While shadows in windows, ghost dogs roaming the graveyard and a railway tunnel haunted by the women killed in it all scream ‘Halloween movie setting’, it’s all considered normal for this small community.
Picton, NSW, has long been given the questionable honour of being named Australia’s spookiest town.
Growing up in the area, Brent Hilbrink-Watson has had his fair share of hair-raising moments.
“Picton was a colonial town and as with any old place, deaths occurred and some of the spirits still reside here,” Brent, 38, tells Woman’s Day.
Brent and his sister, Jasmine Flaxman, 36, run Wollondilly Tours, a spooky look at Picton after dark as it’s a site rich in convict murders, bushranger activity, construction accidents and is even where Australia’s first serial killing took place.
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The ‘Mushroom tunnel’ is the town’s most well-known haunted location and, until it was gated by the council 10 years ago, Brent says visiting at night was a teenage rite of passage.
“About 80 per cent of the locals I’ve met on my tour have reporting having an experience there,” he says.
“There are photos of orbs, stories of a figure appearing, rapid drops in temperature and whispering sounds.”
Brent’s own ghostly experiences have centred around St Marks’ cemetery where the Picton After Dark tours start.
EERIE HAPPENINGS
In 2010, a photo went viral depicting what looks like two children in colonial dress playing in the graveyard.
The little girl is thought to be Blanche Moon, an 11-year-old who died in 1886 after a pile of railway sleepers collapsed on her, and seven-year-old David Shaw who died from polio in 1946.
“It’s entrenched in tragedy and there are lots of kids buried there,” Brent says.
When Brent and Jasmine first started their tours they asked locals for their experiences, and stories from all over the town flooded in.
“Shop owners from Argyle Street reported some eerie happenings. One told me when their son came to stay he emptied all the coins in his pocket on to the kitchen bench.”
“He was woken in the night when the same coins dropped, individually, on top of him!” Brent says.
But the scariest story he’s heard was from the inhabitant of a house that used to be a maternity hospital.
“A woman staying there was woken in the night to a feeling of fingers scraping out her mouth,” he shares.
Other haunted locations include the now-closed Imperial Hotel, which was once a sanatorium.
“The jukebox would often go on even when it wasn’t plugged in [and] there’d be drops and a feeling of being watched,” Brent says.
But he doesn’t believe the ghosts have any ill intent.
“I don’t think these entities are there to scare us,” he says. “They’re just stuck and want to be known.”
HUNTING FOR GHOSTS IN AUSTRALIA AND BEYOND
Amy Waine has been a full-time ghost hunter for the last six years, travelling all over the world and filming her spine-shuddering, supernatural findings.
“It started after a personal experience in San Francisco,” Amy, from Adelaide, tells Woman’s Day.
“I saw a little girl [ghost] in the apartment we were staying in and I wanted to learn more.”
Since then, it’s become an obsession and now Amy earns enough from her Amy’s Crypt YouTube channel that she and her husband, Jarrad, both 35, have quit their corporate day jobs.
“Every time you hear a tap or a knock or see a shadow, it’s thrilling. I love that it’s so unexplained,” she says.
The most haunted place she’s ever been to in Australia is the Aradale Lunatic Asylum in Victoria.
“It was the first time I heard voices and managed to record them, too.”
Another of Amy’s most terrifying nights was at the famed Villisca Axe Murder House in Iowa, US.
“There was this loud noise in the night and then the feeling someone else was in the house,” she says.
Amy claims, however, that she doesn’t really get too scared during these spooky encounters.
“It makes me want answers even more.”
