Gawler Underground - Union Mill

Union Mill

1 Julian Terrace, Gawler

  The Union Mill was established in 1855 by Harrison Brothers, opening on the site of their unsuccessful tannery. It was the second flour mill in Gawler. In 1863, it was purchased by Walter Duffield. In 1880, The Adelaide Milling Company bought the Union Mill. In 1933, Jeff Brothers leased the mill from the Adelaide Milling Company.

  In 1864, the middle floor of the mill gave way. The western wall fell, and many of the windows were blown out by the weight of mountains of wheat. The destruction poured into what is now Julian Terrace. In the 1870s, a train siding, coming from the tram line in Murray Street, was built into the Union Mill yard. The rail line had its own turntable to spin trucks around and take them back the way they had come after loading and unloading. The mill also had its own weigh station.
Fire destroyed much of the building in 1914. Rebuilt, but smaller. The mill ceased operations in 1968. In 1975, fire destroyed parts of the southern section of the building.

Centrelink and the CES were situated here in the late 1980s and early 1990s. There was a medieval-themed restaurant that operated on the second floor in the 1990s. Where Asian Central is located today, there was an open-air dining area, which was enclosed in the early 1990s.

Today, the Salvation Army, Pole for Fitness, Asian Central and Action Psychology occupy the retail spaces of the former Union Mill.

Go underground via this link

researched and written by Allen Tiller

 

A Shot of Spirits: Ep 20 - Hahndorf Academy - South Australia

The Haunted Boy

(also known as The Crying Boy)

Recently I have seen for sale in Adelaide several the old allegedly cursed “Haunting Boy” paintings, so I thought why not write about that, and get to the bottom of the legend!?

In 1985, ‘The Sun’, a very popular tabloid newspaper in England, published a story in its September 4th edition (page 13) with the Headline “Blazing Curse of the Crying Boy”. The story that followed told how, after a fire burnt their South Yorkshire’s home to the ground, married couple Ron and May Hall put the blame squarely on a picture of a crying boy they had hung in their home.
A fire broke out from an overheated frypan of oil and devastated the home they had lived in for 27 years, the house was a mess, and one of the only things unscathed in the fire was a picture of crying toddler, hanging on a wall. Ron’s brother Peter, was a local fire-fighter, his Fire Station leader, Mr Alan Wilkinson said he had heard of numerous cases of fires where prints of “crying boys” would be undamaged in a devastating house fire, this of course turned a mundane ‘hot chip’ fire story into a leading headline, and propelled the “Crying Boy” curse into the world spotlight.

The story picked up legs in the next day’s edition when The Sun reported that readers had been phoning in with their own horrifying stories of bad luck related to The Crying Boy paintings. Quotes were printed in the newspaper such as this one from Dora Mann in Surrey “All my paintings were destroyed – except the one of The Crying Boy”.
A Mr Parks claimed he had destroyed his copy after returning from the hospital from smoke inhalation from his house burning down, to find the only thing untouched in the scorched ruins was a crying boy painting.
More stories accumulated, about misadventures happening to residents in houses where the prints hung. One lady even speculated that the painting may have been the cause for her husband and three sons dying over a span of a few years.

A security guard named Paul Collier threw one of his two prints on a bonfire to test the theory that the paintings and prints would not burn, he claimed that after an hour in the flames, the painting was not even scorched, this, of course, led to even more sales for The Sun!

Strangely, not all the prints and paintings were of the same crying boy, paintings by Giovanni Bragolin and Scottish artist Anna Zinkeisen became associated with the Curse. Zinkeisen had released her crying boy paintings as part of a study titled “Childhood”.

After some time (and a lot of newspaper sales) it emerged that Alan Wilkinson had personally logged about 50 “Crying Boy fires dating back to 1973”. He had dismissed any supernatural connection between the fires and the paintings, finding that in almost every case, it was human error or human carelessness that had started the fire. He could not explain though, why the paintings would survive the fires unscathed.

As the original sun newspaper story began to fade from readers’ minds, the story of the Crying Boy paintings morphed into an urban legend and spread across the world. Along the way new information was added to the original legend; psychics claimed a spirit was trapped in the original painting, and the fires were an attempt to free itself. Other stories told how the artist’s bad luck had cursed the painting, and that’s why so many bad things happened in its presence.

The Crying Boy legend is still very much alive today, recently shown on the new TV series “Cursed”. If one looks hard enough one can find enough evidence to suggest that this whole urban legend is an exaggerated coincidence designed by The Sun Newspaper back in 1985 to sell newspapers, now it has become part of urban legend and pop-culture.

Anna Zinkeisen's version of the crying boy

Allen is the founder of Eidolon Paranormal, South Australian Paranormal and the author of book and blog, “The Haunts of Adelaide: History, Mystery and the Paranormal”.

Allen was awarded the 2017 “Emerging South Australian Historian of The Year Award” as presented by The History Council of South Australia.

