Monte Cristo Homestead

Christopher William Crawley made a fortune in the Riverina, and in the mid-1880s he and his wife Elizabeth built a two-storey late-Victorian manor on a hill above the town. With its iron-lace verandahs, servants’ quarters, stables and later a timber ballroom, Monte Cristo was a statement of arrival for a large, devout family. The Crawleys lived there until 1948.

Christopher died suddenly of blood poisoning in 1910, and local rumours that the house was haunted are said to have begun soon afterwards. Elizabeth stayed on for the rest of her life – about 23 years – and is remembered as almost never leaving the house. After the family moved out it stood empty, watched by a succession of caretakers, and by the early 1960s it had been stripped by looters and was falling apart.

In 1963 Reg Ryan, a tailor from Wagga Wagga, and his wife Olive bought the house from the Crawleys’ descendants for £1,000 and spent years restoring it, filling it with Victorian antiques. They opened it as a museum in the late 1960s, and Reg, who was convinced the house was occupied by about ten spirits, began ghost tours and overnight stays in 1993. Their son Lawrence – also known as the stunt rider Lawrence Legend – ran the tours from 2014, when his father fell ill.

The tours told a string of tragic stories: an infant Crawley daughter killed in a fall on the staircase; a maid, said to have been pregnant, who died after falling from the balcony; a stable hand who burned in his bed; and Harold, a man with an intellectual disability said to have been kept chained near a cottage for decades. These are told locally as legend, and the published histories do not document most of them. Harold’s story in particular should be read as a tale about how disabled people were treated, not as a monster story.

Olive Ryan died in November 2024, and in January 2025 the homestead’s official page announced that it would not reopen. The house passed to her daughters, Lawrence kept the Monte Cristo name and tour rights, and the property was listed for sale in November 2025. It is now a private home and cannot be visited.

The Ryans said that on their first visits they saw lights in every window of a house with no electricity, and later heard a woman’s heeled footsteps on the verandah, voices and moving objects. Mrs Crawley is the most-reported figure – said to tell visitors to “get out” – along with a bearded man taken to be Christopher Crawley. Overnight guests described waking unable to move with a woman standing at the end of the bed.

Reports centre on the front room and staircase, the upstairs balcony and verandah, Mrs Crawley’s bedroom, and the outbuildings: the dairy, coach house and caretaker’s cottage. Most came from the night tours and overnight stays between 1993 and 2024.

Monte Cristo appeared on ABC’s A Big Country (1977), Getaway (1992), the reality show Scream Test (2000), Ghost Hunters International (2010) and My Ghost Story (2013), and it inspired the 2012 Australian horror film Muirhouse. In Junee the house is a landmark, and many residents have campaigned to keep its name and heritage after the sale.