1892 for the murder of his partner and hanged two months later in Melbourne, where he had committed the crime. Former Scotland Yard detective Robin Napper has in recent years driven the theory that Deeming was a prime suspect for unsolved killings in London’s Whitechapel district in 1888. His death mask appears in the Scotland Yard Museum of Crime as “Jack the Ripper” and a Deeming mannequin stands in the courtroom dock in a display at the Yilgarn History Museum in Southern Cross. Mrs Crafter said her spookily-intuitive husband Russell had felt the cold presence of another Deeming victim upstairs in the hotel and had never returned for a second introduction. “He came here with another woman after the melbourne murder, but nobody knows what happened to her,” she explained. “So people think the lady who hangs around the Palace was her and there are also poltergeists in the kitchen that move things around and throw plates and things like that.” Mrs Crafter moved to Southern Cross from Narembeen with her husband in 1984 and jokes that she almost feels like a local. They had met in Pingarup, where her father ran a farm, and only planned to stay in Southern Cross for five years. “Russell is a gypsy ... we’d been married five years and moved 20 times because he hates being in the same place,” Mrs Crafter said. “But with our freight business, he can drive and move around every day so we’ve been in the same place for 35 years. It was such a long time ago now that I forgot about the five-year plan. “I’ve always felt at home here. I sort of moved in and slept in.” In the meantime, Mrs Crafter has fallen in love with Southern Cross and it’s surrounds, from the gimlet trees and strange “jelly beans smell” in the bush, to the pursuit of finding water holes. “Any water hole that has been built by man or nature, I will go and look for it,” she proclaims. “In the Yilgarn, if you didn’t have water, you’d die. The Aboriginal people didn’t live here permanently because there is no permanent water here anywhere in the Yilgarn. “There might be rock pools and soaks, but no underground water.” Mrs Crafter is one of the busiest little bees in a town buzzing more than usual with the increased recent number of local travellers. She has developed her fine art of finding water since becoming fascinated by the wells of Charles Cooke Hunt — known as Hunt’s Wells — and was happy to share the secrets, with her eyes the main tools of her trade. “You just look at the lay of the land and if you come across some hard conglomerate, gravelly sort of stuff and it slopes down, you can bet your bottom dollar there’s a gnamma somewhere,” she explained. “If you see white kaoline stuff on the ground, there is going to be a water hole there. I just put them on a GPS and I’ve written up about 190 of them in the museum. It’s very much become an obsession.” Mrs Crafter said she had two knee replacements, one six months after the other, to help continue her water-finding pursuit. But it had made minimal difference. “It doesn’t matter, I still fall over because I’m not very steady on my feet at the best of times,” she said. She was also a little indifferent to her husband’s passion for gold prospecting. “I sit out there and take a whole heap of books and have a read and make sure I take a fly net so the flies don’t drive me mad,” she said. “There’s not much around Southern Cross because it’s all fine gold. He just goes where he can see quartz blow with salt and pepper-type rock and water trees. Even if he gets any gold he gives it away to somebody. “But if it keeps him happy and out of the pub, that’s all right.” Mrs Crafter, 70, carefully claims there are “a lot of oddballs” in Southern Cross, from the farmers and townspeople who had been there all their lives to the blow-ins who had been there for up to 50 years. But one look at the town’s main street proves the place is loved and well cared for by the locals. And there seems no more dedicated person than Mrs Crafter’s fellow museum committee member, Lance Stevens. While she does a lot in the town, even directing musicals and volunteering for St John’s Ambulance, he knows a lot about it ... perhaps everything there is to know about the area. For the record, he does not agree with Mrs Crafter’s ghostly claims. “That’s crap, but it sells beer at the hotel,” he says bluntly. But he believes so strongly in the fact that Deeming was indeed in Southern Cross and could well have been Jack the Ripper that he wrote the explanatory spiel alongside the mannequin in the museum. Southern Cross-born in 1938, the sharp 82-year-old has also written a string of stories about the town and surrounding areas to preserve a history he cares deeply about. He rattles off location names you have never heard of before revealing his commitment as town historian had been triggered by his predecessor, Erna Forrester. “She was a former school-teacher and became my mentor and it sparked me off,” Mr Stevens said from the museum, which he describes as the oldest building of any consequence east of Northam. “I couldn’t say there was a single thing that captured me, but I couldn’t never wait to get back to Battye Library to learn more. I’ve probably got to the point where I know probably more than anyone. People seek you out to ask bits and pieces and it’s surprising what I can tell them. “Gold was the original driver here and the early fellas got the best of the workable stuff on the surface and then there was the farming. But we’ve had four rises of gold, usually about 25 years apart, all triggered by an increase in the price and we’re just about due for another one now. The history is there that it will come.” Like Mr Stevens, Mrs Crafter seems destined never to leave her Southern Cross home, which was named in connection with her maternal great uncle Charles Crossland, a prominent former government surveyor. He is said to have once told prospector Thomas Risely to head just east of the Southern Cross star constellation to find gold in the ironside hills. Risely later gave the town its name. “My great uncle was the most gorgeous-looking guy you’ve ever seen — tall, dark hair,” she said. “Then I looked at a photo of my grandfather and he was only five-foot-six (170cm) and had hair like mine and a weasley face. I thought, ‘Oh, it’s just not fair’.”