The Manly Ghost Tour

Finally, it was time for Mary Beth’s big surprise activity for the evening. We grabbed a ferry again which took us 30 minutes out to Manly, a suburb on the north shore right against the ocean. It’s a much younger more spring break-feeling town, but still a nice place to spend the afternoon. The wind off the ferry was darn chilly, but two cups of five-dollar hot chocolate at a gourmet shop called Chocolate By The Bald Man fixed that right up.

For the last hour before the Big Surprise, we walked over to the beach and saw the ocean for the first time. Surfers were splashing around in the sixty-degree water like it wasn’t sixty-degree water. We were smart enough to turn around and take our picture at the exact moment a rogue wave shot up on the beach, drenching our jeans, shoes, and socks. (It’s been that kinda weekend.)

Finally, though, the big reveal! MB got us tickets to the Quarantine Station ghost tour! Yaaay ghost tour!

(This might get a little wordy, feel free to skim.)

From the 1820s onwards, the young country of Australia set aside some oceanside property as a camp for incoming ships. Once you finished the three-to-six-month voyage from England, you had to stop off here before being allowed into Sydney for a period from two weeks to four months. Ships were broken up into sick and healthy, then again by class and race, and thousands of people over 140 years just whittled away the hours and days here, seven short miles from their destination.

By the 1980s, Quarantine Station had been shut down and was a bunch of abandoned, very spooky-looking buildings, quite separated from the rest of civilization in a national park. Not surprisingly, the ghost stories quickly began to collect.

So it was this cluster of buildings, creaking and hardly lit, which Mary Beth, myself, our tour guide Brian, and seven other tourists wandered around holding nothing but kerosene lanterns. The tour was 2 1/2 hours long, during which time we heard gruesome descriptions of death by smallpox and were allowed to venture through the hospital and morgue. Brian did an excellent job setting the spooky mood, banging on metal walls at exactly the moment to cause all nine of us to squeal like little girls.

It’s hard to describe how surreal this set of buildings were, set off like this in what seemed like the middle of nowhere. The phenomenal view back toward the Sydney and Manly skylines made us genuinely amazed that it hadn’t all been ripped down and turned to condos by now. Yay historical preservation!

It was the best ghost tour I think I’ve been on. As much of a chicken as I am, it’s still rare to never that I feel actual tangible fear while on a tour. Quarantine Station did the trick.

We hit it off great with Brian, too, who has about 50,000 years more tour guide experience than me but was still very grateful to have a fellow guide on the trip. He was even so nice as to offer us a ride back from Manly to Sydney; we were happy to accept, and got an additional half-hour’s worth of Australian history til we were back at the hotel. Up front he educated us on tipping etiquette in Australia and how tipping of tour guides was NOT expected. Mary Beth still left a $20 bill under his hat in the back seat.

And that was how we finished out our final night in Sydney. Between the pumpkin pizza and five-star tour experience, it was a perfectly decent finale to our weekend here. And yet, we’re still calling a do-over on Sydney at some point in the future, when the weather’s happier and the heads of state are fewer. The city was even so cheeky as to present a crystal blue, cloudless sky this morning when we headed off for the airport and the flight to Cairns. Thanks a LOT, Sydney.