10 October 2012

Canberra's creepiest locations?

| Hacketthead
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I was wondering what Canberrans would consider to be the creepiest locations around town? I used to live in Ipima Street, Braddon, in the days before the houses were demolished to make way for high density accommodation and I always found Haig Park to be a bit creepy. The fact it had a reputation as a gay beat and I had heard stories of gay bashings happening there might have influenced my perception but there’s something about it which just doesn’t sit right with me. I always thought one day I’d come across a body dangling from one of the pines.
The other place I thought was creepy was crossing the old Woden Cemetary just on dusk after visiting a friend in the Hospital. I think I was lucky, as I’ve heard of people being mugged in there. Your thoughts?

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batmantrilogy8:15 pm 04 Nov 15

Personally i have never sensed super natural stuff until now but yet from the stories i have heard, it certainly gives you chills.
Old parliament house pretty famous for that.

eily said :

sarahsarah said :

Alderney said :

Hacketthead said :

A location I pass every day on the way to work which has a creepy history is the road up to the Red Hill Lookout, off Mugga Way in Deakin. In his book “Australian Tragic”, the journalist Jack Marx relates a story from I think it was 1954. A nursing student and her boyfriend were driving back to Canberra from Queanbeyan, and had an accident. The boyfriend was really badly, critically hurt, and the nursing student broke her pelvis. A car came by, and the driver said he’d take the nursing student to hospital and get an ambulance for the boyfriend. Turns out the driver was a serial sex offender, who had just been released from prison. He took the nursing student up to the road which runs up Red Hill, and raped her there. What kind of sadist rapes a woman with a broken pelvis? It beggars belief. Anyway the bloke was caught, and found guilty. In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

Last person hanged in NSW was John Trevor Kelly – 24 August 1939 – Hanged at Long Bay Gaol for the murder of Marjorie Constance Sommerlad at Tenterfield, NSW.

You’ll have to dig a little deeper than what you’ve provided.

He was sentenced to death by hanging (ACT’s first death sentence) but I can’t find anything to say that the sentence was carried out.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/3101671

Vincent George Dixon’s death sentence was commuted to life on 15 March 1953. If you impute his name into trove search engine quite a few items come up under it.

…and the mystery is solved.

Many hands make light work.

sarahsarah said :

Alderney said :

Hacketthead said :

A location I pass every day on the way to work which has a creepy history is the road up to the Red Hill Lookout, off Mugga Way in Deakin. In his book “Australian Tragic”, the journalist Jack Marx relates a story from I think it was 1954. A nursing student and her boyfriend were driving back to Canberra from Queanbeyan, and had an accident. The boyfriend was really badly, critically hurt, and the nursing student broke her pelvis. A car came by, and the driver said he’d take the nursing student to hospital and get an ambulance for the boyfriend. Turns out the driver was a serial sex offender, who had just been released from prison. He took the nursing student up to the road which runs up Red Hill, and raped her there. What kind of sadist rapes a woman with a broken pelvis? It beggars belief. Anyway the bloke was caught, and found guilty. In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

Last person hanged in NSW was John Trevor Kelly – 24 August 1939 – Hanged at Long Bay Gaol for the murder of Marjorie Constance Sommerlad at Tenterfield, NSW.

You’ll have to dig a little deeper than what you’ve provided.

He was sentenced to death by hanging (ACT’s first death sentence) but I can’t find anything to say that the sentence was carried out.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/3101671

Vincent George Dixon’s death sentence was commuted to life on 15 March 1953. If you impute his name into trove search engine quite a few items come up under it.

poetix said :

poetix said :

Garema Place…

If you think that those carousel horses are locked up to protect the machine, you are wrong. After the third person was killed, they tried to cage the beasts. But the night mares still roam free, creating a race of pimply faced zombies, who wonder aimlessly through the world’s least inspired city centre.

Or wander, even.

