“Why are you celebrating Halloween? We’re not Americans.”

The same debate pops up every year around the same time as the Halloween decorations do. Someone else will chime in about the Gaelic origins of Halloween; that is, the festival originated in Scotland and Irish in pagan times at Samhain.

Samhain is the first day of November and a marker of the beginning of Winter. While earlier Gaelic people followed the Wheel of the Year around equinoxes and solstices, modern Scottish settlers wanted to celebrate at the same time as back home. With Christianity came “All Hallow’s Eve”, later shortened to “Halloween” (a Scots term).

So, no, Halloween in Bundy isn’t an imported fad from America. It arrived here with the Scottish settlers who helped build the town.

1. Halloween in Auld Bundy

Bundy has a long tradition of Halloween festivities from the colonial era. It was hosted annually by the Caledonian Society - the forerunner of our modern Caledonian Pipe Band. The festivities were so popular they went all hours of the night until dawn.

Inside the old Caledonian Hall, Scots celebrated with:

• Haggis - Brought in on a silver tray with dancing and bagpipes as it’s paraded around the venue, often to a dramatic recitation of a Robert Burns piece.
• Chappit tatties (mashed potatoes) hiding trinkets of fat. A thimble for lifelong bachelorhood, or a ring for marriage.
• Dookin’ for apples - That is, plunging your head into a bucket of water full of apples, and attempting to catch one in your mouth.

Over time, Bundy Scots started to loosen their grip on Old Country traditions. An attempt to revive the annual Halloween festivities occurred in 1929. Aberdeen-born President of the Caledonian Society, William Douglas (Oakwood), arranged the event despite the absence of bagpipes. It was a low turnout.

Over time, Auld Bundy Halloween faded. But the stories remain.

So, cue the ominous haunted house organ soundtrack.

 

2. Fairymead House - A Sweet Curse

A beautiful heritage-listed homestead stands in our local Botanic Gardens. It was the 1890 plantation house of the Young family, gifted to the Council in 1988 by Bundaberg Sugar Company. The old home was transported in six separate pieces to its present location in 1989.

While the aesthetic and new surroundings are serene, its past is anything but.

The name Fairymead seems innocent, right? The land was selected by the Brown brothers, and named when a visitor saw it on a misty morning, commenting that it looks like a “fairy mead” (meadow). It was perfect for the Browns, and almost like a nod to the folklore told to them in Somersetshire.

The Young family bought the land in 1875. This house came later.
Though, beneath the mythical name and grand facade, the home bore witness to tragedy and loss that may still echo through the house in its new location.

It may be a curse or just a tragic coincidence due to poor workplace health and safety at the time… But while Fairymead House, with its mill and sugar plantation, paints a sweet picture, the archives are grim. Between 1888 to 1949, I can count about 30 deaths on the plantation as a result of freak accidents, fire, violence, industrial accidents, and disease.

• 1888: Mrs O’Laughlin perished after her skirt caught fire.
• 1889: Three South Sea Islander labourers convicted of murdering another labourer..
• 1892: A German worker fell into a tank of boiling sugar.
• 1901: A dysentery outbreak claimed ten South Sea Islander lives; forty more were hospitalised.
• 1908–1940s: Electrocutions, snakebites, tramline accidents, and industrial explosions haunted the plantation.

From its construction in 1890, Fairymead House bore witness to decades of tragedy.

 

3. Shadows in the Botanical Gardens

By day, the Bert Hinkler House sits serenely amongst the lush greenery of the Botanical Gardens. The gardens are a place of weddings, family picnic, and quiet contemplation while drowning out the sound of flapping ibis wings.

Bert Hinkler’s house, was  dismantled brick by brick in England and brought to its present site in 1984.

Before colonisation, the land was said to have been a meeting place for surrounding Aboriginal peoples. Locals today remember a corroboree ring in the paddock, as well as two bora rings on the side of a hill visible from the road.

In later years, in the mid-1950s, the Trammachi family leased the property as a dairy farm. In a BRC Now article, Paul Trammachi recalled swagmen making camp beneath an old fig tree (about 500-600 years old) near the Fairymead House Museum. One lone swagman returned for 3 years, being the camp of Bundy’s final swagman.

Some say the area is haunted by the same swagman, his spirit drifting around the lakes which were once a swamp full of eels.

The gardens are usually a place of tranquility, but as dusk falls, ducks get ready to roost, and the lights turn off in Fairymead House, those who walk the winding paths after dark, Bundaberg’s peaceful park might just feel… not so peaceful after all.

 

4. The School of Arts

This glorious pink building on Bourbong Street was a centre of local culture and learning. It contained reading rooms, lectures, and a museum for all townsfolk to access. Behind its classical revival facade and window arches, one of Bundaberg’s darkest tragedies was brewing.

In the 1920s, the School of Arts was the workplace of a respectable museum curator, Mr. Lewis Holden Maynard. Mr. Maynard was also the president of the School of Arts committee, and a former Bundaberg City Council Mayor. The ex-Mayor was of high standing and respected as an intellectual. Behind closed doors at his home on the Bundaberg South end of George Street, his second marriage was collapsing.

