Haunted places in Oceania

Australia’s most haunted places are mostly products of its colonial and convict past. Port Arthur in Tasmania, a penal settlement until 1877, runs nightly ghost tours through its ruined penitentiary and asylum; Fremantle Prison in Western Australia and the Old Melbourne Gaol tell the stories of the people held and executed there; and Monte Cristo Homestead in Junee, New South Wales, has been promoted for decades as “Australia’s most haunted house”. Former asylums such as Beechworth in Victoria, open from 1867 until the 1990s, and Sydney’s old Quarantine Station at Manly add their own histories of illness and isolation.

In outback Queensland the Min Min light, a glowing orb said to follow travellers, has been explained by the neuroscientist Jack Pettigrew as a kind of Fata Morgana – a mirage that carries distant lights over the horizon. In New Zealand, Larnach Castle on the Otago Peninsula is the country’s best-known haunted house. Across the Pacific islands, beliefs about spirits of the dead and sacred places belong to living cultures and are treated here with care.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and Māori understandings of country, ancestors and the dead are not “ghost stories” and are not ours to sensationalise. Where colonial-era legends touch on Indigenous land or history, we give that context, and we set out the documented history and the skeptical explanations for every site.