North Kapunda Hotel
The North
Kapunda Hotel was built in 1848 by the North Kapunda Mining Company. ‘The Northern Arms Hotel’ as it was then
called, was a small single-story hotel situated on Franklin Street Kapunda, the first publican was a man named John Bickford.
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| James Crase: 1879 - Photo SLSA: B76601 |
In the early
1850's the hotel was sold to a local butcher, James Crase. Mr Crase was a wealthy
local man with big dreams for the town of Kapunda. He also had big plans for
his newly purchased hotel. His first step in changing the hotel was a rebranding
from the Northern Arms Hotel to The
Garland Ox Hotel.
In 1865, Crase
invested heavily in his hotel, expanding the basement area, and building the second story of the hotel, which also linked the previously
built miners quarters at the rear (now referred to as the “Hallway From Hell”,
but once known as the Bachelors Hall).
The new hotel featured the most expensive
kitchen in Australia at the time, located in the basement, which now also had
living quarters and a rainwater tank. Upstairs now contained a living area for
the Crase family, a new meeting room known as The Commercial Room, and hotel
and display rooms for travelling salesmen. Crase also built a new two-story
building at the rear of the hotel that could house banquet dinners and roller skating,
as well as a small bowling alley.
Mr Crase sold the hotel in the early
1880's, but not after dealing with much controversy, with members of his staff caught selling alcohol outside of hours, prostitution, and gambling in his
establishment.
Later owners were also
caught doing similar things, and in 1923, under the ownership of Mr Pearce, the hotel lost its liquor licence for a year. To survive, the downstairs and rear
accommodation served as a brothel.
The Hotel has seen
numerous deaths in its 165 plus years of service, including scissor grinder
Martin Jansen who choked to death in the ground floor Parlour.
Henry Binney Hawke, a very well
respected man in Kapunda, who died in the billiard room of the hotel after
suffering a heart attack.
Joseph Caddy, a local music teacher and a politician who died of natural causes in an upstairs bedroom.
In 1912 Mr Henry Fairclough, publican of
the hotel for 14 years became very ill, and by November of that year had been
confined to his bed as his condition worsened. On Monday 17 November 1912,
Henry Fairclough lost his battle with illness and passed away in the upstairs
bedroom he shared with his wife.
Dennis Horgan, was publican of the hotel
from 1913 until 1919, then again in 1925. Horgan died from a heart attack in
the hotel in December 1925 in an upstairs room he shared with his wife.
Other deaths reported include that of
servants, at least two young prostitutes, a travelling salesman, and at least 3
young children.
The North Kapunda Hotel
was featured in the 2000 Documentary “Kapunda: Most Haunted Town in the Western
World”, in episode 7 of Haunting: Australia, and in 2015 gained international
attention when tourism website Travel MSN listed it as the 8th most
haunted bar or pub in the world!
The hotel has numerous ghost stories, too many to cover here –
so here are a few of my own personal experiences from investigating and visiting
the hotel from 2009 until now.
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Ghostly fingers across a guests face in 2015
(date in photo is incorrect) |
I had many ghostly experiences in the hotel after tours and
on private investigations, but the most memorable for me happened one night
after a tour. As the last guests were leaving. Karen and I were doing our “after-tour” walkthrough, to lock up
the hotel and make sure no-one had been locked inside. As I went to close the
tour room door, I turned and saw a young girl, I would estimate around 7 years
old, standing in the hallway looking at me.
She didn't appear
“ghostly”, she looked like a real little girl, except her clothing was very
old, much like a pinafore, similar in style to the clothing actress Shirley
Temple would've worn near the beginning of her movie career. My first instinct
was that someone’s child from downstairs had somehow gotten upstairs.
The girl suddenly
turned and ran towards room 1, a room we have now dubbed “The Nursery Room”. I quickly followed, knowing she was trapped as
I had just locked from the outside the only other exit door to the rooms she
was running toward. I made my way down the hallway, into the Nursery Room, the
Dressing room and back into the Drawing room, to find no-one in there at all. I
checked the windows, locked from the inside, I checked under the bed, nothing.
This ghostly young
girl did not glow, she was not misty, nor did she have any of the other
attributes we associate with spirits or ghosts. She looked as real as my wife
who was waiting for me at the top of the stairs in case the girl came back that way
– it was an unusual encounter, but not the last time I would encounter this
little girl.
