You could fill an entire holiday wandering Tasmania’s lonely outcrops, abandoned rocky island prisons, sandstone gallows and other places of torture and torment. But if you’re short on time, or just after the gold-standard disquieting, you’ll want to head directly to Port Arthur.
photographers ALASTAIR BETT and YIWEN SONG
What if a building remembered things? What if it could speak of those memories, or even show us what had happened within its walls? According to Guy, the Port Arthur ghost tour guide around whom we’re huddled, such things are possible.
Guy describes something called “residual hauntings”, a kind of paranormal film reel associated with a place and experienced as a repetitive glitch from the past. Residuals are the more benign of the two broad categories of ghost – it is the “restless dead” we should be more concerned about, apparently.
Trapped in the space between life and death, Guy says, these entities seek to communicate with the living, in an attempt to right past wrongs. Both types of ghost, Guy confides with honed gravitas, might be joining us over the next 90 minutes.
With his ankle length cloak and flickering lantern, our guide is perfectly attired for this evening’s cool air, as well as his role as suspenseful storyteller. An expanse of up-lit sandstone buildings and ruins tumble across Port Arthur’s green grounds. A cuckoo trills against the black and metronomic wash of dark waves against the nearby seawall. It is a theatrical stage for adventures into the unknown. With more than 2,000 paranormal experiences reported at Port Arthur, it is considered one of the most haunted places in Australia, so we’re hopeful, and equally apprehensive, of witnessing something inexplicable tonight.
So, if ghosts do exist, how exactly do you find one, or do they find you? Guy explains that a good place to look for residual ghosts is around old stone buildings. Stone tape theory, a term coined in the 1974 movie of the same name, posits that certain damp rocks hold memories and events from the past. According to the theory, energy imprints from the geological archives are projected like ghostly picture reels, replayed on loop. The concept itself is far older than the film. If you’ve ever taken a mossy, moonlit walk up a riverbed, or sat in a drizzly churchyard cemetery, you’ll likely be familiar with the stone tape feeling, if not the term.
It could be argued that the notion of rocks holding stories is similar to how historical records of earth’s magnetism are recorded in seafloor basalt or evidence of past plant assemblages are laid down in fossil-rich limestone. OK, it’s not at all similar, and the skeptic in me has her arms squarely folded across her chest, but I’m keeping an open mind.
. . .
I know that whilst death is certain, we know almost nothing for sure about what happens next. There are generally plausible, if not logical, explanations for most things. For example, our complex brains can conjure all manner of events and realities (just ask any police officer taking witness statements or someone waking from a vivid nightmare). I‘m willing to believe that, on occasion, I’ve scared myself into seeing things which probably weren’t there. Our brains are unreliable witnesses. Humans are wired to look for danger and to fill in the gaps where information is missing. Such is our propensity to find potentially threatening faces in our periphery for example, that there is even a word for it: pareidolia. We see faces in tree bark, clouds and in the knots on the underside of pine bunk-beds. There are certainly faces lurking in the corners of my vision this evening, but they look more like furtive wallabies.
When it comes to perceiving ghosts, paranormalists believe that in addition to having a certain kind of rock, having a certain kind of brain is equally important. Psychologists use the term “sensory processing sensitivity” to describe a type of neural wiring with greater than average perception and reactivity to incoming sensory information. Research suggests about 20 per cent of people are born with such sensory processing sensitivity, so there’s likely to be three or four in our group here tonight. Highly sensitive people register and respond more acutely to smells, temperature changes, lights, sounds and their emotional and energetic environment. Whilst this has its obvious challenges, it would presumably also make them ideal spectre-detectors.
Paranormal means “counter to normal”, but since every individual’s sensory experience is different, what constitutes “normal” and “paranormal” is tricky to define. Guy says that if we do encounter something paranormal, it’s unlikely everyone in the group will experience it simultaneously, or in the same way. Such variation would explain why, inside the Parsonage (thought to be the most haunted building in the country), only some people feel something brush against them. One man describes a sudden tightness in his chest, dissipating the moment he leaves. Whether the result of a ghostly communiqué or a nod to the evocative delivery of our guide, I have the sensation of icy ants crawling across my scalp, just as a young woman from interstate hurriedly exits the room. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
Our guide, however, is more than happy to talk about it, relaying how hundreds of others have felt, seen or heard something inexplicable in that room.
