By day Melbourne is a city renowned for its arts and culture, but when the sun goes down another kind of culture emerges. A city bursting with ornate and gothic theatres, derelict prisons and creaking old mansions – Melbourne offers a wealth of popular ‘haunts’ for those forever caught between here and the afterlife.

Melbourne can claim for its own no shortage of ghostly anecdotes and ‘paranormal’ occurrences. Whether or not the stories have any factual basis, the incorporation of figures who are prone to suddenly and mysteriously reappear from the pages of the history books illuminates the city’s colonial past in a spectral glow. Such tendencies arouse speculation in these narratives, injecting a Romantic lustre into a past already rich with gold-rush fuelled opulence and hedonistic raffishness.

While any discussion of paranormal activity will tend to attract extreme points of view, ghost stories are a unique and powerful means of understanding history: we can learn much of our forebears – their customs, habits and livelihoods – by imaging them wandering our hallways at night. Partly because of this personal and evocative connection with history, ghost stories have enchanted young and old for generations. For instance, rumours of the ghost of John Batman persistently dogging the site of a house once owned by John Pascoe Falkner in Smith Street, Collingwood, keep alive one of Melbourne’s greatest intrigues – who founded Melbourne, Batman or Falkner?

The Romanticism of ghost stories provides for some an artistic or intellectual inspiration, channelling deeper sensations by suggesting a nostalgia and yearning for the infinite, in addition to speaking of profound feelings, sensations and the unconscious mind or soul. The idea of an ‘afterlife’ is irresistibly attractive and engaging; it suggests that immortality is within our grasp, numbing the incomprehensibility of death.

The sense of wonder and fascination aroused by speculating on the possibility of life after death corresponds with the deep spiritual yearning that punctuates studies of the ‘sublime’. ‘Ghosts’ or apparitions fall easily into the category, coined by Romantic philosopher Immanuel Kant, of the ‘mathematical’ sublime which, like a star-filled night sky, gives us “the impression that what we see goes far beyond our sensibilities and we are thus induced to imagine more than we see”.

We are led to this because our reason (the faculty that leads us to conceive ideas such as God, the world, or freedom, which our intellect cannot demonstrate) induces us to postulate an infinity that is not only beyond the grasp of our senses but also beyond the reach of our imagination, which cannot manage to harness it to a single intuition.

- Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 1790

Interest in the paranormal is indicative of a yearning that extends far beyond mere speculation on the existence of ghosts. As artists have shown, an interest in the ephemeral and the ethereal is intimately connected with spirituality, with the search for ‘home’, with sanctified space. It is about finding a deeper meaning to life – a poetry in the human condition – beyond the concrete physicality of the everyday, and achieving a connection with the wider cosmos.

Some artists, such as Melbourne filmmaker Donna McRae, are explicit in their depiction of ghosts. In her short film She Wants to Play, based on an actual sighting in Hawthorn in the 1960s, McRae humorously portrays one boy’s encounter with a ghostly apparition. For most artists, however, depictions of the spirit world are much more subtle, elusive, and atmospheric. Iris Fischer’s evocative photographs of fog-shrouded trees speak of transience; of the ephemerality of our existence, and no more than allude to an ethereal presence in her pastoral portraits.

For those actively engaged in the business of paranormal investigation, there is little room for atmospherics and allusion. Ghost hunting today is an exacting science, boasting a wealth of gadgets and instruments. While ouija boards and divining rods still play a part, they are more than likely to be accompanied by thermographs and scientific instruments for measuring atmospheric pressure, vibration, and magnetic and electrical fields. Various ‘ghost-hunting’ organisations actively seek to document the existence of ghosts, and it seems there is no shortage of haunted property owners extending invitations to these modern-day ‘ghostbusters’.

