Mitchell Pearce’s family home haunted by ghost

In this exlcusive extract from Australian Ghost Stories by James Phelps, Mitchell Pearce and his family reveal how the ghost of a little boy was haunting their home.

Mitchell Pearce says a ghost exorcism may have saved his NRL career.

Rugby league superstar Mitchell Pearce has made the revelation that a ghost exorcism may have saved his NRL career.

In an exclusive interview about a ghost that haunted his family home, the Roosters legend and son of Balmain Tigers great Wayne Pearce said a ‘ghost whisperer’ cured him of a mystery ailment at the beginning of his NRL career.

‘I had an injury that was giving me a lot of trouble,’ Mitchell said.

‘It was this niggling pain in my shoulder, and I just couldn’t get on top of it. I was playing in pain, and nothing I did to try to treat it helped. And then one day, it just suddenly stopped hurting.’

Aged nineteen and an NRL rookie with the Sydney Roosters at the time, Pearce was still living with his parents at the family home in Sydney’s north. On that day, he burst through the front door, face plastered with a grin.

‘Guess what?’ Mitchell called out to his parents in the living room. ‘You know that injury I’ve been complaining about? My dodgy shoulder and back?’

Mitchell Pearce couldn’t explain what was causing his niggling shoulder and back pain at the start of his NRL career. But his parents could …

Terri and Wayne knew all about the injury. Mitchell had been complaining about it for months.

‘Well, the strangest thing happened today,’ Mitchell continued. ‘All of a sudden, it just cleared up on its own.’

Terri turned to her left and looked hard at her husband.

Eyes widening, Wayne shook his head. ‘No way,’ he said, not to his son standing before him, all sunshine and smiles and stoked to deliver his good news, but to his wife, her face now white.

Terri turned to her son and smiled, albeit nervously. ‘Really?’ she said, a slight tremor in her voice. ‘It just suddenly felt better? When did that happen?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mitchell said. ‘When we were doing ball work. Sometime between eleven and twelve, I guess. Suddenly, I just noticed it was gone.’

Hands shaking, Terri turned to Wayne. He was now whiter than his wife.

‘What’s going on?’ Mitchell asked, the grin he had been wearing ever since the injury cleared suddenly gone.

Terri swallowed hard, her voice barely a whisper as she told him to sit down.

And that’s when she told him about the ghost. About the bouncing boy.

‘I explained that a medium had come round that day,’ Terri said. ‘And that she had found a “presence’’ in the house. The ghost was a little boy. And she told me he had been living in Mitchell’s room.’

Whatever, Mitchell thought. He didn’t believe in ghosts.

‘Na, this is a gee-up,’ he said before chuckling. ‘You guys are off your heads.’

He stopped laughing when he looked towards his father. He wasn’t laughing. He wasn’t even smiling. And that was weird, Mitchell thought, because his dad could never keep a straight

face in the middle of a gag.

‘Mum then told me that the ghost has attached itself to me,’ Mitchell said. ‘And, I kid you not, the medium said it had attached itself to my back.’

Terri and Wayne Pearce with their children Tatum, Hannah and Mitchell had an uninvited guests in their family home.

Mitchell suddenly went cold.

‘But I just shook it off,’ he continued. ‘I was like, yeah, whatever. I didn’t believe in ghosts.’

Not until he listened to what his mum said next.

‘I told him that the medium had cleansed the house, and the boy was now gone,’ Terri said. ‘He was no longer climbing all over his back. And the freaky part is that the ghost crossed over at the same time that Mitch’s injury inexplicably cleared.’

And with that, the rising NRL star, who would follow in his father’s footsteps and become a rugby league great himself, was a believer.

‘It’s hard to argue when something like that happens,’ Mitchell said. ‘Honestly, it was an injury I just couldn’t get on top of. And no word of a lie, it suddenly cleared up on the same day Mum got that lady in.’

Mitchell went to training the next day and told his teammates that an exorcism had cured him of his injury, a revelation that left them all stunned.

