Old Melbourne Gaol

Melbourne’s gaol grew up with the city. The first cell block on the corner of Russell and La Trobe Streets opened in 1845, and the gold rush that turned the Port Phillip District into the Colony of Victoria filled it to bursting. Between 1852 and 1864 it was rebuilt in dark bluestone on the model of London’s Pentonville, with tiered galleries of single cells, a chapel, a female wing and a high perimeter wall that dominated the skyline.

Inside, a “separate system” ruled. Serious offenders began their sentences in solitary confinement on the ground floor, hooded with a calico mask whenever they left their cells; well-behaved prisoners earned their way up to work in the yards. The gaol also held vagrants, people judged insane and children – the youngest on record, three-year-old Michael Crimmins, spent six months there in 1857 for being “idle and disorderly”.

During its working life, 133 people were hanged at the gaol. They included Elizabeth Scott, the first woman executed in Victoria, hanged on 11 November 1863 with her co-accused Julian Cross and David Gedge for the murder of her husband; the serial killer Frederick Bailey Deeming in 1892; Colin Campbell Ross, executed in 1922 and pardoned in 2008 after the evidence against him was shown to be flawed; and, most famously, the bushranger Ned Kelly, hanged on 11 November 1880. The executed were buried in unmarked graves inside the walls, and plaster death masks were taken for phrenological study.

The gaol closed in 1924. Much of it was demolished and parts were absorbed into what is now RMIT University, but the original cell block and gallows survived and opened as a museum in 1972. Today it is run by the National Trust of Australia (Victoria), and its night tour – named, with a wink, “Ghosts! What Ghosts?” – is one of Melbourne’s best-known after-dark outings.

Security guards have reported cell doors slamming at night and the jangle of a ring of keys no one is carrying. Guides say the most commonly described figures look like warders. In 2023 guide Janet Watson Kruse told reporters of footsteps on the gallery above her tour group with nobody there, and of visitors who felt their hair pulled near one cell.

The three-tiered galleries of the main cell block, the gallows beneath the central octagon, and the female cells. Reports cluster on night tours and among security staff locking up after hours.

The gaol is central to the Ned Kelly legend: Kelly’s armour, his death mask and the gallows draw visitors from around the world, and the theft of a skull once believed to be his in 1978 became a mystery of its own. The National Trust runs the adults-only “Ghosts! What Ghosts?” night tours alongside its daytime museum.