The Port Arthur ghost tour begins after the day visitors have gone. The lanterns are handed out, a guide counts heads, and the group sets off across the grass in the dark, with two kilometres of path and ninety minutes ahead of it. The stories are the ones the place is known for. A clergyman who died in his parsonage in 1870 and is said never to have left it. Boys from the prison on Point Puer, heard across the water when nobody is there. A small island where the convict dead were put into the ground, and a gravedigger who swore he had met the Devil among them.
Port Arthur’s ghosts are spread across the settlement. A woman in blue, a figure at a window, a touch in an empty prison: the stories make the whole place feel occupied after everyone has gone home. They also belong to different kinds of fear. Some are threatening. Others are sad. A few begin with nothing more than the feeling that someone else is still in the room.
But the lanterns do not turn every death here into a ghost story. The memorial garden, incorporating the shell of the Broad Arrow Café, remembers the thirty-five people killed at Port Arthur and nearby in April 1996. After the attack, the ghost tours were suspended and later returned with changed scripts and routes. The distinction matters: these are historic hauntings, told in a place where living grief has its own ground.
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Port Arthur and Mason Cove
Port Arthur sits near the bottom of the Tasman Peninsula, about ninety-seven kilometres south-east of Hobart, at the end of a road that crosses the narrow isthmus of Eaglehawk Neck and continues south through farmland and eucalypt forest. The last bend drops towards the water, and the settlement opens out around a small, sheltered harbour called Mason Cove.
What surprises most people first is the grass. The site is a wide, mown lawn running down to the shore, planted with old English trees that turn in the southern autumn, in April and May, when the rest of the bush stays green. Across it, at intervals, stand sandstone buildings in every state of repair: whole houses with gardens and verandas, roofless shells, a church that is only a spire and four walls, and at the water’s edge the great hollow block of the Penitentiary, row on row of windows with sky behind every one of them.
Each building has its own purpose and its own date. The Commandant’s House faces the harbour from the slope. The Penitentiary was raised in the 1840s as a flour mill and granary and turned into a prison block in the 1850s. The Separate Prison, completed in 1852, stands behind a wall further up the hill, and the asylum built beside it now houses the site’s museum. Across the water is the headland of Point Puer, where the boys were held. Nearby lies the Isle of the Dead, a low wooded island that the settlement used as its cemetery. A ferry runs past both.
By day it feels less like a prison than a village green after the village has left: people with maps and coffee crossing the lawn, children on the steps of houses no one lives in, the water moving quietly against a jetty. The light at Port Arthur comes off the sea, and in winter it goes early. By late afternoon the shadows of the ruins stretch most of the way across the grass, and the lanterns for the Port Arthur ghost tour are being set out.
The History of Port Arthur
Port Arthur began in September 1830 as a timber camp, cutting the peninsula’s forests with convict labour. From 1833 it became something harder: the destination for secondary offenders, men who had been transported to Australia and then reoffended there. For the next forty-four years it was the colony’s place of last resort. The peninsula made it a prison before any wall did. Its only land connection to the rest of Tasmania was the strip of sand at Eaglehawk Neck, a few dozen metres wide, and the authorities guarded it with soldiers and a line of chained dogs. Escape stories gathered around that line, including one of a man who tried to cross it disguised in a kangaroo skin and was shot at by guards who took him for game.
Political prisoners came too: the Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien was held on the peninsula after the rising of 1848. Among its institutions was Point Puer, across the harbour, a prison for boys, some of them as young as nine, who were schooled, worked and punished apart from the men.
The site’s own count is that more than a thousand people died at Port Arthur in its forty-seven years as a penal settlement, and most were buried on the island in the bay. The current official account places more than a thousand burials there. Markers were forbidden on convict graves; the few headstones that survive belong mostly to officials, soldiers and their families, buried apart in their own corner, with a handful of later stones for prisoners.
In 1877 the prison closed. The government did not try to preserve what was left. It changed the name of the place to Carnarvon, after a British Secretary of State, and sold off the prison buildings on condition that they were demolished. Most of the property went at auction in 1889. Fires in 1895 and 1897 gutted the Penitentiary and other buildings, which is why so much of what stands today is shell.
