World War II tunnels or bunkers are rumoured to exist at the Mount Evelyn Recreation Camp or the Recreation Reserve. The Australian Army requisitioned the Camp in June 1942. American servicemen as well as Australians were stationed there. Locals remembered the soldiers marching along York Road and doing training exercises in the bush.

Noel Kerr recalled the 'Yanks camped on Do Drop In area' (now York on Lilydale) about 1944-45. He says they marched up one day, put guards at each end of Inverness Road, took over the woodcutters' timber mill next door to his grandparents' house, and set up targets. Over a few years Noel dug quite a few flat lead bullets out of the clay banks.

Rin Vanderwerth and a friend found a bomb in the Recreation Reserve area, identified by Army bomb disposal experts as an 'altitude bomb', and live!

Rumours abound that the supposed tunnels contained wartime relics – vehicles, planes, weapons, ammunition, explosives or dangerous chemicals. Military excavator Mark Rawson investigated the edges of the oval at the Reserve in 2002 and 2009, with inconclusive results.

'Tunnel' stories have a recurring theme of two boys finding – what? The tunnel entrance, revealed by a natural spring? Three tunnels with doors like the doors on shipping containers? The only person we know of who claimed to have seen the tunnels with his own eyes retracted his claim when we suggested he should inform the Army and the Police!

But the stories just won't go away.

Exploratory drilling beside the oval in 2009. Photos Kevin Phillips.