In Melbourne, a walking tour of haunted buildings

I’ve just photographed a ghost. A disembodied face, grey and pixelated in the darkness of the night. It looks like a boy, no older than 14; submissive, long nose, angular jaw, eyes downcast. I won’t know he’s here until I review my photos later, pinching the screen over an indiscernible smudge of light to reveal an ethereal, impish figure. I’m glad he’s keeping his hands to himself.

Cell 17 at the Old Melbourne Gaol is notorious for paranormal happenings: women having their hair stroked, men thrown from the doorway, cameras seizing up and a guide dog refusing to enter. “Weird stuff happens in that cell,” says in-house guide Trevor Poultney, as he leads a group of wannabe ghost hunters through the jail – some skeptics, others ardent believers, many just slightly terrified.

Though I’m in the agnostic category, what I’m about to see and hear is hard to refute. Next year marks nine decades since the Old Melbourne Gaol, a mid-19th century bluestone building on central Melbourne’s northern fringe, was decommissioned. Once home to some of the city’s most dangerous criminals, the jail was also a place of reckoning; 133 people were hanged here including its most infamous inmate, bushranger Ned Kelly. It’s been a lifetime since the 93 cells have been occupied but, speaking to the staff here, I sense that some prisoners never left.

“In all the years I’ve worked here, I’ve never known a site supervisor who hasn’t had a weird experience when they’ve been in here by themselves,” says Poultney, a master storyteller and creator of the night ghost tour. “Most of them report [being] followed by heavy footsteps. Other people have heard chains clanking, keys rattling, doors slamming.” It’s an eerie, grim place with six rows of cells divided across three levels, stone walls, steel doors, bolted locks, a hangman’s noose and barely a smidgen of light.

Melbourne has had a particularly scandalous history with convicts, gold rush-related crimes, opium dens, gang wars and infamous characters such as murderer Frederick Deeming, who many believe to be Jack the Ripper

Poultney leads us across the flagstone floor where, he says, a site supervisor was kicked in the calf by someone who wasn’t there. Hours later, the jail erupted in a cacophony of shrieking voices and rattling locks. She quit three days later. Then there’s the creepy case of the footsteps: someone running, a rush of air and wet footprints puddled on the floor. Poultney even has a photograph to prove it.

He tells us stories of a stocky man in a waistcoat and broad-brimmed hat seen leaning over the balustrade by the gallows, and of a woman and young girl in 19th-century dress known to loiter on the top-floor gangway. It all sounds a bit fanciful, but Poultney produces photos, provided by visitors, with haunting similarities. He’s an affable, earnest kind of bloke and I’m enthralled. And a little bit scared.

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ANY SUPERNATURAL SLEUTH IS RIGHT AT HOME IN MELBOURNE. For while the Victorian capital might be one of the world’s most livable cities, it’s also a haven for the non-living. Along the cobbled streets and breezy corridors of its heritage buildings, there are spirits lurking. Just ask Lantern Ghost Tours founder Jacqueline Travaglia, who has been running tours in greater Melbourne for nine years and has since expanded to Sydney, Adelaide, the Gold Coast and London. “Melbourne has had a particularly scandalous history with convicts, gold rush-related crimes, opium dens, gang wars and infamous characters such as murderer Frederick Deeming, who many believe to be Jack the Ripper,” says Travaglia, a certified paranormal investigator. “I also run tours in London and find Melbourne to definitely be on par in terms of hauntings.”

When I join Lantern’s Old Melbourne Ghost Tour, it’s a cold wintry night and about 20 of us huddle outside the Melbourne Visitor Centre at Federation Square, opposite the iconic Flinders Street Station. We’re joined by guide Chloe Towan, a young, spirited woman, who tells us about “George”, a bald fisherman who was allegedly murdered in the Yarra River and can still be seen on Platform 10, dressed in overalls and clutching a fishing pole and bucket. We learn about the haunted painting in the Young & Jackson pub opposite the station, of the grisly misdeeds of the English-born Deeming – regarded by some as Australia’s first serial killer – and about murderers and body snatchers furnishing doctors’ dissection rooms with corpses in the name of medical science.