None of this kept people away. Tourists arrived almost as soon as the prisoners left. There were guidebooks, postcards and guesthouses in former convict buildings. One former convict, for an extra shilling, would take off his shirt and show the scars the lash had left on his back.
Marcus Clarke’s novel For the Term of His Natural Life, published in the 1870s, sent readers looking for the place it fictionalised. In 1918 a visitor could write that “bitter memories are fading into romantic interest”. The name Port Arthur was restored in 1927; the ruins had become somewhere people wanted to visit.
The ruins gradually gained protection and conservation work. Since 1987 the Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority has managed the site. In 2010 Port Arthur joined the World Heritage List as one of the Australian Convict Sites. Its prison buildings were now monuments, and its ghost stories had become an attraction of their own.
On Sunday 28 April 1996, a gunman killed thirty-five people at Port Arthur and the surrounding area and wounded twenty-three more. The memorial garden was dedicated four years later, on 28 April 2000. It remains a place for remembrance, separate from the evening’s haunted stories.
The ghost tours stopped for six weeks after the attack. Supervisor Paul Cooper later explained to Reuters that their return involved new scripts, altered routes and a new name: historic ghost tours. The ruined café was excluded. The distinction was meant to make clear that the stories were not about the people recently killed.
The Port Arthur ghost tour still runs five evenings a week. Its stories lead back to the penal settlement and the town that followed it, to people whose names have become attached to rooms and paths long after their deaths.
The Legend of the Port Arthur Ghost Tour
The Port Arthur ghost tour has a whole settlement to draw on: houses where figures are said to linger, prison cells associated with unseen touches, a church with its own unsettling stories, and a cemetery across the water. The site’s official account dates documented ghost stories here to 1870, while the penal settlement was still operating. The lantern tours came much later.
The Parsonage is at the heart of that reputation. The Reverend George Eastman died in 1870, and the house remains closely associated with his ghost. Lights in empty windows, footsteps, unexplained smells and a sense of weight in an upstairs room recur in published accounts. What makes the story linger is its domestic setting: beyond the prison walls and punishment cells, even the clergyman’s home seems unable to settle.
In a 2025 ABC interview, guiding manager Jake Bradshaw described reports of Eastman appearing around the house. He linked the legend with Eastman’s concern for the wife and ten children he left behind. In that telling, the figure is less a threatening intruder than a man who still has unfinished business with the place.
Then there is the Blue Lady. Bradshaw described a sorrowful figure, often reported by women and children, her hands held out as though asking for help. Guides suggest a connection with women who died in childbirth at the settlement. Her identity remains uncertain: a woman looking for someone, in a place whose records cannot give the apparition a name.
The Junior Medical Officer’s house has a different atmosphere in the lore. Accounts associate it with dissection, cold sensations and faces glimpsed where no face should be. Bradshaw recalled visitor photographs in which a gap in the window shades appeared to reveal a child’s face. A little detail in a familiar scene can be more unsettling than a figure standing plainly in a doorway.
The Separate Prison brings the stories closer to the body. Visitors report touches and scratches, and Bradshaw described feeling someone bump past his shoulder while locking up an apparently empty building. No one was there. It is the kind of encounter that leaves a person turning round twice before closing a door.
Elsewhere, the stories spread from room to room. A rocking chair in the Commandant’s House is said to move, and cameras reportedly fail when pointed towards it. Private Robert Young, who drowned in 1840, is said to appear near a cottage by the jetty. The water that took him is still close by. In the retelling, an ordinary stretch of shoreline becomes somewhere to watch more carefully.
At the church, accounts speak of a bell heard without a ringer and a patch of wall where ivy will not grow, linked in the lore to a convict’s death. Footsteps and figures also belong to stories about the former asylum and its later life as a school. Details vary between accounts, but the effect is cumulative. It is not one haunted room behind a locked door. It is a settlement in which each building seems to have kept something of its own.
