The shack seemed to tremble.
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Nagging taps sounded on each of the windows, one after the other, as if the darkness outside was itching to get in.
It was about 9pm. I was 20 and so were the friends I was with. We were all five of us mortally drunk. One member of our party was slumped in a chair, passed out.
The din continued to grow, until the taps became bangs and the windows didn't just rattle; they shook.
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Then a bone-chilling silence. Suddenly, an insistent knock on the door.
Despite the chaos, one among us remained unconscious.
Frightened glances were exchanged. My friends and I had achieved a newfound sobriety.
This was my grandparents' property and the eyes of my companions told me that the obligation was mine to see who (or what) was terrorising us.
With what I'm sure, in hindsight, was comical timidity, I took a few steps. "Who's there?"
No answer. I opened the door, bracing for some kind of supernatural experience.
The faces I saw were familiar. One of them belonged to a person who'd slept at the property once before.
It was two old school friends, playing a prank. They'd been surfing at Roaring Beach and had decided to have a laugh at our expense on their way back to Hobart. They took some of our beers.
In seeking to scare us, the pair of them had tapped into something about the place, about Eaglehawk Neck, about the Tasman Peninsula.
There's a sublime beauty to its landscape. The beaches are white, the outcrops are sheer and the forests are verdant.
But beneath it all, there's a latent malevolence.
It might be traced back to a great dispossession. The traditional owners of the Tasman Peninsula were the Pydairrerme band of the Oyster Bay tribe. However, they were driven out of their country and there's no recorded evidence of their being there beyond the 1820s.
The infamous penal settlement at Port Arthur began life as a modest timber station in 1830.
A site marked by contradiction, its rolling greens boasted manicured English gardens and impressive architecture. All the while, violence was de rigueur as the convicts toiled in misery.
Tales of the weird and the paranormal at Port Arthur have been carried down from generation to generation and fostered and commoditised by the modern stewards of the place.
The Isle of the Dead, where the departed occupants of the settlement were buried, lends itself well to dark folklore. Lighthearted ghost tours run by the Port Arthur Historic Site take tourists through the supposedly haunted parsonage, the old surgeon's quarters and the asylum, where convicts thought to have been criminally insane were sent.
Although the cessation of convict transportation came in 1853, the settlement at Port Arthur wasn't officially closed until 1877.
Terrible things have happened there, and elsewhere on the peninsula, since then. Violence and hellish blazes have ravaged communities, uprooted them.
Driving along the Arthur Highway today, one can almost observe this disturbing history as though it's inscribed in the landscape, in the charred trees and the mudflats, and hear on the wind the whispers of evil deeds.
As a child, I had a vague sense of the paradox of the Tasman Peninsula.
There's a sublime beauty to [the Tasman Peninsula's] landscape. The beaches are white, the outcrops are sheer and the forests are verdant. But beneath it all, there's a latent malevolence.
Wading through the kelp-choked waters of Lufra Cove, my eyes would inevitably be drawn to the frightening visage of Clydes Island.
To this day, it still looks to me like a yawning skull. Naturally, my young self dubbed the rock Skull Island. I didn't bother to find out what its real name was until I was much older.
There's a graveyard on the island's scalp, its headstones like so many grey hairs. I used to bury coins up there so I had an excuse to create my own treasure maps.
Everywhere you look on the peninsula, the darkness is there.
It's in place names like Pirates Bay and Devils Kitchen. It's in the sculpture at the notorious Dog Line at Eaglehawk Neck, where, akin to Cerberus at the gates of the underworld, beasts once served as sentinels to deter the escape of convicts from Port Arthur.
The snarling dog statue standing there today is a grim reminder of that terror.
All this history was rendered starkly apparent to my friends and I as we heard those phantom noises on that balmy November night.
And no doubt it was evident, even if unconsciously, to the two practical jokers circling the shack outside.
History, however dark, finds funny ways of manifesting itself.