PRESS ROOM

August 24, 2003, The Rocks Ghost Tours - 'On the Trail'

'On the Trail' appears every Sunday in the travel section of The Sunday Telegraph. It covers unusual/quirky and paranormal-related travel written by Australian cryptonaturalist Tim the Yowie Man timtheyowieman@bigpond.com.

Ghouls and ghostly tales

Clutching a flickering lantern, we stumble apprehensively down a dark and dingy laneway. Suddenly, a gust of wind extinguishes my light. A shiver runs up my spine and the hairs on my neck stand firmly at attention.

A voice whispers, ‘it was in this very alleyway that several sailors were hacked to death.’

They are the not-so reassuring words of Brian Harrison, our guide on a tour that explores tales of murder, hangings and hauntings in the birthplace of modern-day Australia – Sydney’s The Rocks precinct.

Only minutes earlier we had set off, armed with freshly lit lanterns and an open mind, from Cadman’s Cottage, the site of a gruesome axe murder back in 1844.

Apparently the body pieces were stuffed into suitcases and dragged down to the edge of the harbour where they were dumped into the water.

What makes this tour stand out from many other ghost tours are Brian’s personal experiences, and being a fifth-generation Rocks resident, he has no shortage of those.

One of the first stops is Sydney’s old morgue, which Brian chillingly recalls he discovered as a child when he climbed atop an adjacent building and peered in to room to see a mass of human corpses.

Carrying a set of keys a prison warder would be proud of, Brian leads us behind locked doors into a secret world of nooks, crannies and deserted laneways, each, it seems, home to at least one pesky poltergeist or horrific haunting.

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