Craig CalvertA dairy farmer in Australia has seen the devil’s face appear in the bushfire smoke out of regional Victoria, he claims.
Craig Calvert shared a harrowing photo of the ravaging fire taking hold in East Gippsland, but if you look closely to the right hand side of the picture, it looks as though you can see a face emerging from the smoke.
The photo was taken by Calvert’s friend, as the bushfires overwhelmed the area – including his own farm – near Sarsfield, on Monday, December 30.
You can hear Calvert recall the moment he made the shocking discovery here:
Speaking to SunriseLIVE on Friday, January 2, he said:
I’m not really into hokey pokey spooky stuff but there’s a big devil face right in the fire.
Calvert, who is a sixth generation farmer, spent a gruelling 13 hours attempting to defend his property with his dad, where he described being hit on five different occasions, as fireballs jumped across the trees and fires became so fierce it created a ‘white flame’.
He called the moment he saw the photo for the first time, telling reporters ‘you won’t believe it, I don’t believe it’.
Craig CalvertCalvert’s home was the only property in the valley of Dirty Hollow not completely ravaged by flames, thanks to his family’s efforts and last minute rescue from the Victorian County Fire Authority.
While he said he was ‘very glad no one got killed’ in the blaze, sadly others in the greater East Gippsland area weren’t as fortunate.
One person is confirmed to have died, while 28 people are still missing following the fires tearing through East Gippsland on New Year’s Eve.
Mayor of East Gippsland Shire and councillor John White told The Age he’s worried about the people who are still missing from the blaze.
PA ImagesHe said:
Are we going to see them walking up the road towards us? I don’t know.
That’s a real worry, because that’s potentially people’s lives. You can put up another house, you can build new fences but you can’t bring people back.
A new estimate suggests almost half a billion native Australian animals have died in the fires since they began in September.
More than three million hectares of New South Wales have burned in the ongoing crisis, and now it’s believed around 480 million mammals, birds and reptiles have died, either directly or indirectly because of the bushfires.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.