DIARY OF A GHOST HUNTER

So I find myself back at the Bellbird Hotel after 2 years. Its always exciting to go back to a site where new owners are expressing concerns about ghostly goings on not knowing that previous owners have had the exact same experiences! Well, exciting for me but maybe not so for them! The Bellbird Hotel celebrated its 100 year birthday in 2014. The hotel is in Bellbird just outside of Cessnock in the Hunter Valley, near the vineyards. Around the beginning of 2013 I took part in a series of stories being run by the Newcastle Morning Herald about ghostly encounters in Newcastle and the Hunter region. After having been interviewed on David and Tanya’s Breakfast radio on 2KO for a piece about my tours at Fort Scratchley, one of my friends, Angela Walton, who works with a team of paranormal investigators at Newcastle Ghost Hunters, of which I am also member, called me to say that she had just heard another person call in to the station who had some ghost stories to share. It was P...

My adventures lead me to Lambton, a suburb in Newcastle to chase my next ghost story. Tammy Guest, the business owner of Inspirational Health in Elder Street met me on a tour a few weeks ago and told me about the presence of a previous owner in the premises she has been working from for the past three years.                                       A view of Lambton photo: Cultural Collections Ncle Uni Lambton is a suburb of Newcastle, and as most of the settlements of Newcastle it started around a coal mine. Originally a coal-mining township, Lambton was incorporated as a Municipality (including Jesmond, New South Wales ), on 24 June 1871. The 1891 Census gave the population as 3,434. It was the first municipality in Newcastle district to be lit by electric light. In the early years the mine...

In case you missed Part One of this story - head here first:  http://newcastleghosttours.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/the-seance-preparation-fictional-story.html Now here is part two: Primed by the inner circle of seance sitters that were the Medium's guardians for these sessions I sat still with a pounding heart in complete and total darkness. The inner circle started to whip up the others around the table by telling us all that they could feel the presence of Spirit in the room. It was swirling all around us, they said... coming up close and peering at us, seeing into our souls. Suddenly the illuminated balls that were now lying in the middle of the table were suddenly picked up by a darkened hand. After a moment of silence the noise started... Thank you Spirit! We can see you! Thank you for attending Spirit - show us what you can do! The commotion went around the table and we were pushed to make comments as these glowing balls came around and stopped in front of certain...

  Polish Villagers Claim Nazi Zombies Running Wild Posted: November 22, 2015   Author: Crazy Polish Guy     What’s worse than regular zombies? Freaking Nazi zombies! And that’s exactly what some inhabitants claim are haunting their village of Glinka in western Poland. First the undisputed facts. In September, archaeologists dug up 27 German Nazi corpses buried near what used to be an old house that was torn down years ago. The Nazi soldiers died in that house in 1945 when the Russians took over the village. They were shot in the head.  After the war, the villagers buried the bodies right outside the house.                                                       ...

Friday the 13th was a perfect night to try a ghost tour. Angela had never been on one before and really didnt want to EVER go one one. Nightmares and being afraid of the dark when she was little had made her lose any desire for this sort of stuff. But her boyfriend kept on pestering her. They were both 19 and Jason wanted to do something different for Friday 13th this year especially since they were on holidays in Scotland. You'll love it her told her... come on... please!!   So here they were in the middle of Edinburgh's Royal Mile waiting for the 8pm underground tour. Now where else would you be on Friday 13th eh? Jason said. The tour guide turned up with his offsider both dressed in period costumes and told the group that they were heading underground to explore the vaults - the places that the poor people of the city lived one on top of the other in filth and misery in the 1700 and 1800's. He assured everyone that the place they were going was ver...

Today has been Remembrance Day - the day we take a moment to pay homage to those who have given their lives for a cause they believed in. Those who have lost their lives in despicable wars all over the world. Many never to be laid to rest on home soil. This is a day that means a lot to me. The dead are part of my life - ghosts of the dead are daily visitors. I go out of my way to communicate with them, to search them out - to sometimes even chase them. I research them, I honor them and I understand that they all have an important story to tell. Today I felt compelled to spend some time  paying my respect to some of those souls buried at my local cemetery. I wanted to search out some headstones belonging to servicemen who had died during war and to leave a flower and say a prayer. I wanted to choose those souls who may have not had a visitor for many years, maybe neglected, maybe their families were no longer living close by or maybe they were also now dead and these ...