I saw nothing wrong with “wondering aimlessly”…. Sounds like a perfectly reasonable pastime.

Hacketthead said :

Juliana House, where I first started working as a teenager in 1991, is looking a bit forlorn – I don’t think it has any tennants at the moment. I remember people saying that place was haunted, apparently a worker was killed when they were building it, and the lifts would go up and down at night of their own accord. I don’t know if that’s true or just an urban legend. The area behind the Soul Bar formerly known as the Contented Soul in Woden is also a bit spooky looking – all overgrown, with the ground floor windows of the surrounding office buildings boarded up and graffitied.

Lifts will park themselves at a specified floor level after a specified period of inactivity. Thus it is not uncommon for lifts to move “by themselves” in the middle of the night.

4 Baudin Crescent Forrest is kinda creepy. A room behind the house had to be demolished by the owners because of the tragic & mysterious death of a young woman there. Apparently the vibe still hung around, because the owners still sold up and moved out.

Alderney said :

Hacketthead said :

A location I pass every day on the way to work which has a creepy history is the road up to the Red Hill Lookout, off Mugga Way in Deakin. In his book “Australian Tragic”, the journalist Jack Marx relates a story from I think it was 1954. A nursing student and her boyfriend were driving back to Canberra from Queanbeyan, and had an accident. The boyfriend was really badly, critically hurt, and the nursing student broke her pelvis. A car came by, and the driver said he’d take the nursing student to hospital and get an ambulance for the boyfriend. Turns out the driver was a serial sex offender, who had just been released from prison. He took the nursing student up to the road which runs up Red Hill, and raped her there. What kind of sadist rapes a woman with a broken pelvis? It beggars belief. Anyway the bloke was caught, and found guilty. In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

Last person hanged in NSW was John Trevor Kelly – 24 August 1939 – Hanged at Long Bay Gaol for the murder of Marjorie Constance Sommerlad at Tenterfield, NSW.

You’ll have to dig a little deeper than what you’ve provided.

He was sentenced to death by hanging (ACT’s first death sentence) but I can’t find anything to say that the sentence was carried out.

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/page/3101671

Girt_Hindrance3:43 pm 12 Oct 12

Alderney said :

molongloid said :

Mary Celeste at http://goo.gl/maps/FeCMf 10 Wongoola Close, O’Connor. The white car has been sitting there with flat tyres for years. Further down the drive way is an old car with shrubs growing up through it. Broken windows on the house.

I don’t know much about O’Connor, but the kid across the road from No. 10 behind the gate looks kinda creepy…

The kid behind the gate? There’s also a face behind the railing near the front door…

molongloid said :

Mary Celeste at http://goo.gl/maps/FeCMf 10 Wongoola Close, O’Connor. The white car has been sitting there with flat tyres for years. Further down the drive way is an old car with shrubs growing up through it. Broken windows on the house.

I don’t know much about O’Connor, but the kid across the road from No. 10 behind the gate looks kinda creepy…

Hacketthead said :

A location I pass every day on the way to work which has a creepy history is the road up to the Red Hill Lookout, off Mugga Way in Deakin. In his book “Australian Tragic”, the journalist Jack Marx relates a story from I think it was 1954. A nursing student and her boyfriend were driving back to Canberra from Queanbeyan, and had an accident. The boyfriend was really badly, critically hurt, and the nursing student broke her pelvis. A car came by, and the driver said he’d take the nursing student to hospital and get an ambulance for the boyfriend. Turns out the driver was a serial sex offender, who had just been released from prison. He took the nursing student up to the road which runs up Red Hill, and raped her there. What kind of sadist rapes a woman with a broken pelvis? It beggars belief. Anyway the bloke was caught, and found guilty. In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

Last person hanged in NSW was John Trevor Kelly – 24 August 1939 – Hanged at Long Bay Gaol for the murder of Marjorie Constance Sommerlad at Tenterfield, NSW.

You’ll have to dig a little deeper than what you’ve provided.

