Adelaide Arcade

When Adelaide Arcade opened on 12 December 1885, on Kaurna country in the heart of the city, it was one of the most modern buildings in the colony: a covered promenade between Rundle and Grenfell Streets with Carrara marble floors, a glazed ceiling, fifty shops with workrooms above, three fountains, Turkish baths next door, and electric arc lamps powered by its own gas engine and generators – among the first electric lights in Adelaide. It was built in about five months by some 200 workers, on the site of a burnt-out furniture factory and a horse bazaar.

On 21 June 1887 the arcade’s beadle, or caretaker, Francis Cluney, was left to watch the engine room while the electrician visited the Jubilee Exhibition, with orders not to touch the machinery. He was found fatally caught in one of the engine’s heavy flywheels; it was thought at the time that he had slipped on the engine-room floor. That accident is the root of the arcade’s ghost story, and the room where it happened later became a dry cleaner’s.

Two other real tragedies are tied to the arcade. On 27 February 1904 Florence Horton was shot by her estranged husband, Thomas Horton, in Rundle Street and carried into a tobacconist’s shop at the arcade’s entrance, where she died; he was hanged for her murder. In January 1902 a three-year-old boy, Sydney Kennedy Byron, died in the neighbouring Regent Arcade; his mother, a palm reader who worked in the arcade, was tried and acquitted. Ghost stories have since been attached to both.

The arcade itself acknowledges its resident ghost. A local tour company, Adelaide’s Haunted Horizons, runs night tours inside after closing, and in 2013 the TV series Haunting: Australia filmed an investigation there in which a psychic suggested – without evidence – that Cluney had been pushed. Low-resolution security footage said to show a figure in the arcade has circulated for years, but writers who have seen it have not found it convincing.

Traders and security guards describe footsteps in the ceiling spaces, on the roof and in the dome after hours, lights flickering, and a shadowy figure on the promenade at night, all attributed to Francis Cluney. A sad woman is said to linger near the shop where Florence Horton died, and a child and a woman near the alley to the Regent Arcade.

The former engine room (later a dry cleaner’s), the upper balconies, roof spaces and dome, the shop at the Rundle Street end, and the alley between the Adelaide and Regent arcades.

Cluney’s ghost is one of Adelaide’s best-known stories, featured on the arcade’s own history pages and children’s history trail, on night ghost tours, in Haunting: Australia, and in local lists of haunted Adelaide alongside the Old Adelaide Gaol and the nearby town of Kapunda.