Reasons for the existence of ghosts, if they do exist, are mixed and varied. Some say it is because of something traumatic happening in the life of the person, which causes their spirit to ‘linger’ after death. This might include the means of their departure, such as a gruesome murder or simply an unexpected and untimely demise. Similarly, some believe that ghosts occur when the spirit of a deceased person has ‘unfinished business’. Drew Sinton from Melbourne’s ‘Haunted Bookshop’ says that “sometimes they stay because they feel at home in a certain place”. Ghosts can appear at any time of the day or night. “I have had hard-nosed atheists or sceptics who have had ghostly experiences”, says Drew, “and it’s completely changed their opinion”.

But not everybody is convinced. The Australian Skeptics Association once offered $100,000 to anyone who could prove a ghost existed. The prize was never awarded. Former Victorian president of the Association Steve Colebrook says that while a lack of evidence suggests that ghosts don’t exist, most claims of ghost sightings are genuine on behalf of the observer. He says that many people who believe they have seen a ghost are trying to maintain the spirit of a loved one. Alternatively, someone who sees a ghost may not understand what they have experienced, and jump to an unlikely conclusion when a rational explanation is not readily available.

However, for every sceptic in Melbourne, there abounds no shortage of those professing their belief in ghosts. While some businesses prefer not to discuss their ethereal guests for fear of frightening more tangible customers (particularly respectable hotels with long-standing histories), for others a ghostly resident can be good for business. It is all part of maintaining a healthy and robust urban mythology.

Spooks reveals an extraordinary array of stories, from an extraordinary range of people. While some offer them freely, others do so more cautiously, for fear of being doubted, or worse, ridiculed. These are people who do not otherwise have any association with the occult, or with anything that might be construed as being ‘mystic’.

Take for instance ‘Jay’, a Melbourne hairdresser – by all accounts an honest and level-headed person – who swears that one night in his single fronted terrace house on Tanner Street, Richmond, he encountered a ghost. Relaxing after work, Jay looked up to see a woman in period dress standing in his corridor, her eyes fixed on him. Jay sensed strongly this woman’s hostility toward him, as though he were an intruder. Jay was transfixed by this apparition – no less so because her form finished at the knees. After no more than ten seconds – she mysteriously vanished. Jay soon moved out of Tanner Street, and it would be years before he told a soul of his story.

What is it that so enchants us about ghost stories? Is it that it arouses in us the possibility of life after death – a kind of ticket to immortality? Perhaps claiming to have seen a ghost invests divine properties in the claimant – but this is often not the case, as with Jay the hairdresser. Ghosts visit ordinary people with ordinary lives, who never expected or wanted to become the instrument of earthly commune from an otherworldly spirit.

What sets ghost stories apart, and has made them relevant and relished by generations, is their capacity to pass on urban legend by capturing the imagination. Just as Melbourne’s original inhabitants – the Kulin people – employed the ‘dreamtime’ as a means of keeping their stories alive, so too do we indulge in our ghost stories. Because it is through the fantastical and extraordinary that our histories become illuminated by our own hopes and dreams. They become something aspirational to us: a way of making our past relevant to us now, and a sacred and intimate means of transferring knowledge from old to young. Whether or not they have any truthful basis, the mythic folklore surrounding ghost stories is very real, and is part of the fabric of the city as much as the buildings and street scapes themselves.
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Eerie even by day, the Old Melbourne Gaol in the dead of night is unquestionably the spookiest building in Melbourne. With its gruesome history of suffering and death, with some 136 prisoners executed by hanging in its time as an active prison, the Gaol is the one place you would expect to be haunted.

Tour guide Bob Foulkes has difficulty explaining the mysterious ‘cold sensation’ on the back of his head, when he stands under the trap door where people were hanged – the very location where 136 people died – most in excruciating pain. “There are no open doorways near there,” he says, referring to the unexplained chill. But, as Melbourne writer Martyn Pedler reminds us in his ‘Secret Histories of Melbourne’, “…someone’s heart has stopped over every piece of earth in this city”.

I find it helpful to imagine the white markings used to outline the position of a dead body. Abstract, angular shapes, flattened and final. Then imagine if they never cleaned them away. They’d overlap. In fact, Melbourne would be carpeted white, kept in winter, all year round, with death under our feet.

