Black Mountain, QLD: Mysteries, portals, underworld, strange beings, disappearances

Black Mountain, QLD: Mysteries, portals, underworld, strange beings, disappearances…

By Brendan Mckenna

Black Mountain – Cooktown, QLD, Australia.

Stories from inside the mysterious mountain dubbed Queensland’s ‘Bermuda Triangle’

Black Mountain is a little known landmark with a dark and mysterious history, if you believe the legendary stories.
Tucked away in far north Queensland, the mountain is known by traditional indigenous owners as Kalkajaka, the place of the spear, and was the site of bloody battles between warring ancestral clans and Dreamtime spirits.

The landmark is also notoriously dubbed the ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of Queensland for the stories of early explorers, horses and cattle vanishing into the boulders without a trace, never to be seen again.

Located 25 kilometres from Cooktown, the imposing mountain range consists of massive granite boulders which stack precariously on one another.
It’s an important meeting place for the Eastern Kuku Yalanji Aboriginal people and is the source of many Dreamtime stories.
Aboriginal tales describe the mountain as a haunted place, home to various evil spirits and demons lurking within

European colonists became part of the mountain’s folklore when they arrived in the area, according to the Queensland Department of Parks.
‘Stories abound of people, horses and whole mobs of cattle disappearing into the labyrinth of rocks, never to be seen again,’ the website states.
‘Beneath the outer boulders lies a maze of passages and chambers—enticing to explorers of unusual places, or those wishing to hide away from pursuers. In the ink dark interior, sheer drops, pockets of bad air or unexpected encounters with snakes or bats could easily cause panic and injury to intruders entering that eerie underworld.’
The websites advises against visitors from venturing onto the boulder field.

‘We heard a stone crumbling from the rock above us. It sounded quite close and we thought it might be an animal. But it climbed all the way down, we could hear the crunching of the bushes and dried up leaves. It sounded like human steps,

‘We still don’t know what happened that night … but for me something inexplicable is definitely going on there.’

Geologist Gavin Dear lives near the foot of the mountain and doesn’t believe in the myths which he described as ridiculous, having conducted his own tests.
‘It’s very mysterious for sure and it does have a special power, I have no doubt about that, but it’s still just a mountain of boulders,’ he told 9news.com.au
He believed the disappearances have more to do with mishap than mystery.
‘If you try and climb to the top you’ve got about 200 calculated leaps you have to make between boulders,” Mr Dear told the ABC in October.
‘If you have a knee fail or slip, you can tumble down there and you just will not come out. No matter how rational I am, I’m always doing my best not to p*** off the mountain.’

Fear of the unknown often causes us to attribute a sinister nature to structures, formations and occurrences that are beyond our present level of understanding. In the case of Black Mountain, just outside Cooktown, Queensland, its direful notoriety is magnified by its very appearance and configuration, not to mention its fearsome reputation for ‘taking’ many hapless individuals who have dared to venture onto it. Known to Australian Aboriginals (who generally keep a respectful distance from it) as ‘Kalkajaka,’ the mountain is actually a huge mass of black boulders, and underneath it is an extensive maze of caves with corridors and chambers. Sitting on the 15°S Parallel of Latitude, at 145°E Longitude, Black Mountain has a grim history of eerie encounters and unexplained disappearances.

Scattered around the globe are many locations, both man-made and natural, dubbed sacred sites or hallowed grounds. They are considered to be places where an invisible realm overlaps the physical 3-D world. Some of these exude an uplifting sense of spirituality and may be aptly described by the Celtic term, ‘Thin Places.’ Black Mountain, while not presenting such a peaceful atmosphere, does fit the pattern of being an energy vortex, portal or entrance to an underworld.
Over the past century and a half, there have been numerous stories of those who have ventured into the area never to return, often with searchers going in to look for them, who have also vanished. Old local legends speak of demons, monsters and huge reptiles, while modern day alternative researchers claim it is artificially built and sits atop an underground empire populated by an extra- or ultra-terrestrial race, and an interdimensional gateway and time portal.

The 15°S Parallel draws a line around the upper portion of the southern hemisphere that reveals a number of intriguing sites along its path. While the rows of latitude are man-made contrivances, not earth-grids or ley-lines, there is growing speculation that they have a guiding purpose and proportion behind them.