‘I told the boys all about it,’ Mitchell said. ‘They must have thought I was off my head.’

The Pearce family opened up to author James Phelps. Picture: Brett Costello

They share their story in Phelps’ new book Australian Ghost Stories.

The story of the bouncing boy begins with Mitchell’s youngest sister, Tatum. She was sleeping in her bedroom next to Mitchell’s when she woke up in the middle of the night and saw a ghost.

She ripped off the covers and ran out the door, down the hallway and into her parents’ bedroom.

‘Mum, Dad, wake up,’ she yelled.

Terri propped herself up and turned towards her daughter, rubbing her eyes.

‘Hon, what’s wrong?’ Terri said, fearing a medical emergency.

‘There is something in my room,’ came the reply.

Terri turned and shoved her husband hard. And it had to be hard, given her husband was, well, solid.

In his prime, which was from the moment he made his debut in 1980 to the last game he played in 1990, Wayne Pearce weighed ninety kilograms and stood just a smidge under six feet. Regarded by many as the first real professional footballer due to his commitment to fitness and training, he was as strong as he was fit. Stacked with muscle and devoid of fat, his physique was so good that Tina Turner stopped flicking through the pile of photos that had been put before her as soon as she saw the strapping and shirtless lock forward.

‘Him,’ said the American star, who had been recruited by New South Wales Rugby League to help create what would go on to become arguably Australia’s greatest sporting campaign.

‘He’s our guy.’ Along with Turner and Sharks player Andrew Ettingshausen, Wayne would become the face of the ‘Simply the Best’ campaign.

Pearce was one of the fittest men in the NRL, chosen by the late Tina Turner to star in the Simply the Best ad alongside Allan Langer and Andrew Ettingshausen in 1990. Picture: Peter Muhlbock.

And even at almost fifty, when Tatum burst into his bedroom in the middle of the night, Wayne was still as fit as a fiddle and as strong as an ox. Which was why Terri was shoving him. He would make short work of an intruder.

‘Wayne, wake up,’ Terri said. ‘Quick. There’s someone in the house.’

‘No, not someone,’ Tatum said, ‘something. It’s a ghost.’

On hearing this, Terri and Wayne would have placated a child and gone straight back to sleep, but at seventeen,

Tatum was a young adult. She was also smart, sensible and sceptical.

Wayne and Terri walked down the hallway to Tatum’s room, flicking on the light and looking around. There was nothing to see other than a typical teenager’s den, posters on the wall, clothes on the floor, textbooks on the table.

‘Maybe it was just a dream,’ Terri said.

Both Terri and Wayne went back to bed. They didn’t give their daughter’s claim too much thought until it happened again, and again, and again.

‘We have two girls, and my youngest daughter, Tatum, was in a bedroom next to Mitchell,’ Terri said. ‘And she used to constantly complain about a ghost. She would always see this figure at the bottom of her bed. We would be like, “Oh yeah?” I mean, what else could we say?’

Mitchell Pearce and his sisters Tatum and Hannah.

But Tatum kept complaining, and strange things started happening elsewhere in the house.

‘There were some other things going on,’ Terri said.

‘Strange noises, things falling over, and Wayne, well, he was always tripping over a particular step whenever he would walk up those stairs. I was always asking him about it. “What’s up

with you and that step?” Wayne would just shrug.’

Terri would not have lifted an eyebrow had Wayne not been Wayne. A former professional athlete with freakish co-ordination, he wasn’t the sort of person who dropped plates, knocked glasses, or stumbled and swayed.

‘I would often trip or stumble over a step,’ Wayne confirmed.

‘I’d have to stop myself from falling over by grabbing the wall or another step. I’d get up and keep going. It was just something I found weird. I didn’t give it too much thought.’

Neither did Terri.

‘I didn’t pay much attention because I was a sceptic,’ Terri said. ‘I was able to find a rational explanation for it all. Wayne was a bit hyperactive, so I just thought it was because he would run up the stairs.’

