30 July 2012
PLEASE NOTE: Due to hardware failure, all video and photos from Lake George Mine, Jerangle and The Quarantine Station are inaccessible. GTA are attempting to recover these files and will update ASAP.
Sydney's Quarantine Station
From Wikipedia - The Free Encyclopaedia:
"The North Head Quarantine Station is a series of heritage listed buildings on the north side of Sydney Harbour at North Head, near Manly, a suburb of Sydney in Australia. It operated as a quarantine station from 14 August 1832 to 29 February 1984.
It is now home to a hotel, conference centre, and restaurant complex known as Q Station, and remains part of the Sydney Harbour National Park. The Quarantine Station is supposedly haunted by the ghosts of former staff and patients, with many paranormal occurrences reported throughout the site.
In the 1960s and 70s, the Officer then in charge of the Quarantine Station, Herb Lavaring BEM (1917-1998), took it upon himself to preserve and compile a museum of artifacts and other range of items of note and significance to the station's operations, including domestic implements, medical instruments, and a diverse range of hand tools for tasks ranging from blacksmithing to building construction. Lavaring collected these materials over the period 1963-1975, and also commenced restoration work on the diverse range of rock carvings and headstones from the major burial grounds. The items collected by Lavaring were preserved and many have since found their way into State and Federal collections, including the National Museum in Canberra where a muzzle loading rifle and a set of manacles are preserved (the latter being used to ensure that no one left the station without medical clearance)."
In early November 2011, Tanya, Jesse, Jamie and I went to the Quarantine Station, or Q station as it is named now, for an organised ghost tour.
I'm sorry to say, but it was a very big fail for us.
It was the night before Halloween and there were a lot of kids around for a halloween party, so very noisy.
The atmosphere was really spoilt for the tour with halloween decorations everywhere; pumpkins, flashing lights, skeletons, spider webs, etc, etc. The tour guides were all dressed in fancy dress and staff were wandering around pretending to be "ghosts". That said, the tour was booked out however; a lot of people, coupled with a lot of screaming kids and staff popping up and saying "boo" every ten minutes really made us feel as though we should have simply thrown away the several hundred dollars we spent to go on this tour and stayed at home.
While all of the buildings were very well restored, the tour guide very historically informative and the thunderstorm rumbling away inland from the coast spectacular, that's as far as the night tour went for us.
The EMF meter the guide had was very "on queue" with 'answers' to every question posed to the local "ghosts".
So we went along with the tour and saw the whole complex. At one point Tanya felt warmth from a bed in the hospital where no one had been previously, but that was all that was felt and nothing was captured on our photos.
But then the tour finished, and we were left to wander about ....... Alone.
Now things started to get interesting! We made our way up the hill to the now deserted and very quiet hospital. The buildings were still unlocked so we made our way inside. The room felt a bit different now to when it was filled with people; a solemn feeling kind of filled the air. Tanya went back to the bed that she felt warmth on during the tour and sure enough, it was still warm to the touch when all the other beds were cold. I took photos of the bed and the hospital ward room, and while many people would say I photographed orbs...... I will write them all off as dust as their patterns and frequency aren't what I'd call paranormal. I wish I had a thermal thermometer with me to confirm if there was a temperature change or not on that bed. While there were one or two orbs that do look like they could be spirit orbs, I'm not convinced; but check out the photos on our Facebook page and you decide.
We made our way around the site on the same path that the tour took several hours beforehand snapping photos as we went. Sure enough, plenty of dust "orbs", some of which appeared to be giving off their own light, but again the sceptic inside me questions if they are orbs or simply atmospheric anomalies.
But then while standing in the old unmarked cemetery where several hundred bodies lie only a few centimetres under our feet (if you go to the Q Station link below you can read that these graves were very, very shallow due to the terrain of the old cemetery and the drunken nature of the undertaker employed at the station; I photographed things that I can't explain.
Jamie and I were standing on the grassy hill side happily snapping away the grassed area and more importantly, the old Dining Hall behind us. While I was taking the photos and reviewing them in on the camera's screen as I went, I saw nothing more than the odd dust "orb" loading about outside the building; some bright some dull. On reviewing the photos there are two things that I see that catch my attention. During the whole time we were there the building was locked and no one was inside or around the building.
The first thing I saw was the internal lights. While there were some emergency exit lights on inside, there was an unexplained light that was first seen in the upper right windows, then later in the photo series, it was in the windows to the centre (where there is an internal staircase). Was this a spirit inside the building?
The other photo I took, which is the most striking photo I've taken, is in a series of three photos I took of the building in succession. The first has the building and an internal light. The second has a white figure floating, yes floating outside the upper windows of the building; some 5-6 metres in the air! The third photo is exactly the same as the first.
I have enhanced the photo, played with exposure and thoroughly tried to debunk what this anomaly was, but all I can put it down to something was in that photo at that time and then disappeared........ Check them all out on our Facebook page and comment on what you think it is.
After quite a long time wandering about the Station, the activity was gone. No more unexplained images, no more feelings, nothing. So a little deflated with the whole evening, we headed home.
We are still going to head back to the station soon and spend a lot more time there, first with an "Extreme Ghost Tour" and then camping out alone in one of the haunted buildings. Stay tuned for our updates!
In the mean time, please check out the Q Station web site at: www.qstation.com.au
www.facebook.com/Ghost.Towns.Australia