DIARY OF A GHOST HUNTER

  The Mermaid Inn in Rye, Sussex England is 600 years old and was a popular Ale House with sailors in the Middle Ages. The cellars date back to 1156 and the building was rebuilt in 1420 as the whole village was burnt to the ground by French Raiders on June 22nd 1377. The Inn has 31 rooms and each one is named after a person from the history of the Inn and Rye. It has been featured in the MOST HAUNTED TV series. and has had a long list of famous visitors including a few of the royal family. There is a lady in grey/or white who sits by the fireplace in Room 1, which is called the JAMES ROOM . Other apparitions are another white lady who walks across a room and stops at the foot of the bed, a man who walks through the bathroom wall and into the main room in another part of the Inn and a woman who is supposed to be the wife of one of the local smugglers back in the 16th Century when Rye was still a port village. Other reports include bottles smashing in the Elizabethan Chamber room and c

  The name of the town is thought to have come from the Gundungurra/Ngunnawal people indigenous to that region. ‘Collector’ is said to have been derived from the word ‘colegdar’, the Gundungurra word for the area (aussietowns.com.au). Collector was first occupied by Europeans in 1829 when Terence Aubrey Murray and his family were granted the farming and grazing lands alongside Lake George, NSW. The property went on to be called Winderradeen (Australian Dictionary of Biography). Murray later acquired other lands including Yarralumla sheep station, which would evolve over time to become the home of the Governor General.  He later became a politician and was appointed to the Legislative Council of NSW Parliament (Australian Dictionary of Biography). The post office in Collector first opened in 1848, and the first hotel opened in 1841. The only hotel remaining today, originally titled the Commercial Hotel (now the Bushranger Hotel, see below), opened in 1861. The Bushranger Hotel has a rep