Port Arthur Historic Site

Also known as Port Arthur convict settlement, Port Arthur penal station

Tasmania’s World Heritage convict settlement, where guides have gathered thousands of visitor stories of a Blue Lady and a parson in the Parsonage.

Port Arthur began in September 1830 as a timber camp on the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart, and from 1833 until 1877 it was where Van Diemen’s Land sent its “secondary offenders” – transported convicts who had reoffended in the colony. A narrow, guarded isthmus at Eaglehawk Neck sealed the peninsula off. Inside, convicts quarried stone, felled timber and built ships, while boys as young as nine were held separately at Point Puer across the harbour.

The settlement was also an experiment in punishment. The Separate Prison, completed in 1853, replaced the lash with isolation: men were hooded outside their cells and kept in silence, a regime that left many with lasting mental illness, and an asylum was later built beside it. More than a thousand people died at Port Arthur during its working life, and most of the 1,646 recorded burials on the Isle of the Dead – the convicts’ graves, as opposed to those of officers and soldiers – were never marked.

When the prison closed, the land was auctioned, fires in 1895 and 1897 gutted the old Penitentiary and other buildings and the town was briefly renamed Carnarvon in an effort to shed its past. Yet visitors kept coming, and the ruins became one of Australia’s first heritage tourist attractions. Today the site is part of the Australian Convict Sites World Heritage listing, inscribed in 2010, and is managed by the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority.

Its ghost stories are almost as old as its tourism. The site itself dates documented ghost stories to 1870, the year the Reverend George Eastman, Anglican chaplain at the settlement since 1855, died. His home, the Parsonage, is called by staff the most haunted building on the site, and some promote it as the most haunted house in Australia. Guides also tell of a sad “Blue Lady” whom they connect with women who died in childbirth, though no one knows who she was meant to be.

Port Arthur is also where 35 people were killed in a mass shooting on 28 April 1996. That tragedy belongs to living memory, not to ghost lore. The site paused its night tours for six weeks afterwards and changed their routes and scripts, and a Memorial Garden on the site honours those who died.

What people report

Visitors and guides describe a figure of a woman in blue who seems to reach out to women and children, lights glimpsed in empty upstairs rooms, footsteps and moaning, sudden odours, and the feeling of being touched or pushed. Guiding manager Jake Bradshaw told ABC Hobart in 2025 that staff keep a store of thousands of written accounts and visitor photographs gathered over a decade of tours.

Where and when

The Parsonage leads most lists, followed by Roseview House (once staff quarters), the Junior Medical Officer’s house, the convict-built church and the Separate Prison. Nearly every report comes from the lantern-lit tours that walk the grounds after closing time.

Timeline of the haunting

September 1830
A timber camp on the Tasman Peninsula Port Arthur, Tasmania
A convict timber station opens on the peninsula. Within three years it becomes the colony’s main punishment station for reoffending convicts.
1870
Death of the Reverend George Eastman Port Arthur, Tasmania
The chaplain, who had served at the settlement since 1855, dies. The site traces its documented ghost stories to this year, and Eastman remains the spirit most often linked to the Parsonage.
1877
The penal settlement closes Port Arthur, Tasmania
The last convicts are moved out. Over the following decades the buildings are sold, burned and partly demolished, even as sightseers start to arrive.
September 2000
Night tours draw 50,000 a year Port Arthur, Tasmania
A Reuters report finds the site’s “historic ghost tours” attracting close to 50,000 people a year, with guides showing blurred photographs to the sceptics.
26 August 2025
Guiding manager opens the ghost “vault” Hobart, Tasmania
On ABC Hobart, Jake Bradshaw says about 20,000 people take the ghost tour each year. He describes the archive of visitor accounts and admits he is still “on the fence” himself.

What could explain it?

Suggestion and setting: the tours are walked after dark by lantern light through ruins, with guides telling the stories as they go, and that primes visitors to notice and interpret small sensations.
Many of the photographs in the archive show reflections, lens flare or shapes in old window glass and blinds, which are easy to read as faces (pareidolia).
Physical discomfort – cold sea air, fatigue and anxiety in narrow, dark rooms – can bring on the dizziness, nausea and mood changes that visitors report.
Some popular stories are attached to buildings rather than to records: no document shows that Reverend Eastman or a “Blue Lady” haunted anyone, and the tales have been shaped by more than a century of tour-telling.

Ghost tours, books and screen

The Port Arthur Ghost Tour is one of Australia’s best-known night tours, drawing about 20,000 people a year, and the anchor of the site’s evening program. The ruins also feature in Marcus Clarke’s convict novel For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), whose film versions helped fix the place in the national imagination, and in paranormal TV and podcast episodes about the “most haunted” places in the Southern Hemisphere.