A number of northern hemisphere parallels have been attracting growing attention: The 37°N being called the Paranormal Highway[i]; The 33°N known as the Masonic Line[ii]; The Pyramid Line at 30°N[iii]; The 25°N crossing the Bermuda Triangle & Zone of Silence[iv]; The Time Rivers Line at 19.5°N [v]. While latitude was originally conceived by the ancient Greeks, the Roman scholar Ptolemy was the first to place a grid system on a planetary map in the second century CE (he knew the world was round). This work was lost, then rediscovered and put to valuable use in the fifteenth century. Black Mountain, along with other sites we will look at, sits on that line formed between an angle 15 degrees south the equator and the centre of the world. Is it simply a Pythagorean principle, or cosmic geometry? Right around the globe there are energetic sites, laid out in straight lines, often at great distance apart, that appear to form links in a chain.

These locations raise several points for us to consider:
* There are sites around the world where a high energetic presence can be sensed.* Geographical lines connect these sites as part of an underlying geometry.
* Unexplained occurrences and disappearances take place at these sites.
* They are either made of stone, or have patterns carved into stone, and usually have caves and tunnels running beneath them.
* They may access energy vortexes, dimensional portals or wormhole gateways.
* There may be entities and communities that dwell and travel underground.
* There may be messages encoded into these symbols, waiting for us to join the dots.

As we follow the 15°S Parallel horizontally around the globe, we pass through mysterious and mystical sites in Peru, Bolivia and Brazil in South America, then Angola, Zambia and Madagascar in Africa. We start out from north Queensland, Australia.

What’s beneath Black Mountain?
The Black Trevethan Range is actually a stack of black granite rocks, over three hundred metres high and stretching more than three kilometres long. Some of the larger individual boulders are over six metres in length. Given their black colour by a coating of iron and manganese oxide, the rocks ring with an odd metallic sound when struck, while noises described variously as anything from wailing to music emanate from within the mountain. These could be caused by wind or the contraction of the boulders, but some claim that the mountain is hollow. The limited exploration through entrances into the formation itself, by the very few who have ventured in and returned, reveals a maze of caves, tunnels and chambers below Black Mountain, and those who have survived it found the experience so chilling that they never want to return. Indeed, some have been unable to speak of it at all.

The list of disappearances is legendary, but what is most astonishing is that many of them involve not one lone wanderer, but several people at a time, some on horseback. The first documented case after white settlement in the region was that of a farmer called Grayner in 1877 who, while rounding up stray bullocks, vanished into Black Mountain complete with his horse and a calf. During the ensuing two decades there were two instances of outlaws taking refuge in the mountain and never returning. The first was an escapee known as Sugarfoot Jack who fled there with two of his henchmen, never to be seen again. The second was when a Constable Ryan from Cooktown chased a wanted man to the foot of the mountain. Both disappeared and trackers then followed their trail to the mouth of a cave, finding no further trace of them inside. In yet another later multiple disappearance, a station owner called Harry Owens went missing while looking for stray cattle around Black Mountain. His partner George Hawkins, after alerting police, went out searching for him and also vanished. Two native police trackers went looking for them both but, after following the trail into a cave entrance, only one came back out and he was too shaken to give a clear version of what had taken place. Other accounts of individuals who have gone missing there can be found in Brisbane’s Public Library or on various websites[vi].
European bloggers Ivan and Danny Mackerle claim to have been part of an amateur group who did some tentative exploration inside the caves of Black Mountain in 2009, although their narrative blends myth and hearsay in with their own first-hand experience[vii].

Danny neatly summarises the speculations of ‘mystery buffs’ on his website:
“Kalkajaka is a mountain unlike any other. That’s why mystery aficionados claim it was built by artificial means, and that it is a ruin of an ancient extinct civilization dating back to the dawn of the world. Its recesses are thought to harbour wondrous mysteries; chronicles of sublime priestly wisdom, remains of ancestral kings, and best of all, untold treasures. The way into the heart of the mountain has been guarded by the spirits of the dead, demons, and poisonous snakes by the hundreds. Modern legend has it that this is but one gate to an underground empire, populated by an extra-terrestrial race of ‘reptilians’ and a dero-like group of human slaves, kept under reptilian control with the help of implantation, technosis, and the like.”

In the end, however, they found the formidable aura of Black Mountain simply too daunting and wound up their investigations without any real resolution to the enigma:
“We tried our luck in different spots and soon realized that an intricate underground web of passages and pathways was underpinning the entire surface of the mountain. Thus we were able to descend further down and explore many narrow stray paths, but in the end Black Mountain was able to preserve its mystery. We never did find a way into its legendary heart.”

What’s your theories on Black Mountain?