Has henry_bg posted his home address yet? I wreckon that would be a creepy location…

Also I’m going to vote the new ‘Loading Zone’ restaurant in Odgers Lane, the Melbourne building. Alfresco dining, right beside the seedy back door to Club X.

Philip Pocock doesn’t have a a bedroom obviously. He sleeps standing up in his kitchen, contained in a large vessel filled with Sulfur Hexafluoride so that each morning, he reemerges with this same, stern, heavy face: http://images.canberratimes.com.au/2012/10/02/3682740/LI-art-wd-pocock-20121002185638506740-620×349.jpg

Hacketthead said :

In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

aah, the days of common sense…

i’m not one who has any truck with belief in a spritual world, but i was none to keen to spend too much time in the small numbers in the am while a night porter many years back in the fifth floor of the rex hotel – home to old files, remnants of repair and god knows what creepy lurky things make me shiver to recall…

Philip Pocock’s bedroom?

A location I pass every day on the way to work which has a creepy history is the road up to the Red Hill Lookout, off Mugga Way in Deakin. In his book “Australian Tragic”, the journalist Jack Marx relates a story from I think it was 1954. A nursing student and her boyfriend were driving back to Canberra from Queanbeyan, and had an accident. The boyfriend was really badly, critically hurt, and the nursing student broke her pelvis. A car came by, and the driver said he’d take the nursing student to hospital and get an ambulance for the boyfriend. Turns out the driver was a serial sex offender, who had just been released from prison. He took the nursing student up to the road which runs up Red Hill, and raped her there. What kind of sadist rapes a woman with a broken pelvis? It beggars belief. Anyway the bloke was caught, and found guilty. In those days, rape was a capital offence. He was sentenced to death and hanged, I can’t remember if he was executed in Goulburn or Sydney.

molongloid said :

Mary Celeste at http://goo.gl/maps/FeCMf 10 Wongoola Close, O’Connor. The white car has been sitting there with flat tyres for years. Further down the drive way is an old car with shrubs growing up through it. Broken windows on the house.

That’s nothing. A bloke who lives near me has had an old Sigma sitting on flat tyres in his driveway for at least seven years. He (is a bit peculiar and) reckons it will make burglars think “someone is at home”. A few years ago it was joined by his crappy Falcon when it died. And his current vehicle ain’t sounding so healthy either.

Government house with the Yarralumla blackfella ghost.

I’ve been here since 1965 and I’d never had a creepy moment until I saw the “Moth Ascending” on Drakeford drive in Tuggeranong.

FWIW – Haig Park is a park, because you cant build there, as there is a fault line running through it or so I was told in a college geography class.

Mary Celeste at http://goo.gl/maps/FeCMf 10 Wongoola Close, O’Connor. The white car has been sitting there with flat tyres for years. Further down the drive way is an old car with shrubs growing up through it. Broken windows on the house.

poetix said :

Garema Place…

If you think that those carousel horses are locked up to protect the machine, you are wrong. After the third person was killed, they tried to cage the beasts. But the night mares still roam free, creating a race of pimply faced zombies, who wonder aimlessly through the world’s least inspired city centre.

Or wander, even.

Garema Place…

If you think that those carousel horses are locked up to protect the machine, you are wrong. After the third person was killed, they tried to cage the beasts. But the night mares still roam free, creating a race of pimply faced zombies, who wonder aimlessly through the world’s least inspired city centre.

“Belconnen”

Juliana House, where I first started working as a teenager in 1991, is looking a bit forlorn – I don’t think it has any tennants at the moment. I remember people saying that place was haunted, apparently a worker was killed when they were building it, and the lifts would go up and down at night of their own accord. I don’t know if that’s true or just an urban legend. The area behind the Soul Bar formerly known as the Contented Soul in Woden is also a bit spooky looking – all overgrown, with the ground floor windows of the surrounding office buildings boarded up and graffitied.