But things kept happening, and Tatum kept complaining. She swore she was seeing a ghost. A little boy on her bed.

‘It was really starting to spook Tatum out,’ Terri said. ‘And one night she had a friend stay over, and they saw it too. I guess that is when we started to think maybe there was something to it.’

Mitchell remembers the night Tatum’s story was corroborated by her guest.

‘Yeah, she had a boyfriend at the time,’ Mitchell said. ‘And he ran out of the room, all freaked out, saying he saw it too.’

Mitchell talked to his sister about the spectre.

‘She said it was more like a shadow than a solid figure,’ Mitchell said. ‘It was enough to make her aware, but I don’t think she was frightened that it was going to hurt her or anything like that. She was just freaked out because it was there.’

Enter the ghost whisperer.

‘A friend of mine had gone through something similar,’ Terri said. ‘I thought it was all a load of bull at the time, but she told me that she had a ghost whisperer come to her house because her son was always complaining about a ghost.

Mitchell with his father Wayne. Picture: Justin Lloyd.

Mitchell would go on to follow his father’s NRL footsteps. Picture: Brett Costello

‘She told me that her son had been seeing a man on the lounge, smoking. He used to say, “The man on the lounge is watching us, Mum. The smoking man is watching us.”

Anyway, she did some research and ended up tracking down a medium who claimed she could not only see ghosts but get rid of them. So she decided to give it a go.’

Terri was intrigued by the next part of her friend’s story.

‘She told me she hadn’t told the medium what the boy was seeing,’ Terri said. ‘They just said something strange was going on and could she come and check it out. And when the ghost whisperer arrived, she supposedly said that there was a man with a cigarette on the lounge.’

Next came the smell. Cigarette smoke. Not just noticed by the medium but by everyone else in the house.

‘Yeah, apparently they could all smell it,’ Terri said. ‘Even though none of them smoked.’

Terri was sceptical but decided to call her friend to reveal the strange happenings at her home.

‘I told her what was going on with Tatum, and she said I should get the ghost whisperer in,’ Terri said. ‘I still thought it was a bit of bull, but I eventually figured, why not? So I asked her for the number and made the call.’

You might think a tough as teak former footballer like Wayne may have been against the idea, but he wasn’t.

‘Terri was more sceptical than me,’ Wayne said. ‘I’ve always been open to that aspect of energy – where does the energy go when you pass away and stuff like that. So no, I wasn’t sceptical at all. I was just intrigued.’

It was a bright and still day when Terri Pearce opened the door to let the ghost whisperer into her family home.

BANG!

‘As soon as I opened the door, we heard a gigantic crash upstairs,’ Terri said. ‘It was a big clunk, like someone had jumped down off something or furniture had fallen. I thought Wayne must have been up there.’

He wasn’t. Terri found Wayne downstairs.

‘Did you hear that noise?’ she asked.

‘Yeah,’ Wayne replied. ‘I thought you must have knocked something over.’

Wayne recalled the thud: ‘I was in the study and heard the noise too. I didn’t know what it was, but it was loud and quite noticeable, and it happened as soon as [the ghost whisperer] came in.’

Terri and the middle-aged woman, who she described as ‘earthy’, went to investigate.

‘We went upstairs to see if anything had fallen over. It sounded like a shelf or something had crashed, but nothing was out of place.’

The ghost whisperer smiled and said, ‘It was the presence.

It sensed me as soon as I entered the house. But don’t worry, it happens all the time.’ Terri shuddered.

‘It was super weird, and that is the moment I started to believe there might be something real to all of this,’ she said.

The ghost whisperer asked for more details, but Terri gave little away.

‘I didn’t tell her what was happening or where,’ Terri said. ‘I just told her something unusual was happening in the house.’

‘There certainly is,’ the ghost whisperer replied.

And with that, the ghost whisperer got to work.

