Barney Duffy's Curse

Barney Duffy was a giant of a man. He towered over the two young soldiers, uttering a terrible curse: 'Take me or report me, ye red coated, lily livered lice! Aye! and then Ill hang but hear me curse on ye! So surely as ye do this, before me corpse has hung a week on King's Town gallows, ye'll meet a violent death, the pair of ye"
Duffy, an Irishman, had been imprisoned by the British on Norfolk Island, in the Pacific Ocean, a territory of Australia, 1450km North East of Sydney. The Island is one of the most beautiful in the world, but it's past is a long tale of blood.
Scores of its present residents claim they have seen ghosts - ghosts of the descendants of the Bounty mutineers, who outgrew tiny Pitcairn Island and moved to Norfolk in the 19th Century, and ghosts of rebellious Irish convicts hanged there after the Brithish authorities shipped them from Botany Bay.
The convict's life was a continuous nightmare. Men got 50 lashes for possessing tobacco or singing. They ate with their fingers and drank water from buckets. Those sentenced to hang thanked God for deliverance, while the remainder prayed not for freedom but for death.
Barney Duffy escped from this hell and hid in a hollow pine in the thick rainforest. He emerged at night to raid the vegetable gardens of the settlement. His beard and hair were long and matted and he had just a few rags to cover himself when the two soldiers, who were out fishing discovered him.
They shrugged off his curse and pushed him back to the settlement with their muskets. Duffy was hanged, and two days later the soldiers went to fish at the same spot near the hollow pine.
Shortly after, a foot partol found their bodies, battered and broken, drifting in the tide nearby.
Some experets find no evidence of the story, but to this day Norfolk Island maps show Barney Duffy Gully wehre two soldiers died of an unknown cause.

Taken from Readers Digest Strange Stories- Amazing Facts