The Nursery Room
proved to have other spirits. One spirit manifested and was witnessed by a
young man, who during the evening, had thought it would be funny to jump out
and scare other tour guests,
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An apparition of a boy in the basement. Some claim pariedolia,
but later photos show the boy in a different position. |
little did he know, the spirits were about to do
the same to him.
As he came into the
Nursery Room the back way through the Drawing Room, he stepped through the
threshold of the Nursery Room door and witnessed a partially manifested spirit
of a woman standing behind the door. This young man had been sceptical all
night, but this incident changed his whole perspective.
It was also in this
room a man was groped by a ghost on the backside, which also happened to another gentleman
in the Hallway to Hell, one of the flirtatious prostitute spirits perhaps?
The Commercial Room on the first floor also proved to have
several spirits, although these ones are passive, and at least one seems to be
a residual haunting and not an intelligent haunting. It was in this room the
tours originally started, and on one tour, a guest pulled me aside to let me
know a man had been standing next to me the whole time I had been speaking. She
described him as wearing a suit, about the same height as me, very thin, and
amused and puzzled as to why I was standing in the hotel talking about ghosts.
It was in this same
room on another night, a young woman witnessed the spirit of a man, standing in
the far corner facing the wall, looking rather morose and staring at an old
tapestry that has hung on the wall for over a century.
Another spirit was that of a man who has been witnessed standing
in front of a window looking out into the Main Street below, transfixed by what
he was looking at. In his right hand, he was continuously opening and closing a
pocket watch chained to his inner pocket.
On a tour, a young
lady who went into the Commercial Room and witnessed this apparition, but it wasn’t
until she entered the front bar and saw the mural of Sir Sidney Kidman it
dawned on her who she had just seen!
During the filming of Haunting: Australia, paranormal guru Gaurav
Tiwari and I set up several ghost hunting devices given to us by Jason
Dickson of Apparition Technologies. We placed REM Pods (a device that emits an
electromagnetic field from an aerial, that if a spirit comes close to, will set
off a warning alarm and coloured lights) as well as voice recorders, EM Pumps
(a device that emits a very strong electromagnetic field thought to attract
spirits) and Vibration Detectors in the downstairs hallway basement, a large
side room that was once bedrooms, originally for the cooks, but eventually used
by prostitutes.
Whilst standing in the
basement, a room once used to store dead bodies, kegs of rum and kegs of beer,
we began to ask if there was anyone present who wished to communicate with us.
It didn’t take long to get an answer. I was standing where I could see into the
downstairs hallway to watch if the lights on any of the devices were turning
on, all of the sudden, I saw a young girl, no more than 7 years old, walk into
the dimly lit hallway, and into the doorway of the room Gaurav and I were
standing in!
Without hesitating (or thinking) I chased
after her to find out who she was. She ran into the hallway and turned left into
the arched hallway that led to the former basement bedrooms, an old decrepit
room with damaged floors and no ventilation. Gaurav was following quickly
behind. There was nowhere for the girl to escape too, but she was not to be
found in the room.
Whilst standing in the
room, we noticed a small window that looks into a smaller room, which in turn
has a doorway back into the hallway. Gaurav noticed some movement, so we ventured
back into the hallway. At this point, the cameraman’s batteries failed so he
radioed back to central control to get a go-fer to bring down a fresh battery
for him.
As he did this, Gaurav who had turned to look back into the
bedrooms noticed a large shadow jump across a doorway, which startled him
enough to drop a few swear words! We re-entered the room, whilst Mick, our
cameraman waited in the hallway, just as we entered the bedroom, Mick heard our
REM pods going off and thinking it was the runner with the battery turned to
say thanks, only to notice no-one there!
In the next few
minutes, things really picked up. Gaurav and I raced into the hallway to see
all our REM Pods and Vibration meters lit to full, every light in the basement,
including our torches and camera lights suddenly drained completely and we were
left in total pitch black. At the same time, Mick got a call over his headset
to get the hell upstairs as the producers thought Ray may have had a heart
attack in the Hallway to Hell.
The three of us, in
pitch black, found our way out of the basement hallway, and onto the stairs
that lead back up to the ground floor hallway, only to find the metal bar doors
locked. Just as we got to the top we saw Field Producer Lucy Connors and a camera
crew walking backwards. Ian and Rayleen passed us supporting Ray and were
heading into the beer garden. I tried the metal-bar door again, and suddenly it
unblocked, and we were free of the basement!