The Isle of the Dead holds the strangest story of all. Mark Jeffrey, the convict gravedigger, claimed that the Devil appeared in his hut and spoke to him. The site’s own account says he was so frightened that he begged to be taken off the island. His later memoir gives the legend a first-person voice: a man living among the graves who believed that something had come to visit him.
What separates that story from the others is the water. The island is visible from the settlement, but visibility is not company. There is a particular unease in imagining the gravedigger there after the boats have gone, with the graves around him and the lights of other people’s houses across the bay.
The lore is still growing. Visitors bring photographs and accounts to the guides, adding their own moments to stories already passed between generations. Bradshaw’s interview gives a glimpse of that living tradition, told by someone whose working life is spent among these buildings. The setting is historic; the feeling that something just happened is often very recent.
The Skeptics
A sceptic would start with the conditions of the visit. Darkness changes familiar buildings. Lantern light moves, old glass reflects, draughts pass through stone rooms, and a noise has time to become a footstep before anyone finds its source. Low-light photographs can blur a moving person or turn a reflection into an apparent face. Knowing the stories gives an ambiguous moment a ready explanation.
That does not mean every witness is mistaken about having experienced something. It means that the experience and its cause are different questions. A photograph can be unsettling without showing a ghost; a sudden touch can remain unexplained without identifying who, or what, caused it.
Richard Wiseman and colleagues’ 2003 research at Hampton Court Palace and Edinburgh’s South Bridge Vaults found associations between reported unusual experiences and environmental conditions. It was not a study of Port Arthur and cannot settle these particular stories. Here, the available evidence is chiefly testimony, photographs and folklore.
Mark Jeffrey’s account leaves the same gap. His memoir tells us what he claimed happened, without giving us a way to revisit the encounter. Yet there is one difficulty with dismissing all of Port Arthur’s ghosts as a tourist invention: the site’s own chronology places ghost stories here while the prison was still working. The modern tour inherited a haunted reputation. It did not create one from nothing.
My Thoughts
What draws me to Port Arthur is the sense that the haunting belongs to a whole place. Eastman in his house. A woman reaching for help. A gravedigger frightened of his own island. Each story belongs to a room, a path or a stretch of water, and each changes the way you imagine standing there after dark.
I don’t think the accounts let us decide what is walking, or whether anything is. But I can understand why they persist. The buildings still carry the arrangements of the lives once lived in them: who was confined, who gave orders, who cared for the sick, who buried the dead. A ghost story puts a person back into that empty space.
There is one part of Port Arthur where I think the stories should stop. After the 1996 shooting, the ghost tours were suspended for six weeks. When they returned, the scripts and routes had changed, and the word “historic” had been added to the name. As the supervisor explained to Reuters, the distinction was intended to make clear that the tours were not about people recently killed.
The memorial garden asks something different of a visitor. It incorporates the shell of the Broad Arrow Café, where people who had come to visit a historic site became part of its history. To turn that place into another stop on a ghost walk would be to change what the garden is for.
The convicts were recent once, too. Port Arthur’s early visitors could pay to see a living man’s scars; later generations came for picturesque ruins and stories by lantern light. Time can turn suffering into atmosphere without anyone quite deciding when it became acceptable. That is what makes the boundary here worth thinking about.
For me, the tour is right to keep that line. Come for the Parsonage, the prison stories and the island across the water. Listen to the guides, look at the dark windows, and decide what you make of them. But let one garden be only a garden, and do not ask it for a ghost.
Which leaves the question I cannot quite put down: if the line is kept for the living who remember, who will keep it when they are gone?
Visiting Port Arthur Historic Site
Port Arthur Historic Site is reached from Hobart by the Arthur Highway, through Eaglehawk Neck. Most people drive, allowing around an hour and a half each way; day coach tours run from Hobart.
The site is open from 9am to 5pm daily, except Christmas Day. As checked in October 2026, general admission is A$55 for adults and A$27.50 for children, including a twenty-minute harbour cruise and short guide talks. The official FAQ states that site entry is valid for two consecutive days; allow half a day to a full day. The Isle of the Dead experience is listed at A$85 for an adult including site entry; allow 65 minutes for the ferry and guided visit. Island paths have steep gradients. Check the official booking pages for current inclusions, accessibility and prices.
