Hauntings of Quarantine Ep 1 – Brandon

Q Station, the hotel and heritage venue that now occupies the old North Head Quarantine Station in Manly, released this five-minute video in June 2020 as the first of a short series called Hauntings of Quarantine, in which its tour guides tell their favourite stories on camera. Here the guide is Brandon, who says he has led ghost and history tours at the site for nearly five years.

He stands in the building known as the Gravedigger’s Cottage and describes what he says has happened there on his tours: a figure glimpsed moving through a doorway that sent seventeen visitors running outside; three nights in a row when guests told him someone was standing behind him; and, in the second bedroom, which staff call Sam’s room after a presence they say prefers to be called Samuel, a night when a visiting woman seemed to be wrestled by something unseen and spoke in a man’s voice until he led her outside.

This is the site telling its own ghost stories, so watch it as a record of the lore rather than as evidence. Everything here rests on what the guide and his groups felt or briefly glimpsed in a dark building on a ghost tour, the conditions in which expectation and suggestion are strongest. Even the guide notes that people “don’t really see very much” — they sense something.

The history behind the stories is well documented. From 1828, when the first ship was held at Spring Cove, until the station closed in 1984, vessels arriving in Sydney with smallpox, cholera, typhus, plague or influenza aboard were quarantined at North Head. More than 13,000 people were held there, and an estimated 572 of them died and were buried in the station’s three cemeteries, many of them children. The headland, long important to its Aboriginal custodians, is now part of Sydney Harbour National Park.