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 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 the