Motel Booing
If you’ve never seen a platypus in the wild, or a ghost in your bed, then Malanda Lodge, on the Atherton Tablelands, 80kms southwest of Cairns, looms as your chance to kill two birds.
According to http://www.strangenation.com.au/casebook/ghostroom17.htm, the ghost occupies Room 17. Noeleen Stagg the cleaner was the first to notice the spook. She’d mop the bathroom tiles only for some thoughtless mug to tramp over all her good work an hour later – despite the room remaining empty.
Odd noises would escape the room – none belonging to the inhouse movie service or cable TV. Noeleen suspected the sounds – which had a creepy corroborree quality – could be traced to the Aboriginal spirits of the Millaa Millaa people, but research gave her a different theory.
Back in the 1960s, before the lodge was built, the site belonged to an abattoir. Were the weird didgeridoo tones the echo of doomed cattle? Noeleen could only speculate, though the spook with the boots was most likely the same poor slaughterman who fell into a vat of boiling oil.
Times have changed. Malanda has changed. Coffee crops and tourism have arrived in the one-time dairy village. The boiling vat has been usurped by a kidney-shaped pool with its own artificial waterfall.
Surrounded by tropical gardens, Malanda Lodge is a four-star hideaway ‘where nothing’s a problem and everything’s a pleasure’. You can nurse a spirit in the cocktail bar, or spy on the platypus swimming in the creek next-door. Enjoy your stay. Just do me a favour – check the water temp before hopping into the en suite tub.
[The lodge at on the corner of Merragallan and Millaa Millaa Roads. Contact 07-4096-5555, or see more at http://www.malandalodgemotel.com.au/.]
August 30th, 2005 at 10:06 pm
There’s no end to haunted pub yarns. I seem to remember the Maori Chief in South Melbourne was haunted. Apparently the old chief manifested himself in the form of a large portrait that sat on the walls of the boozer and, so the folklore goes, when the painting was taking down it put itself back up overnight. Easy to explain, but then there were tales of the chief being so excited by topless barmaids that his picture shook until it jumped off the walls. It’s enough to give anyone the willies…
August 31st, 2005 at 8:20 am
Hmmm, makes you wonder if ghosts can go blind -
Many pubs do have a haunted reputation – some genuine. Like the Sidney Kidman Hotel in Kapunda (SA). The new owners became so rattled by clunks in the night they invited a medium from Melbourne to exorcise the rooms upstairs. Apparently the culprit was a see-through shearer who took his own life in the pub’s grand past.
If you know any other good spook yarns – pubs or any other locale in Oz – then post us a bone-chiller. Or a rib-tickler.