So, last Friday night D™ and I went on a ghost tour of the old Quarantine station at Manly. The guide was doing his very best to make us all spooked out, but I didn't see any ghosts. The tour was fun - and you learn a lot about the history of people arriving in Australia, and how hard it is to keep the country free from diseases (especially if you don't know how the disease is spread, or cured).
However even though we didn't see any ghosts I did have a weird feeling during parts of the trip. At the top of the hill is the hospital wing and we went inside one of the wards. On the verandah outside, I had the strangest feeling, like I was falling, or like something was about to happen, and then as we exited the ward I felt very queasy and had that weird feeling when you just *know* your blood pressure has suddenly dropped.
D™ reckons it's to do with the fact that we were on a peninsula and the wind was changing all the time. At the end of the tour a serious southerly change came up and sent us all inside to have a cup of tea, when the rest of the night was quite mild and humid. So maybe that was it. But the guide told us about others who have seen/felt ghosts on that site so .... /shrug/
But it makes me think about what it is that happens when you see (feel?) a ghost.
I think that a ghost might be an impression left behind by someone when they experienced strong emotion in a certain place. When we went to Wombeyan Caves (or Wombleyan, as I like to call them) we went on a guided tour. In one of the tunnels, the guide said "imagine the 18th and 19th-Century tours down here, ladies crawling along in their dresses and petticoats..." and I had such a massive freakout. The cave, the enclosed space, the darkness, flickering light, all that was fine. But the thought of all those people crawling about just unsettled me. I get the same weird feeling seeing the depressions in old sandstone steps behind Cadman's Cottage - from all the hundreds of thousands of people who have walked there since they were cut. So I'm weird that way, but maybe that's what I'm sensitive to - just the feeling of hundreds of years of people doing things in one spot.
So ... on the quarantine station tour, maybe that's what the weird feeling was - just knowing that hundreds/thousands of people had been processed there. But it was diluted by the modern touches so I was only partially spooked.
Add your ghost stories in the comments.
Labels: tourism