I can’t help but wonder if being squeezed by an unseen presence was the holiday experience the tourist was seeking. It seems that darkness holds appeal in Tasmania, and many visitors to the island come to explore exactly that. Often, when I hear mainlanders speak of Tasmania, it’s tinged with darkness of one kind or another. “Oh, you’re Tasmanian?” someone asks, and conversation soon turns to ecological tragedies and social problems, bleak tales of missing persons and cannibalism, harsh weather and shipwrecks, dark and impenetrable forests or equally dark movies and literature about all of the above. We’ve even acquired our own genre, “Tasmanian Noir”.
With its covering of dank, wet forest, history of penal punishment and numerous convict sites and asylums, Tasmania has potential stone tape locations in spades. You could fill an entire holiday just wandering the island’s lonely outcrops, abandoned rocky island prisons, sandstone gallows and other places of torture and torment.
However, if you’re short on time, or just after the gold-standard disquieting, you’ll want to head directly to Port Arthur.
Convicts, soldiers and free settler families alike would have experienced hardship at Port Arthur. During its 47 years as a prison, a number of murders and suicides are known to have occurred, and prisoners were subjected to experimental attempts at rehabilitation, including prolonged isolation and social deprivation in tiny cells. The remains of approximately 1,100 souls lie just offshore at the Isle of the Dead.
Following closure of the prison in 1877, ex-convicts and their children, as well as other entrepreneurs, offered tours of the site. In more recent years, international ghost hunters have come to Port Arthur to record what happens here. For a period, visitors could join paranormal investigators, using ghost-detecting equipment to capture and record whatever bumps occurred in the night.
The current ghost tour offering began in an attempt to encourage overnight stays in the area, thereby increasing business for hotels, eateries and other attractions. It is a formula which obviously works, having remained popular for more than 25 years. Ghost tours now run Wednesday to Sunday, with three after-dark departure times.
Guy has another spooky tale, about a tourist checking his rear view mirror following a ghost tour, and seeing a slightly transparent young girl sitting quietly in the back seat. For reasons I can’t fathom, the man simply continued driving home to Hobart, whereupon the girl followed him inside. Equally mystifying, he ignored her and went to bed. However, as she was still waiting patiently in the morning, the man decided he’d better drive her back to Port Arthur. I guess there’s no guidebook on how to deal with such situations, so it seems a fair enough solution to me.
As for whether part of us persists after death, I believe it’s possible. After all, we’re made almost entirely of energy and thin air. Working as a paramedic for 15 years, I’ve witnessed more last breaths than most, and found that death remains mysterious and uniquely remarkable each time. The grief of losing someone seems to be lessened by believing they persist in some way, rather than being simply gone. Similarly, accepting our own mortality is easier if we believe death is not the end. The paramedic role also meant helping people through what we choose to call “psychosis”, and I know that whatever those people heard and saw was as real to them as their own physical existence was to me.
I’ve certainly experienced enough mysterious things in my time to have more questions than answers.
Despite the fact that we keep looking for other explanations, we do seem to want to believe in ghosts. Whilst I can’t guarantee you’ll meet the chain-jangling dead if you go ghost hunting at Port Arthur, I can emphatically say that the tour is atmospheric, entertaining and well worth the ticket price. The sheer number of paranormal experiences reported at Port Arthur seems to indicate that someone, or something, might be trying to get our attention.
Sonia Strong moved to Tasmania in 2005 and lives in the forested hills of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. She has worked in conservation and alpine/marine park management, as a paramedic and recently, as a wilderness ranger. She is also a metalsmith, writer and painter. She has a deep affection for windswept and interesting people and places and is happiest when creating, immersed in a creek looking for sapphires, exploring wild places or in the sunshine with wine and friends. Sonia has published several children’s books through Forty South, including “Tazzie The Turbo Chook Finds Her Feet”. You can follow her on Instagram, @soniastrongartist.