Sydney Observatory, by night
I try to make it a point to go on any ghost tour I can find where-ever I am. That said, I’ve only actually seen two outside of my own hometown (which doesn’t count, for obvious reasons), not because they aren’t offered, they’re offered in nearly every port we stop in, but because we usually aren’t in town at night and they don’t exactly run during the daytime. That’s why I missed the one at Port Arthur Penitentiary during the World Cruise, we hoisted anchor mid-afternoon. That said, I’m somewhat grateful I wasn’t around for that one…Port Arthur never struck me as precisely friendly.
Anyway, based on my limited experience, and on what others have told me, ghost tours can run the gamut from “this is just a history tour with one sentence about a ghost thrown in” (aka, the tour I took when I lived in the UK), to “there might be real ghosts here, but you’re going to be too busy jumping at the planted actors we have in the crowd to notice”. Last night’s was…somewhere near the middle…
That said, it was definitely interesting.
We met our black-cloaked, black-clad, lantern carrying guide at Cadman’s Cottage: The original home of the first coxswain in Sydney and one of the oldest buildings in the area. It was originally on the waterfront itself, fronted by a small beach, but the harbor has since been pushed back and Circle Quay built on the reclaimed land, and now the cottage stands well back from the waterline.
I had been in there earlier and while I can’t attest to whether or not the place is haunted, I can say it has a very odd feel to it, I walked in and out quite quickly, and not just because I was looking for something. It was then that it became apparent that this was the style of tour that used props – actual props, not just the skull-topped cane (which becomes a hangman’s noose, which becomes a pointer, which becomes a shotgun etc etc) that we use in our versions. The guide carried a black leather Gladstone bag, which was a prop in and of itself, and each time she stopped to tell a story, she used the campfire trick of holding a flashlight under her chin…
Thankfully the obvious theatrics didn’t distract from the actual stories. Most cities have a dark underside lurking beneath the polished exterior they present to the tourists and Sydney as it turns out is no different. The Rocks used to be a very dangerous place (it’s still not somewhere I’d care to wander alone at night), where sailors were frequently beaten to death with saps, or with whatever was handy, smugglers abounded in tunnels beneath the streets and ladies of the night plied their trade both inside the “boarding houses” and on the street corners. Neighborhood like that is bound to have some unearthly occupants. Most of them sailors, some haunting the old bordellos, some just lingering where they were killed. There are even some victims of the plague that still linger around the area of the Big Dig (a giant excavation site that now has a building built over top of it in such a way that it actually hasn’t’ been disturbed and is still open to the public).
There were only two areas that got to me (and one where I was compelled to ask “did that well originally go a lot deeper? Because I think someone fell in there once…” out of the blue, which may or may not have startled the guide, I couldn’t tell).
One was a little dark alcove just off a side street. It was gated off, and it didn’t feel unsafe, it was just unsettling. Long before the guide requested that we turn our flashlights off I was already on edge. As it turned out, that area used to be part of the original hospital. Not a hospital in the sense that we would think of one, but an outdoor encampment style hospital, before the days of anesthetic (but not before amputation…), when if one of the men in your tent died, you didn’t tell anyone so that you could continue to get his food ration…
And the other was the hill. Observation Hill (or something along those lines) they call it now. But the second I set foot on it I was reminded of Pioneer Square back home, it only looks like a park. I hadn’t read up on the area in advance, but you didn’t need a lot of background information to put two and two together in a place like that. The trees are huge, and their lower branches run nearly horizontal to the ground, but well ,well above it. Staring at those trees, silhouetted against the midnight blue of the sky, with giant bats fluttering everywhere around us…I don’t think anyone was surprised by the next thing the guide said
Sometimes I have customers who walk up this hill and start complaining of a severe headache, sometimes even tightness around their throat – which will linger while we stay here, and disappear when we move on…
Hangman’s Hill…it used to be called. Literally, it was a hanging field.
At this point, the words from my own script started echoing through my head, as I’m standing there staring at these tree branches were who knows how many people were killed…
Now, hanging was considered a very humane death…5 minutes tops, bang you’d be gone…
Now, in Victoria, the hangings were carried out by a professional executioner. ‘We’ knew what we were doing. Here? Not so much. Here, you could dodge your own death sentence by becoming an executioner – so you had convicts hanging convicts. Which means you also had the element of convicts’ justice. If they thought you didn’t deserve the punishment, then they would tie the knot properly and the death would be (comparatively) swift, if they thought you did deserve it, they knew how to adjust the knot so that it was calibrated incorrectly…and instead of a swift death, you got a slow, agonizing strangulation…
Hanging, you see, is not a short drop and a sudden stop, it’s complicated, its weight ratios, it’s mathematics, it’s physics – and because it is so logical, it can be controlled fairly precisely…
The trees don’t care of course, they just keep growing, long after the hanging field was shut down and a proper gallows built in the jail. A gallows that, I’m told, could hang 7 people at once….
Like I said…every city…has it’s dark side…
Think of that, next time you walk through what looks like a park…