Private Pages Viewable Publically?

I may not be doing this the most optimum way so pointers taken please?

I have created some pages that I don’t want to be visible on the page menu so I’ve made them private. However, I do want them to be visible via means of a page that has links to them.

This works if one is logged in to the site, but otherwise I get a page cannot be found type error. Apart from creating individual html pages with the info and having the links point to them, is there a way in WP to achieve what I want?