We followed them
outside not knowing exactly what had happened.
Ray was very pale and
did not look good, he was crying and slouched over. Ian performed an exorcism
on him. Ray was vomiting and pale and looked very unwell, but not long after
Ian started his exorcism, Ray suddenly looked a lot better, got up, and left
the beer garden to go back into the break area and away from the hotel.
As Ray left, Rayleen was very suddenly
and very vocally saying the Lord’s Prayer at break need speed, as she was
overcome with whatever had just left Ray. Gaurav performed a cleansing ritual
on her, and soon she too left to go into the break room and recover, with Ian
following closely behind to make sure they were both OK.
This left Gaurav, Robb
and me standing in the beer garden wondering what had just happened. Without hesitation,
Robb told Gaurav and I to go upstairs and find out what was going on.
Considering neither of us are psychics, it probably wasn’t
the smartest move, but we're paranormal investigators, right? Fearless to the end
and go where Angels fear to tread. To lighten the very heavy feeling the hotel
now had upstairs, Gaurav and I began to crack jokes about just how tough and
manly we are. We then entered The Hallway to Hell, which felt very different
from how it did earlier in the night, much more foreboding, but much more
“alive”.
It took only a few
seconds for things to start to happen, within minutes of being in the hallway I
witnessed a full-bodied apparition of a woman dressed in a period dress that I
could only describe as from the “Victorian” era. The Dress was black and lacy, the
woman was very white in the face, red full lips, but had a very sad look to her
demeanour. She walked backwards into room 11, and I released a number of swear
words in disbelief of what I was seeing with my own eyes!! (the edit on television
was a few seconds, in reality, my swearing probably went for a few minutes).
In the next half-an-hour, Gaurav and I experienced 3 gunshot
sounds, they were clear and very, very loud. The first, in room 11, was right
after seeing the mysterious woman disappear into the room, it
came from the
air in the centre of the room and echoed throughout the room. I suggested later
during our reveal filming at the Old Kapunda Courthouse, that the noise may not
have been a gunshot at all but could have been the sound of what psychics and
mediums call a “portal” snapping closed as the spirit returned to her own realm.
We heard the next shot
only a few minutes later in room 12, which is the room in which Ray was
partially possessed and fell to the floor. At the time we didn’t realise his voice
recorder was still in the room recording. Later we would find out Ray had captured
an EVP of someone saying, “hates blue eyes”, it also contained the gunshot
sound we heard in the room.
As we re-entered the
hallway, I heard footsteps, so we turned to look in the direction they came
from, as we did so, a stone was thrown at us. Next, we entered room 13, where
we thought the footsteps had gone, only to hear another, and the loudest of the
gunshot noises for the evening.
This is also around
the time Gaurav took a photo that he claimed later, looked like a shadow person
standing on the stairs leading out of the hallway. In the reveal, I declare
that I cannot see what he was talking about, and I honestly could not at the
time see anything resembling a person in his photo, but a few months later,
after filming, I would see for myself a shadow person in the Hallway to Hell
right where Gaurav had claimed to capture his photo.
As a side note, the
Haunting Australia episode featuring The North Kapunda Hotel rated first place
on Foxtel as the most viewed show the night it was broadcast, beating “The
Walking Dead” and other popular shows – so on behalf of all of the cast – thank
you to each and every person who watched the episode and supported the show.
Another very important thing that happened whilst filming
Haunting: Australia which was never aired, occurred to my wife Karen and to “psychic bad-boy” Ian Lawman. Ian was in
the basement under the front bar when psychically he picked up on a poker game
being played.
He described the gentleman running the
game and even got his name and a few attributes associated with him. My wife
worked in the hotel in 2009, and knew the name of the person as a former
publican, but didn’t know anything about him. So, Karen made a phone call to
her former boss who ran the hotel in 2009 and asked her if she knew anything
about this man, who was named “Charlie”. As it happened, she did know him, and
confirmed everything Ian said, even down to his description, his dog and the
poker games!
Karen was subsequently interviewed as a witness for the show,
in a portion that would have confirmed Ian's psychic abilities, that was for
reasons unknown to the cast, entirely cut from the episode, which was a great
loss for the viewers as it would have proved that Ian does actually have
psychic ability (even if he is a scaredy cat and runs from some of the ghosts!)
I may at some point reveal more about ghostly goings on in
the North Kapunda Hotel, perhaps in a book.
Researched and written by Allen Tiller © 2019