So I will go near and far for a good ghost chase and I have just returned from a four day stay in Melbourne where I met up with my OZGHOST tour group who were cruising down from Sydney on the Carnival Spirit  Cruise Ship enjoying all that cruising has to offer! This even was the very first OzGhost Tour organized by me and I was very excited that everyone would be totally happy with how the event turned out. Our first meet up and tour after everyone arrive in Melbourne was at the Old Melbourne Gaol for a day time historic tour which turned into a ghost talk after we we coerced our tour guide Peter to talk to us about all of the experiences people have had there. When the Old Melbourne Gaol as built in the mid-1800s, it dominated the Melbourne skyline as a symbol of authority. Inside the Gaol, dangerous criminals were held alongside petty offenders, the homeless and the mentally ill. Between 1842 and its closure in 1929 the gaol was the scene of 133 hangings including Au...

Darkness enveloped the room. Total darkness. So black I could not see my hand in front of your face. I could feel the pounding of my heart as my hands were taken up on both sides by the people sitting on either side of me. They were held tight and placed on the big round table that the group was sitting around. Silence and an air of expectation filled the room. Both of the people on either side of me had been to many of John's seances. They assured me that it would all be OK. They were laughing and giggling and making light of what was to come. "You will be amazed! Wait until spirit shows itself and be prepared to be touched on the head" said the older lady. She was filled with joy, as if the next 2 hours would be some sort of a holy experience. I guess for her it was. I didn't know what to expect other than what I was told before we had been moved into the room. "Now love, remember...." she whispered, "don't move, as it can cause...

In 1921, a thoroughly charming and entertaining article appeared in The Times detailing the domestic rules of etiquette for receiving ghosts. This ghostly code of conduct was prepared as a possible topic for discussion at the First International Congress for Psychical Research in Copenhagen the same year. Whether it actually made it onto the conference agenda for that year, or any other, however, is not known. Nevertheless, I would say that any of today’s self-respecting psychic researchers could do very well to abide by these principles if only to avoid unnecessary and embarrassing ostracisations from the spirit world — heaven forbid ! The Times, Jan 1921 WHAT’S GOOD FORM WHEN RECEIVING GHOSTS? We cannot urge you too strongly to appear perfectly natural when receiving a ghost. If you are seated remain so. You won’t gain anything by standing up. When reading you may lay aside your book if you wish. Or if you are very nervous you may walk across the room and flick...

I spent the most wonderful morning being introduced to the ghosts of one of our suburb's - Lambton. Originally a coal-mining township, Lambton was incorporated as a Municipality (including Jesmond, New South Wales ), on 24 June 1871. The 1891 Census gave the population as 3,434. It was the first municipality in Newcastle district to be lit by electric light. In the early years the miners of the township used to entertain themselves gambling on dog races known as the "Dog & Rat" because they would release a rat (wallaby) on flat open area then let their dogs chase it down. The dog that caught the rat won (the rat won if it made it to the scrub!)                                                       ...

Last weekend I had the opportunity to take myself to Campbelltown on a ghost hunt with the crew from SIGHT ( Sydney Investigation Ghost Tours ) I visited Quondong Cottage - St Patrick's, as the building was originally known, was the first catholic school in Australia to be built from private subscription. The Catholic Church acquired the land from Mary Shiels. It had a gabled hall of plastered brick. The veranda across the front was added later, as were the urns on the round-topped pilaster-buttresses. It was built in 1840 and opened on St Patrick's Day. It remained in use as a school until 1914 when Father James Dunne opened St John's Primary School in Lindsay Street. It was then sold to Mrs Keihone who had it converted to a dwelling, and wishing to give it a truly Australian title, renamed it Quondong. It appears to be named after a Kurrajong tree at the front which was mistakenly believed to be a native Quandong tree. Local legend has it that at one ...