We Went On A Ghost Tour And Had The Scariest Night Of Our Lives

One of Australia’s most haunted locations, three of Australia’s most frightened chickens.

Hi, we're Jemima, Mat, and Michelle, and we're all big ol' scaredy-cats.

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When the idea came up of potentially doing a ghost tour, that was literally the face all three of us made. We're all scared of the dark, hate horror films, and without wanting to sound dramatic, we'd all probably rather just die than go on a ghost tour.

So somehow, all three of us found ourselves on a night-time tour of one of Australia's most haunted locations, Quarantine Station.

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The area used to be home to a hospital, jail, and quarantine station for people arriving to Australia by ship in the 19th and 20th centuries. By day, it's one of the most scenic places in the city, on one of the headlands in the harbour, where a lot of weddings are held. By night, it's all your nightmares come to life. You're walking around in the dark, through old buildings on the edge of a cliff, surrounded by national park. And though you rationally KNOW that you're near civilisation, you feel isolated AF.

And honestly, we were all pretty certain we'd shit ourselves before the night was over.

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Michelle was actually super chill about it, until we got there and suddenly we all realised what we were in for. We'd been booked on the "extreme ghost tour", which is described as: "Hear tales of malevolent spirits and shocking events. Basic experiments will be used to try and encourage paranormal activity and perhaps reveal underlying truths that have long been buried." It's also worth mentioning that this tour is only meant to be for people who have already been on basic tours before, which of course we hadn't. So we all knew we were in for a long and scary night.

The tour started with them dropping us off in a dark, deserted courtyard between two buildings and driving away.

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Awesome.

After a while, our guide literally appeared out of the darkness (in hindsight, he probably just walked out of the door of a building), holding an old-timey lantern and wearing a long-ass coat. I don't know if they wear those just to be creepy, but goddamn, it worked.

For the duration of the tour, we walked in the darkness with pretty much only the light of the lantern to guide us. So as we're walking along, all we can see is this:

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Which is pretty fucking spooky even when you don't factor in all the ghosts and bad vibes of an old hospital.

Because, let us tell you, there were definite bad vibes there.

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We had two guides, and we later found out that rule was only made after an ill-tempered spirit cracked a guide's neck while he was leading a group by himself, and he passed out for seven minutes. And here we were blissfully telling ourselves that surely the ghosts couldn't actually hurt us.

The guides were like supernatural good cop and bad cop. One was the “protector”, tasked with keeping us safe, the other the “antagonist” who was there to provoke the ghosts, calling them shitbags to make them react. He was able to weave the most ordinary historical information into diabolical bullshit that made sitting in a pitch-black room completely terrifying. And that was really the most terrifying part of the experience – all the stories. All three of us saw, felt, or heard things that were (almost) definitely ghosts, but they weren't the things that scared us. It was the suspense, hearing scary stories and waiting in the silent dark in case something happened.

Luckily we had very high-tech tools for detecting the presence of ghosts.

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But no floating Dalmatian faces appeared so we knew we were safe... for now.

Though just because there weren't any spooky apparitions lurking in the background of our Snapchats doesn't mean that we didn't have any ghostly encounters.

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Mat: "There were times when I saw things, figures in the distance or movements, I’d hear the wind pick up or I’d see glows from lights that weren’t there, and at times I was convinced something was afoot, but more often than not I chalked it up to my eyes playing tricks on me in the dark. When you’re already terrified, how hard is it to convince yourself that something is in the room with you?"

Michelle: "In the first room there was a constant breeze of cold above my head and the lights kept turning on and off, but it was only the case for me. What left me shaken the most was the hospital. There was a mannequin directly in front of me as I stood at the head of the table. I also saw a child-sized figure in front of her, but only for me. I don’t know what I saw. I looked away, and I looked back and it was gone."

Jemima: "There was one house we went into where I immediately felt a huge sense of panic or dread, like the beginning of a big anxiety attack. My chest got really tight, and I felt scared in a way that I hadn’t yet on the tour. Our guide then told us a story about a girl who was raped and murdered in the house, and as soon as he told us the story and about the man who was probably responsible for her death, the feeling went away as quickly as it had come."

By the end of it, none of us had pooped ourselves but Michelle definitely came the closest.

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While we all went into the experience with a vague belief in ghosts, the tour didn't really confirm or deny their existence for any of us. We all had the literal scariest night of our lives, but know now that most ghosts aren't actually malicious, and the scary bitch from The Conjuring isn’t ever going to pop out and push us out a window or anything. Praise fucking be.