‘She did what was called a “cleansing’’,’ Terri said. ‘She went around burning sage and beat a little drum. Whether you believe in that sort of thing or not, I don’t know … I didn’t until this all happened.’

Mitchell with his parents Wayne and Terri Source: Instagram

The cleansing took about an hour. The medium then invited both Terri and Wayne to take a seat.

‘I was sort of keen to see what the ghost whisperer was going to say,’ Wayne recalled.

While any rugby league fan would immediately recognise Wayne Pearce, the ghost whisperer did not. She was more interested in sage than sport.

‘We sat down and had a cup of tea,’ Terri said. ‘She began by telling us that there was a presence in the house and then went on to tell us that she had found a presence upstairs.’

The ‘presence’ was indeed upstairs. Educated guess? That’s where the noise had come from, after all.

‘She then went on to say that the presence was a young boy,’ Terri said. ‘A very active and playful spirit that had not crossed over.’

Wayne raised an eyebrow. Maybe Terri told her that the ghost was a boy?

She hadn’t.

‘He seems to have a big presence in your boy’s room,’ the ghost whisperer continued. ‘That is where he spends most of his time. He also hangs around the hallway and goes into the girl’s room next door.’

Terri shook her head in disbelief. This couldn’t all be a coincidence. Could it?

‘Now don’t be frightened, because this is not unusual, but I believe the ghost has attached itself to the boy,’ she said. ‘He is hanging off his back all the time. He is always on his back, jumping around. He is not an evil spirit. I would describe him as playful, and he is obviously attracted to the boy because he considers him a friend and likes his company.’

Wayne turned to Terri and said, ‘Wow.’

‘He then shook his head in disbelief,’ Terri said. ‘Because at that time, Mitchell was playing first grade, and he had a recurring injury to his shoulder that he couldn’t shake. He had been complaining of it for ages, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. They told him it was just a twinge and to put up with it.’

The ghost whisperer continued.

‘But the good news is he has now crossed over,’ she said. ‘He is gone, and he will not come back.’

When Mitchell burst through the door later that night, smile on his dial, shoulder suddenly fine, Wayne was convinced that there really had been something supernatural in the house.

‘So yes, that was quite interesting about the back injury,’ Wayne said. ‘It’s a pretty uncanny coincidence if it’s just a coincidence.’

Terri agreed.

‘That’s the freaky part of the story,’ Terri said. ‘That Mitch’s injury suddenly cleared at the same time we were told a ghost had been removed from his back.’

Mitchell went on to win an NRL Premiership with the Roosters.

He later went on to join the Newcastle Knights. Picture: AAP Image/Darren Pateman

Mitchell then told his parents about the odd events he had experienced but kept to himself after he learned that a medium had just cleansed the house.

‘I’d noticed some strange things,’ Mitchell said. ‘It had been going on for a while. I’m not sure if I believed it, but there was no doubt that something was not quite right in that house.

It was just like you felt like you were being watched. There would be breezes when windows weren’t open, noises you couldn’t explain. I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to sound like a nutter.’

There was another part of the story that helped turn both Terri and Wayne into believers.

‘She said the boy used to also play on the stairs. He liked to jump up and down a section of the stairs that just happened to be where Wayne kept on tripping.’

Now here comes the kicker. Or, to be accurate, kickers. Wayne stopped tripping over.

‘No, I didn’t trip over after she cleansed the house,’ he said.

‘Weird, right?’

You bet.

Tatum stopped seeing the ghost.

‘Without a word of a lie, Tatum did not see the presence again after that day,’ Terri said. ‘I know how crazy it sounds, but that’s the truth.’

And Mitchell went on to play over three hundred NRL games.

‘I honestly believe that there was a ghost in that house, and ever since that episode, I have believed in the supernatural,’ he said.

This is an edited extract from Australian Ghost Stories by James Phelps published on October 2 (HarperCollins Australia $34.99)
https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9781460764152/australian-ghost-stories/

Originally published as Mitchell Pearce’s family home haunted by ghost