The Port Arthur ghost tour is a separate booking, listed at A$35 for adults and A$18 for children. It runs for about ninety minutes, Wednesday to Sunday, with seasonal departure times. Book ahead and arrive 15–30 minutes early. The route covers around two kilometres and is not wheelchair accessible or suitable for people with restricted mobility. It may not suit very young children or those susceptible to nightmares. Tours run in most weather; umbrellas cannot be taken. Check the time offered for your date rather than relying on a fixed year-round timetable.
The memorial garden is open to everyone and is meant for quiet reflection. The events of 28 April 1996 remain very distressing for many people, staff among them, so be patient if a guide would rather not discuss them; staff also prefer not to use the gunman’s name. The site sets out what happened clearly and simply for anyone who wants to know. Let the garden be what it was made to be.
Plan your trip: Compare flights and accommodation on Trip.com for Hobart or the Tasman Peninsula; search Klook for Port Arthur and Hobart excursions if you prefer an organised trip; or compare car-hire options with GetRentacar.com for a self-drive visit. These links open the providers’ search sites: enter your destination and dates, and check pickup points, admission inclusions, cancellation terms and whether an evening ghost tour is included.
Read further: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life is fiction, rather than a documentary account. Mark Jeffrey’s A Burglar’s Life offers a retrospective convict memoir; for wider travel planning, browse Tasmania guidebooks.
Before You Go
This was Location 20, the last of the twenty in The Dark Atlas, Season 1. The companion episode on Spotify follows the line this article describes in a direction the page does not. Explore the historical accounts, sources and visitor guides for the season at The Dark Atlas.
Read next: Château de Brissac: The Green Lady and the Pardon or The Pendle Witches.
Sources
Books and Academic Works
Richard Wiseman, Caroline Watt, Paul Stevens, Emma Greening and Ciarán O’Keeffe. “An Investigation into Alleged ‘Hauntings’.” British Journal of Psychology 94, no. 2 (2003): 195–211.
Lynette Ross. “Isle of the Dead.” In The Companion to Tasmanian History, edited by Alison Alexander. Hobart: Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2006.
Marcus Clarke. For the Term of His Natural Life. 1874.
Journalism and Long-form Reporting
“Ghosts Draw Tourists to Australian Ruins.” Reuters, via ABC News, 12 September 2000.
“From Trauma to Tourism and Back Again: Port Arthur’s History of Dark Tourism.” The Conversation, 2016.
“Stain or Badge of Honour? Convict Heritage Inspires Mixed Feelings.” The Conversation.
Ethan James. “‘Still Raw’: Port Arthur Refuses to Fade 30 Years On.” Australian Associated Press, 26 April 2026.
Joel Rheinberger interviews guiding manager Jake Bradshaw. “Tour guide shares ghost stories and chilling experiences from Port Arthur Historic Site.” ABC Tasmania Afternoons, 26 August 2025.
Official and Institutional Sources
Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. “Ghost Tour.” portarthur.org.au, accessed October 2026.
Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. General Admission and Isle of the Dead Tour. Current visitor pages checked October 2026.
Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. “Port Arthur Memorial Garden.” Visitor brochure.
Discover Tasmania. “Port Arthur Ghost Tours.” Visitor listing, accessed October 2026.
Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority. History Timeline, People of Port Arthur and Separate Prison Conservation Project Report. The conservation report dates completion to February 1852.
Further Reading
“Port Arthur, Tasmania.” Wikipedia. Background reference; historical dates and burial numbers checked against the institutional sources above.
“Port Arthur, Tasmania.” dark-tourism.com. Used for the Eaglehawk Neck dog line, the kangaroo-skin escape and William Smith O’Brien.
“An Exciting & Haunting Self-Guided Tour of Port Arthur’s Ghosts.” The Creative Adventurer, 7 April 2021.
“Port Arthur, Tasmania: The Most Haunted Town in the Southern Hemisphere.” Ranker, 2018.
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