Larnach Castle

William Larnach, an Australian-born banker, arrived in Dunedin in 1867 to manage the Bank of Otago and grew rich on land speculation, farming and timber. In 1871 he began building a home on the ridge of the Otago Peninsula, high above the harbour, designed by the architect R. A. Lawson in a Gothic Revival style. Some 200 workmen took three years to finish the shell, and craftsmen spent years more on its carved ceilings, Italian marble and Venetian glass. Larnach simply called it “The Camp”; within days of the family moving in at the end of 1874, the local press was calling it a castle.

The house was built for his first wife, Eliza, and their children. Its story soon turned sad. Eliza died suddenly in 1880, aged 38; Larnach married her half-sister Mary, who died in 1887, also at 38. That year a 3,000-square-foot ballroom was added as a 21st birthday present for his favourite daughter, Kate, who died of typhoid in 1891. Larnach, by then a former Colonial Treasurer, married a third time, to Constance de Bathe Brandon, but his businesses collapsed with the Colonial Bank in 1895. He died by suicide in a committee room of Parliament in Wellington in October 1898, aged 62, and his children fought bitterly over the estate.

The family sold the castle in 1906. Over the following decades it passed through many hands and uses – among them a home for soldiers recovering from shell shock and a psychiatric hospital – and fell into disrepair. In 1967 Barry and Margaret Barker bought it as a family home and began a restoration that their family continues today. It is open to visitors every day, its gardens are rated of international significance, and in 2018 Heritage New Zealand named it a New Zealand Landmark.

Ghost stories gathered around the house as it stood half-empty in the 20th century, and the Barkers have never dismissed them. By 2008 staff counted close to 30 reported sightings, as well as accounts of touching and pushing. William Larnach is said to keep watch over the ground floor, particularly the ballroom and billiard room, and Eliza the upper floor. Paranormal TV has been drawn to the castle repeatedly, and in 2012 a visitor told the castle that something had come between him and his wife in the music room and pushed them apart.

Visitors and staff describe a bearded Victorian gentleman taken to be Larnach, the smell of cigar smoke and port in empty rooms, a sudden push in the back, furniture creaking and rocking, and a feeling of suffocation in a bedroom. TV crews have filmed what they described as a figure in the ballroom.

The ballroom and billiard room (William), the upstairs bedrooms (Eliza), the music room, the tower stairs and the stables, where a TV crew abandoned its sleeping quarters in the night in 2008.

Larnach Castle has appeared on Ghost Hunt, Spookers and Ghost Hunters International, in Owen Marshall’s novel The Larnachs (2011), in the play Castle of Lies (1994) and as a royal palace in the Netflix film The Royal Treatment (2022). It is one of Dunedin’s main attractions, with about 120,000 visitors a year.