Fremantle Prison

Fremantle stands on Walyalup, Whadjuk Noongar country at the mouth of the Swan River. When the struggling Swan River Colony asked Britain for convict labour in 1850, the first job given to the men who arrived was to build their own prison: a limestone “Convict Establishment” quarried from the hill above the port, with a castle-like gatehouse and a four-storey Main Cell Block designed for a thousand prisoners. Its cells measured about 2.1 by 1.2 metres, and buckets served as toilets until the day it closed.

After transportation ended, the prison passed to the colony in 1886 and became Western Australia’s main gaol. In 1888 a gallows was built inside the main block, and until 1984 it was the state’s only lawful place of execution. Forty-four people were hanged there between 1889 and 1964, ending with the serial killer Eric Edgar Cooke. The prison held escapers such as Moondyne Joe and the Fenian John Boyle O’Reilly, and in the late 20th century an ever-growing share of its inmates were Aboriginal people – a part of its history that the World Heritage interpretation, focused on the convict era, has been criticised for underplaying.

Overcrowding and tension culminated in a riot and fire on 4 January 1988, when prisoners took guards hostage and the roof of one division collapsed. The prison closed in 1991, replaced by Casuarina. It became the first building in Western Australia on the National Heritage List in 2005 and part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage listing in 2010. Since 2015 the former women’s prison has been a backpacker hostel.

Its best-known ghost story belongs to a 1970s prison officer who said he turned back from a guard tower to see a man in a dark coat staring down at him; he later identified the figure as Surgeon Atfield, the prison doctor in the 1860s, refused to work the tower again and transferred out. The other is Martha Rendell, hanged on 6 October 1909 for the murder of her de facto husband’s son Arthur Morris, and suspected of poisoning two of his daughters – the only woman executed at Fremantle. Visitors say her face appears in a chapel window, and hostel staff hear of a presence in the shower block that was once her cell.

Reports include a dark-coated figure in a watchtower, a woman’s face at a chapel window, children’s voices, footsteps and murmuring in the cell blocks, and an uneasy, watched feeling in one of the hostel’s shower rooms. Former women’s-prison officers visiting in 2015 reportedly asked whether that room still felt strange before anyone had mentioned it.

The Main Cell Block, the gallows and condemned cells, the chapels, the guard towers along the walls, and the former Women’s Prison, now YHA Fremantle Prison. The Torchlight Tour runs after dark on Wednesday and Friday evenings.

The Torchlight Tour is one of Perth’s best-known evening outings, and the prison regularly appears on lists of Australia’s most haunted places. It also hosts a tunnels tour through flooded convict-era passages, and the hostel lets visitors sleep in the cells of the old women’s prison.