5 spooky halloween-inspired road trips

With Halloween on the horizon, it’s time for things to get ghoulish. Here are five road trips to get you and your family in the mood for the spooky season.

Allegedly Australia’s most haunted house, Monte Cristo Homestead

 opens its doors for daytime tours, but it’s the evening wanderings that really get the goosebumps going. Held at 6pm every Saturday, the tours tell the spooky stories of previous owners, as well as strange sights and mysteries over the decades.

While the elegant manor – a double-story late Victorian building on a hill overlooking the town of Junee in the Riverina region – was once a place of happiness, things quickly turned murderous. Today, it’s a ghost hunter's paradise, and in addition to the tours you can visit a creepy doll museum and an antiques store. Will you hear the weird voices in the distance and footsteps in the hallways?

Geelong Gaol

 has been an enduring icon in Melbourne for 170 years; if only the walls could talk. Instead, the haunting stories of this place are relayed by the talented team from Twisted History, who will welcome you through the prison gates after dark to ‘meet’ the convicts and murderers who once called this three-storey bluestone building home.

The chilling tour takes you back to a time when the gaol housed men, women and children – many of whom have never left, according to legend. Over 90 minutes, hear spine-tingling stories of life locked behind the walls of one of the most infamous and oldest gaols in Victoria, with your costumed guide able to raise the dead (and the hairs on the back of your neck).

Built by convicts in the 1850s and decommissioned as an operating maximum security gaol in 1991, Fremantle Prison

 occupies grand heritage buildings… which are still home to tortured souls to this day, or so the story goes. You can join a torchlight tour with the prison’s guides, who will regale you with sordid and ghastly tales of decades past. Or, book a tour with the Fremantle Tram every Friday to discover the stories behind other historic Fremantle buildings (dinner is included) before wandering around the prison, where the walls echo with stories of loneliness, pain and suffering, of executions gone wrong, of the innocent unjustly imprisoned and the guilty punished.

More than 1000 people died at Port Arthur Historic Site during its 47-year history as a penal settlement, and some people say that the twisted souls of the departed have never left. Come here as the sun sets for a lantern-lit ghost tour that will take you through some of the most infamous buildings on the grounds, all the while discovering vivid stories of unexplained events that have baffled and alarmed historians and visitors for decades – of convicts, free settlers and soldiers who suffered hardship and death with imprisoned here. There has been documented paranormal activity on the site since 1870 – will you be able to add a ghoulish story from your visit?

Q Station

 may sit pretty within a protected swathe of land on the city’s North Head, near Manly, but its buildings – the city’s former quarantine station – have seen their fair share of ghoulish action over the decades.

The hotel embraces its history, and in addition to offering boutique accommodation, it runs after-dark ghost tours that reveal the paranormal occurrences entwined with the site’s 150-year heritage. Tread in the path of haunted souls while visiting the burial grounds, historic buildings and eerily empty pathways, your guide entertaining with tales of ghosts and paranormal occurrences. Then bed down in one of the rooms… if you dare.

^Disclaimer

^{Viva Energy Australia Pty Ltd (“Viva Energy”) has compiled the above article for your general information and to use as a general reference. Whilst all reasonable care has been taken by Viva Energy in compiling this article, Viva Energy does not warrant or represent that the information in the article is free from errors or omissions or is suitable for your intended use.}