May 26: Are ghosts real?

One of the best tourist tours I have ever done, in fact probably only second to my Sound of Music tour in Salzburg, Austria, is the Fremantle Prison Torch Light tour.

I don't know why we ended up on the night time tour rather than a day time one, maybe we wanted to scare ourselves. But here we were, my sister and I in 1995 engrossed in one small part of our country's history. I don't think we had stuck so physically close to each other in many years.

The Fremantle Prison website is quite upfront about the tour including these words:

This experience involves a number of surprises and is not recommended for children under 10 or anyone with a weak heart or other health issues that may be aggravated by scares.

The prison only closed in 1991 so it was only a couple of years after this that I did the tour. I wasn't viewing something that was from 100 years ago, I was walking around a just closed prison.

The stories shared were historical but also of those still living, some in other prisons and some now out in the community.

We went through the morgue and we went to death row and the gallows where the rope was still hanging ready for the next person. There are cells with artwork covered walls and frames stained with blood were prisoners were flogged with a cat 'o'nine tails.

The last person hanged in 1964 was Eric Cooke, a serial killer who murdered an unknown number of people in Perth. After that, the community kept discussing whether or not capital punishment was something they wanted in our society until eventually it was abolished.

Yet there were still others that died within those walls, of natural causes or as the victims of prison life. Their deaths were not peaceful and painless.

And their ghosts remain there.

There was a particular story about a female prisoner who has been showing her ghostly presence for decades. I can't recall her story or why she remained at the prison, but she is there.

With the right atmosphere, an experienced story teller, the wind blowing just right and the stars twinkling in the night sky, you just might see those ghosts for yourself.

However, it's important to note that ghosts can do nothing to the living.