In Pink Alley, the atmosphere turns somber with the macabre tale of 12-year-old murdered school girl Alma Tirtschke, whose body was dumped near here in 1921. A light flickers and a rumble echoes through the deserted laneway as an air-conditioning pipe coughs into action. Towan produces two dowsing rods, small L-shaped metal sticks used for communicating with spirits. I brace myself to talk to the dead. Holding the short ends of the rods loosely in my closed palms, I ask Alma if she misses her family. The right-hand rod sweeps swiftly outwards. That’s a definitive no. The experience leaves my skin prickly. Women, mothers in particular, report strange sensations here. “I always feel incredibly light-headed when we come down here,” Towan says, adding that two women have fainted in the alley during tours.

There was a period of two weeks where I kept hearing my name spoken by a woman, but I’d turn around and nobody would be in the room

Light relief comes under the ornate domes and heritage verandas of the Princess Theatre, where we’re introduced to Frederick Baker (also known by his stage name, Frederick Federici), Melbourne’s most celebrated friendly ghost. In 1888, the Italian-born British opera singer was performing his final scene as the devil in the production Faust when he suffered a heart attack while descending through a stage trapdoor and died. But death didn’t stop Federici immediately appearing alongside the rest of the cast for the show’s final curtain call. More than a century later, his ghost, dressed in full evening wear, can still be seen in the dress circle, and for decades, the Princess reserved a seat for the handsome baritone on opening nights.

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THE NIGHT CASTS A FOREBODING FILTER OVER OLD POCKETS OF THE CITY. Shadows slither up walls, deserted cobblestones hitherto alive with the clatter of horse-drawn carriages fall silent, and graffitied laneways – vibrant and bewitching during the day – exude a sinister edge. It’s Saturday night and I’m on another ghost tour – the Haunted Melbourne Ghost Tour – this time with Drew Sinton, owner of the Haunted Bookshop. Sinton, a peculiar fellow dressed in a long black clerical coat and hat, provides a historical glimpse of Melbourne through a spiritualist’s lens.

We visit the Mitre Tavern, a laneway pub housed in one of Melbourne’s oldest buildings, which dates back to 1837. It was here that Connie Waugh, the mistress of Sir Rupert Clarke – the son of an Australian baronet – is said to have hanged herself. Staff have reported seeing an orb of light and a figure in a long flowing dress and hearing a woman singing. “There was a period of two weeks where I kept hearing my name spoken by a woman, but I’d turn around and nobody would be in the room,” bistro manager Amanda Waldon later tells me. “I was getting a bit scared to be honest, I was like, where is this coming from?”

An hour shy of midnight, we traipse over the hill of Flagstaff Gardens, the city’s oldest park and the highest point in old Melbourne town, which also happens to be a popular place for sun worshippers during the summer. However, it’s frigid and spitting rain when we stop on a desolate stretch of asphalt that, at this hour, is unrecognizable as the Queen Victoria Market. Few realize this popular tourist attraction, which celebrates its 140th anniversary this year, was built over the site of Melbourne’s first official cemetery. Some 10,000 bodies were interred here between 1837 and 1854 and 9,000 of them remain, just 30 centimeters below the asphalt in some cases, according to Sinton.

“You can actually see the camber of the graves,” he says, pointing to the subtle rise and dip of the ground beneath our feet. Behind rows of stalls selling fruit, vegetables and trinkets during daylight hours, the old cemetery wall still stands – a boundary that segregated the noble dead from the corpses of the “undesirables”. Among the outcasts are the bodies of the first five felons executed in Melbourne. Legend has it that at unsociable hours, their restless souls can be seen wandering under the cavernous arches of the deserted marketplace.

My mind, too, is restless as I lie in bed, thoughts haunted by stories of Melbourne’s spectral underbelly. The morning after my Old Melbourne Gaol tour, I email Poultney the ghoulish photo I took in Cell 17. “Very interesting,” he responds. “I think it looks a little like an evil gnome.” Just one of Melbourne’s garden-variety ghosts coming out to play.