Above: The Hobart Convict Penitentiary. (tasmania.com)
The following is a lesson in not believing everything you read online, especially on ‘paranormal industry’ social media.
Back in 2011, the photo below – described as showing an ‘eerie face in the mist’ – turned up on the ‘Brisbane ‘Ghosts Tours” Facebook page.
It was accompanied with the claim that it was taken during a tour at the South Brisbane Cemetery on the previous Saturday night. There were a couple of immediate issues with this claim. Firstly, it did not look like any part of that cemetery. Secondly, it appeared to have been taken during daylight.
The truth was revealed soon afterwards when the photo was posted on another social media page, this time with one crucial difference – it was uncropped. On that page it was correctly identified as having been taken at the Hobart Penitentiary and Chapel, Tasmania, under a glorious blue sky. What is more, it was from 2006. So very clearly not ‘last Saturday night at the South Brisbane Cemetery’.
When multiple commenters pointed out this fact, ‘Ghost Tours’ admin initially insisted that it was from their cemetery tour, a claim they only backed away from when the original photographer himself intervened to point out that it was indeed from Hobart in 2006. He said that he had sent the photo to Ghost Tours in an email which made it clear where and when the photo had been taken, and that Ghost Tours had reproduced that email online but edited out the identifying details. It would be fair to say that he was not impressed with their actions.
Ghost Tours admin then claimed to have ‘misread’ the email. After I discussed this story online, I received an email containing legal threats from Ghost Tours (‘we are asking you now to cease and desist or we will have to take action against you’) with further claims that it was a ‘simple mistake’ of ‘mislabelling’. This excuse was contradicted by their very selective editing of the photo and text. In fact, even after the discrepancy was first pointed out, Ghost Tours had still insisted that it was from a night tour at the cemetery.
The legal threat was, of course, ignored.
The most straightforward conclusion would be that this whole episode was a deliberate act of deception, designed to falsely promote the cemetery as a ‘haunted’ place. As it is, incidents like this only serve to undermine any genuine conversations about the folklore of the supernatural.
This ‘ghost’ might not haunt the South Brisbane Cemetery, but the photo should haunt Ghost Tours.
Christopher Dawson 