True Crime Ghost

In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.

How could such a dark secret have been kept for so many years? Police Chief Greg Adams was out on patrol. Christmas was coming to Saxonburg, Pennsylvania - a quaint borough of just 1,300 - in three short weeks. The winter air was crisp. Colored lights sparkled on houses. He was only a block and a half from the police department, and this was just an average traffic stop. Until it wasn’t. Despite his many aliases, the true identity of the murderer was quickly found. The killer himself was not.

Absorbing and emotionally gripping, this new series from multi award-winning journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna is a stunning investigation into the untold story of the 1979 Ghost Train Fire at Sydney’s iconic Luna Park. On a winter’s night over 40 years ago a deadly fire tore through the Ghost Train ride at Sydney’s Luna Park in 1979, killing seven people – six of them children. After 42 years, and despite multiple inquiries, no one has ever been held accountable for the blaze.