Picnic at Hanging Rock is a spooky mystery-without-a-solution story that I found fascinating and evocative in the Peter Weir film version. But I, like many, crave closure on such things. So I provide it here for this Halloween.

I call this “a solution” because plenty of people have put forth their own solutions, including the original author, and this isn’t the author’s solution. Joan Lindsay’s original ending to the 1967 novel was that… (highlight the line below to reveal the spoiler).

The girls encountered a hole in space/time and turned into lizards.

The publisher said, “Let’s just leave that final chapter out.” And so they did, and the book and the film were better for it.

However, if you like mysteries and you know anything about disappearances in the wilderness, better solutions may well occur to you. And here is mine.

The Picnic

(via Wikipedia) On Valentine’s Day 1900, nineteen students from Appleyard College, a girls’ private school in Victoria, Australia, embark on a picnic to Hanging Rock led by teachers Miss Greta McCraw and Mademoiselle de Poitiers.

At Hanging Rock, the students settle down to their picnic; the teachers worry about the time, as the only two available watches have both stopped at exactly 12 noon. Miranda, Marion, Irma, and Edith ask permission to explore the area. As they head to the Rock, they are observed by a young Englishman, Michael Fitzhubert, and his Australian coachman, Albert Crundall. The girls begin climbing and, under a strange influence, fall asleep. When they awaken, complaining of not feeling well, Miranda, Marion and Irma proceed in a trance into a crevice. Edith, distressed, watches them go before screaming and fleeing back down alone.

The Aftermath

Mlle de Poitiers, Edith, and the remaining 15 students return to Appleyard College hours later than expected, having not found Miranda, Marion or Irma, and reporting that Miss McCraw has also gone missing. The police undertake their own search the next day without success. Edith provides a disjointed account in which she recalls seeing a strange red cloud and Miss McCraw running towards the Rock without her skirt.

After having nightmares about the girls’ disappearances, Michael returns to search for them, with Albert’s assistance. He stays overnight at the Rock and the next day discovers Irma unconscious in a crevice, barefoot and without corset or stockings. Michael staggers out and collapses. Alarmed by his overnight absence, Albert returns with the police and finds Michael unconscious. As he is carried to the carriage, Michael passes Albert a torn scrap of Irma’s dress. Albert goes back to the rock and locates Irma. She has no memory of what happened.

My Solution

Miranda, Marion, Irma, Edith, and Miss McCraw became sick from eating a Valentine dessert spoiled by the heat–something not shared with the other students. They experienced vomiting and diarrhea, which Edith left out of her story. Delirious from the illness and heat, and now suffering from dehydration, they got lost and decided to look for a watering hole. Imagining they could not only drink but swim in the imagined watering hole, they disrobed. (This is fairly common among people in an altered state who get lost in the wilderness.) Edith left this out of her story as well (to the degree that she remembered it) for the sake of propriety.

Deciding to get dressed again, Edith became separated from the others and only saw them from a distance as they discovered a crevice in the rocks. Miss McCraw crawled into the crevice head-first in hopes of finding a pool of water, but she fell down the steep hole and broke her neck. Still alive, she called for help, and the girls descended as well, suffering only minor scrapes and bruises.

But now the girls were trapped in a tiny hole of a cave. They couldn’t help Miss McCraw, who soon died, and over the next couple of days Miranda and Marion died of thirst. Irma—who had eaten less of the spoiled dessert and drunk more of the punch they’d brought—at last managed to claw her way out by propping up the bodies of the other girls.

Outside, Irma found her clothes, redressed haphazardly, and stumbled across a canteen of water left behind by searchers. Over the next couple of days, she returned to the crevice in hopes of rescuing the others, not grasping in her delirious state that they were long dead.

Eventually, Michael found Irma at night but (in her vulnerable state) scared her away and fell into the crevice himself. He was injured and barely escaped by similarly crawling over the bodies of the girls, including Miranda, with whom he was infatuated; this left him traumatized. Albert then found Irma in a state of shock and amnesia while he searched for Michael.

Altho Edith’s memory was more complete than Irma’s, neither remembered the events well due to shock, thirst, and heat exhaustion and left out some useful details due to Victorian propriety. Michael only stumbled upon the crevice in the dark and wasn’t of any help. But after several months, Irma was able to recall enough details about the crevice that searchers found it and discovered the remains of the lost young ladies of Appleyard College.