With little known about her life, the focus of this site is the untimely death of Elizabeth Gold in the gold-mining town of Coolgardie, Western Australia. The little that I do know about that life is based solely on newspaper reports written after her murder and tales in the years since, of her ghost...
For a number of years Elizabeth had been married to Captain Charles de Garburgh Gold. She was his second wife and though there is no record of the Gold's having a child together, two adult step-children lived in New Zealand. Captain Gold died in Coolgardie in May, 1897, at the age of fifty-seven. Prior to Captain Gold's death, Kenneth Snodgrass had boarded with the Gold's and, on the Captain's death, Kenneth Snodgrass undertook the funeral arrangements and also managed the meagre estate.
A short while after her husband's death, Elizabeth took on the role as housekeeper at Kenneth Snodgrass's Bungalow Dining Rooms. A month later, Mrs Snodgrass and her seven children arrived in Coolgardie. The Bungalow Dining Rooms failed after only eight weeks.
Five months before her death, in an effort to support herself, Elizabeth was engaged as a probationer nurse at Coolgardie Government Hospital. Elizabeth worked with and shared her tent (or camp) with Janet Snodgrass, the daughter of Kenneth. The matron, Rosa Snodgrass, was Kenneth's cousin.
On the last day of autumn, May 31, 1898, the weather was unseasonably humid and oppressive, but the off-duty nurses were looking forward to the Cinderella Ball at the Mechanic's Institute that evening. Elizabeth was one of the nurses preparing for the Ball when Kenneth Snodgrass, armed with a revolver, called at the nurse's camp.
By half-past seven Elizabeth, aged thirty-two, was dead.