A new adults-only graveyard tour is descending upon Yass Cemetery this Halloween and the accompanying tales of gruesome and unusual deaths are not for the faint-hearted.
If this tour were held after dark — which it isn’t due to rabbit warrens and uneven ground — the horror factor would be next level.
Volunteer tour guide with Yass Valley History Centre, Corrine Chalmers, was reluctant to divulge too many stories but she warned, “train travel is not as safe as one would think, is all I’m going to tell you”.
Apparently a young Scottish soldier, who managed to survive battle injury in WWII and even three years in a POW camp, didn’t live to see the last train stop home after being repatriated.
“Let’s just say there was a mishap,” Corrine said. “So there were parts of him found, shall we say.”
The tour is historically accurate and took more than 250 painstaking hours of research in the Yass & District Historical Society archives as well as the National Library of Australia’s Trove portal. Corinne calls the dark collection of ghastly deaths “out of the ordinary”.
“We had a gentleman back in 1876, who just popped out to grab something from the shops for his wife and well, that went horribly wrong,” Corrine said, without elaborating further.
“We’ve had all sorts of interesting ones. One young lady found herself in love with a young man where she worked and it ended up being a very tragic situation where her love, I wouldn’t say was unrequited, but he actually did murder her and committed suicide. For this young lady, it brought such shame to her family and her grave had been left unmarked for so many years… her family actually ended up leaving the area.”
The manner in which some poor souls have died will shock you (one unfortunate chap had a mishap with a harmless table utensil and ended up dying a painful death).
A local nun also met her maker in a shocking way — hydatid. I asked Corrine to explain but she just whispered, “Google it”. It ain’t pretty.
“She had a terrible death with hydatid and this actually all happened in front of students,” Corinne said.
Previous cemetery tours run by Yass & District Historical Society have coincided with the annual Canberra Heritage Festival in Autumn, however Corrine said, “this time we’ve gone really dark”.
These tours usually book out quickly so there are already plans for an extra cemetery tour on Saturday 15 November at 6pm. Get in quick.
The two-hour Halloween tour is on Friday 31 October at 6pm, at Yass Cemetery on Irvine Drive, Yass.
Yass & District Historical Society is on Facebook.
Bookings essential: trybooking.com/1471613