Allen has also been employed as “Historian in Residence” in 2016/2017 with the Adelaide City Council Libraries and employed by the City of Port Adelaide Enfield Council to write the
popular, “Ghosts of the Port Self Guided Walking Tour”

www.twitter.com/Allen_Tiller
www.facebook.com/AllenHauntingAustralia
https://www.facebook.com/TheHauntsOfAdelaide

First published in MEGAscene Issue 8 2016

Haunted Art Gallery

Haunted Art Gallery

The Art Gallery of South Australia, North Terrace
Photo: © 2017 Allen Tiller

On May 13^th, 2005, television show Stateline, on the ABC, broadcast an episode about an alleged haunting at the Art Gallery of South Australia. The story was reported by Patrick Emmett, the following is the transcript from the episode.

Adelaide Art Gallery

Patrick Emmett: It was early one morning while he was checking the halls of the Art Gallery before opening that Trent had his first close encounter of a different kind.

Trent: I was almost in the door. It was pitch black, there was no lights on and, all of the sudden, there was this – this great burst of white light that went across the room, and it actually made me fully step back, I went “Oh, crikey, what was that?!?”

Patrick Emmett: Shaken, he checked what security cameras had picked up and what he saw surprised him even more. They showed him entering the room, reacting, but no sign of the mysterious light.

Trent: Its quite regular that you will see a frightened patron who wants to leave a particular area or a frightened staff member who has seen a ghost.

Patrick Emmett: Trent’s story is one of many you will hear from those who patrol the Art Gallery on North Terrace. There are tales of mysterious old ladies, pictures that move on their own and unexplainable spine-tingling drafts.

Female Witness: The cold comes through the floor, starts onto your legs and it goes up, and the actual hairs on your neck stand up, every hair on your body just is standing on end. As I came to this doorway I saw a flash of someone.

Patrick Emmett: The encounters can happen at anytime of the day. Staff report seeing strange people but when they search for them, they’ve disappeared!

Female Witness: I saw a dark shape go past the gallery archway and I thought “There shouldn’t be anybody down here” So I sped up a little bit, expecting to see somebody, and I entered gallery 19 and there was no-one there, and then I saw the same shape go past the archway of gallery 18. So, I came down a little bit quicker expecting to see who was here and I checked this whole gallery and there was no-one there. I looked up through the staircase to see if anybody was running up the stairs and there was no-one here.

Male Witness: I saw a lady in a long white dress of old period costume, high neckline and a bustle at the back. She had her hair in a bun and she just walked straight across the archway and I though, “Well, it’s a hot day, what are you doing wearing a dress like this on a day like”- you know, I remember it was a Tuesday and it was really hot, so I walked through just to have a quick look and I looked to me left and the lady wasn’t there. I though “this is really strange, she must have snuck into the other gallery without me seeing her”.

I walked through into gallery 20 and the lady wasn’t there either and that’s when I started thinking” hang on, what have I seen here? “

Patrick Emmett: Many of the sightings are in what’s called the Morris Gallery. A mysterious old lady in a green dress often appears, sometimes sitting in a rocking chair. Staff rarely tell their tales to outsiders, so they were dumbfounded when approached by a recent visitor.

Female Witness: And he approached me, and he said, “There’s so much energy in this room, and there is a presence” and I said “Well, that’s interesting” I said, “Can you communicate with this presence?” and he said, “Yes I can”. So, I asked him to and he did, and he said to me “There’s a little lady that lives in the gallery and she loves it here, but she’s got one complaint and that is that the gallery, this particular gallery, is very cold”.

Patrick Emmett: While the old lady might be happy in the Morris Gallery not everyone is so relaxed about her residency. Some patrons have refused to enter the room because of its atmosphere, including two Japanese tourists.

Trent: They got down as far as gallery 20 and they started really getting scared and they said, “Can you please get us out of this gallery as quickly as possible” and we got them to the stairs just here and as soon as we got them to the stairs, they ran up the stairs.

Patrick Emmett: Another visitor has warned staff that this painting is evil and the source of the unrest. It’s not clear what is the background is, but one worker believes he’s seen this woman walking the halls.
 But there are strange happenings in other galleries as well. There was the green glow in a recent Egyptian exhibition, and books and chairs sliding around by themselves and then there was the day the two guards opened these rarely used doors that look into a car park.

Male Witness: The opened them and this particular guy, he said “Did you see?” and he didn’t even get that out and the other guy said “I never want to talk about this again. I saw nothing”. And apparently what they saw was just scrub and desert outside the doors when they opened them for a few seconds and then it went back to carpark.

Patrick Emmett: Some say the hauntings are because the gallery is built on an old grave site. Others say they’re because two people were once hanged inside the grounds, and there are the cynics that say they’re just the product of fertile imaginations, but the believers say they were once also cynics, but they can’t disbelieve the evidence of their own eyes.

Male Witness: I’m not into that sort of thing and, quite frankly, I didn’t believe anything like that existed, but you have to change your mind when you see things like this and they’re unexplained.

Female Witness: They’re here. They haven’t actually hurt anyone. They just live here as part of us. It’s part of the gallery, so we just don’t worry about them.

Transcript:

Haunted Art Gallery

Broadcast: 13-05-2005

Reporter: Patrick Emmett

Network: ABC

Program: Stateline.

Transcribed by Allen Tiller