We live with this ‘death’ under our feet every day. Properties known to be haunted regularly come onto the market. President of the Real Estate Institute of Victoria, Adrian Jones, says that the issue of a property’s past is “highly subjective’, noting that “The reality is that a fair proportion of Melbourne houses have had somebody die in them over the past 120 or 130 years, if they’re that old. At what point do you draw the line?”

It only takes one sighting, one sound, based on nothing more than the experiences of one person, usually alone in an old building at night, for an urban legend to be born. For some, ghost stories have become a mini-industry, with businesses such as the Princess Theatre using their own poltergeist – English actor Frederick Baker (better known as ‘Federici’) who died on stage in 1888 – to great effect. The possibility of encountering Federici affords a certain authenticity to some productions, such as The Phantom of the Opera.

Melbourne tour guide Bevan Leviston says “There’s a deep seated human need to be scared from time to time”.

It may well be part of our survival instinct. Maybe it was part of the tribal storytelling, that without the bogey man out there, how can we hone the flee or flight response. It could be that psychologically, if we don’t have ghosts, we’d need to invent them anyway.

Drew Sinton knows of about 50 ghosts in the Melbourne CBD alone, with a further 100 in the suburbs, and perhaps 70 more in rural Victoria.

The Old Melbourne Gaol has goodness knows how many ghosts. The [Queen Victoria] Market has about five ghosts. The Flagstaff Gardens has the ghost of a nurse. In Royal Arcade, on the first floor, there’s a woman on a spinning wheel. The National Gallery has a musical sort of ghost. Greater Union [cinema] has the ghost of a cleaner.”

Other buildings said to be haunted include Parliament House, the State Library of Victoria, Tasma Terrace and the Old Mitre Tavern. At Como House in South Yarra, Carolyn Armytage has been seen on numerous occasions by staff and visitors, since she died in 1909. More recently, the ghost of Carolyn’s daughter Ethel, who died in 1872 aged only seven, has been seen in the property’s Morning Room.

One of Melbourne’s best-kept secrets is the ghost of Old Treasury. Former museum curator Helen Stuckey describes him as a ‘gentle ghost, he was very kind to women, and a nice presence to have in the building’. Often alone in the building at night, Helen would have a sense of him passing her door, and the lift would often arrive at her level before she had pressed the button.

Former catering official Eric Lely had a very different experience of the ghost, saying that he had run in terror from the building one night after seeing “strange shadows” following him.

It was around 9 o’clock at night; I was there alone doing some set-ups on the second level on the Parliament House side of the building. It was winter and dark outside. Suddenly, in the corner of my eye, I saw something dark pass by the door. I thought there must be someone there so I went out in to the corridor but it was empty. I went back to work and two minutes later the same thing appeared but going the other way.

I felt quite scared and decided to leave. I ran down the stairs to the basement and switched off all the lights. I did not take the lift because I felt nervous. On my way down I saw a shadow in the stairwell, like someone leaning on the balustrade overlooking me. I can tell you, it definitely made me run faster. the whole time, from the second level to the exit, I felt someone behind me, as though someone was looking over my shoulder.

Eric believes the ghost is likely that of live-in caretaker John Maynard. John, his wife Emma and their eight children occupied a small residence in the building’s basement, from 1916, until John’s death in 1928. Some say John continues to look over the building, and watches over the last person to leave each night.

Paranormal Investigator Darren Done has examined hours of video footage and digital images taken during his overnight vigils at the Old Melbourne Gaol, in an attempt to discover whether it really is haunted. While floating, phosphorescent orbs are often seen, capturing actual concrete documentation has so far proven elusive.

Most regular staff at the Gaol have never experienced anything ‘out of the ordinary’. Night tour actor Hannes Berger over two years spent at least two nights a week at the Gaol, yet says “Personally, I haven’t seen anything supernatural. (But) other people have said they have”. Similarly, former curator Diane Gardiner admits “I have to say the Old Melbourne Gaol is not haunted, it is an incredibly 'sad' place. You cannot have so much death and pathetic people in one place without an atmosphere”.

Text © City Museum 2007

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