There’s a creepy house in Cox Street Ainslie (I won’t freak the current inhabitants out by specifying the number, but it’s in the 30s). Worst ever luck: in the mid 1980s a girl living in a student group house while at uni was almost carved up by a mad intruder – nearly killed. He thought she was his ex, who had just moved into the adjoining bedroom. Realising his mistake, he went on to murder the housemate. The landlord – a supposedly hippy leftie public schoolteacher Ainslie real estate mogul who owned four houses in Ainslie, had the carpets cleaned the minute the remaining housemates left (same day as the murder of course) and re-let the house within a week. Didn’t even replace the carpet in the murder room.

The opposite of a creepy Canberra location is where I live: accidentally Lee-Steere Street, I never thought life could be so sweet!

Comic_and_Gamer_Nerd9:28 pm 10 Oct 12

voytek3 said :

I don’t know if its so much creepy as it is depressing as cancer but the entirety of Canberra fits that description.

*cocks 44 in mouth*

Hahahahs. Classic.

Moneypenny, the Currong Apartment are allegedly known as the “Suicide Flats”. Apparently residents and non residents alike have been known to utilise the height of the apartment blocks to leap to their demise from.

The more remote parts of Kowen Forest can be pretty eerie – something to do with the way that the beds of pine needles deaden the sound.

I don’t know if its so much creepy as it is depressing as cancer but the entirety of Canberra fits that description.

*cocks 44 in mouth*

The Great Wall at Mawson is pretty creepy. I heard it’s been gentrified a bit now, but the one time I went there to have a look at a rental property which was available, I definitely got a bad vibe. I knew a guy in college who’se sister lived there, she said there’s been at least one murder there.

moneypenny26127:05 pm 10 Oct 12

Hacketthead said :

I’ve been living here since 1985 and it was the first time I’d heard the stories associated with the Brick Works, or Currong Apartments but some like the ghosts in Parliament House I had heard of. Canberra has it’s own unique and weird history.

What’s the story with the Currong apartments?

I’ve heard the Canberra airplane crash site at night is creepy. Never been there so can’t say for sure. I think it’s out off Pialligo Avenue somewhere between Quangers and the airport.

Gantz said :

Just do a search on the site for ‘haunting’s’ or ‘ghost’ I think there is a fair few threads and discussions already had.

At least it should provide you with somewhere 🙂

Make sure you consult your iridologist and your tarot reader first.

Lake Burley Griffin on a cold grey misty July morning with the bare skeletal trees, two or three shuffling, ashen-faced public servants and the the Carillon playing a classic dirge (is it able to produce anything else) across the lake.
I wonder if George A Romero has ever visited?

Perhaps not somewhere that most Canberrans could go visit, but the sub-basement underneath the John Gorton Building. It’s not climate controlled, it’s dark, there are locked cages where you can only see about 2′ into the darkness. It’s eerily quiet, there is random stuff stored down there. And there are locked doors that go who-knows-where.

On my own, it was pretty weird to be there. With someone else, it was a bit exciting.

Just do a search on the site for ‘haunting’s’ or ‘ghost’ I think there is a fair few threads and discussions already had.

At least it should provide you with somewhere 🙂

Hi Gantz, I’m not all that paranoid, just morbidly interested. 🙂 Was reading a booklet a friend showed me called Macabre Canberra, which listed locations around Canberra associated with various crimes, tragedies and hauntings. I’ve been living here since 1985 and it was the first time I’d heard the stories associated with the Brick Works, or Currong Apartments but some like the ghosts in Parliament House I had heard of. Canberra has it’s own unique and weird history.

Parliament house, the new one or the old one.

neanderthalsis2:03 pm 10 Oct 12

Here

and

Here

If by creepiest you mean the places with the most creeps.

Firstly, don’t live your life in such a paranoid state (This thread won’t help)

Also, Yarralumla Brick Works if they still exist.

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