One of Mr. Maynard’s daughters from the first marriage to Muriel Annette (nee Bloxham) recalled Maynard’s infidelity, and shared the story with her son, Lewis “Bernard” Harte. She told him that his grandmother Muriel had gotten ill and suffered from asthma, dying in 1915.

While Muriel was unwell, the family lore was that Maynard brought his English girlfriend, Alice, to Australia to become the family’s housekeeper. Alice was rumoured to be poisoning Muriel until she died in January 1915, paving the way for Alice to move in as Maynard’s new wife.

A couple of months later, in March 1915, the now widowed Maynard married Alice and brought her into the family home with multiple children.

One afternoon, on 4 February 1928, Mr. Maynard shot Alice before taking his own life with the same weapon. The town was shocked and the tragedy was reported in the newspapers all over the country. Bundaberg’s social order had cracked.

Mr. Maynard was an avid collector of artefacts for the School of Arts Museum. He was said to have had the largest historical weapons collection in Australia. In hindsight, this might have been a red flag if not for Maynard being a museum curator. Maynard donated this weapons collection to the Queensland Museum, as well as other artefacts including an Ancient Egyptian shabti (funerary figurine). The shabti was somehow acquired from renowned archaeologist Flinders Petrie after an excavation of a sacred burial tomb in Abydos.

While the collection is no longer there, the School of Arts has preserved an echo of the troubled museum curator dusting off Aboriginal stone tools, canoes, taxidermy crocodile, and an alleged human skull.

If you’re in the School of Arts after dark, you might hear the faint scrape of a chair or soft clangs of objects being placed on shelves as Mr. Maynard ponders what to do about his second wife.

 

5. Bundaberg Post Office

Just around the corner, the Bundaberg Post Office is recognised by its looming clock tower. A perfect spot for our town’s early aerial photographs. In 1932, the foreman telegraph line worker, Donald Frederick Luther, was accused of a similar crime causing speculation around accident versus intent.

Luther lived with his wife, Margaret (née Tennant) on Gahans Road, Kalkie. They got married in 1921 but over time, their relationship got rocky. At least, from Mr. Luther’s perspective. Letters would reveal during a trial later on that Luther was writing love letters to another woman, Maggie Clarke, signing off, “Your intended hubby, Don Luther”.

On the night of 25 July 1932, a gun fired in the Luther home. Luther sat at the dinner table with his teenage stepdaughter and his wife, Mr. Luther claimed to be repairing his rifle when it was discharged by accident, ending in his wife’s death.

The letters to Miss Clarke had the Crown Prosecutor, Mr. Cosgrove, convinced of a more sinister story. The Crown alleged that the shooting was intentional, and Luther wanted to remove his wife from the equation. But in March 1933, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. It was declared an accident.

The town was divided on the verdict, and Luther left Bundaberg with a fresh start in Nanango as a senior linesman. Maggie Clarke stayed behind, working as a dressmaker. Eventually, she and Luther married.

It’s said today, if you stand beneath the clock tower on a quiet night, you might hear a strange electrical sound buzzing in the wind.

 

6. Holy Rosary Church

The Holy Rosary Catholic Church in Bundaberg is hauntingly beautiful. Designed in Gothic Revival style by architect Francis Stanley, it opened in 1888, replacing a humble wooden chapel. Few realise the church grounds conceal the hidden crypt of its founder, Father Constantine Rossolini.

Born in 1846 in Cupramontana, Italy, Count Rossolini gave up a life of privilege to serve the church. Chosen by Bishop Quinn, he arrived in Brisbane aboard the Storm King in 1871 and settled in Bundaberg after years serving the Gayndah–Mount Perry parish. His legacy endures in stone- and his earthly body rests within the grand house of worship he helped create.

The church where he once led his congregation also became his tomb. After Father Rossolini’s death on 7 November 1893, approval was granted for his burial “ten feet under and ten feet in” within the church grounds. The exact location of his crypt remains unconfirmed, adding intrigue, and perhaps unease.

The Brisbane Courier (1893) recorded it as an “intramural burial” — an indoor resting place, with a building erected for the purpose.

 

7. Wintergarden Theatre

Let’s open the curtains on Bundaberg’s Wintergarden Theatre- a landmark where art deco elegance and cinematic history meet something colder than air-conditioning. Recently restored under the guidance of architect Tomas O’Malley, the theatre’s story reaches far deeper than its 1929 grand opening.

Before Birch, Carroll and Coyle Ltd. built the theatre, this corner of Woongarra and Maryborough Streets had already seen generations of stories… and perhaps a few restless souls.

In 1880, the land belonged to government surveyor William Leofric Barns, who died that same year, leaving it to his wife, Caroline Louisa “Carrie” Barns (née Nott) of a prominent sugar family. Their home, Weycliffe, stood nearby where Cherri Backpackers now sits overlooking Bundaberg’s first cemetery. Before 1881, the town’s burials took place across the road from the Barns residence, long before the remains were moved to the present Takalvan Street cemetery.

By the 1890s, Carrie’s brother, Frederick Lewis Nott, had purchased the allotment where the Wintergarden stands today. His wife, Jeannie, ran a boarding house there known in electoral rolls as “Mrs. Nott’s.” Some local historians believe that structure was later transformed into the Austral Hall- a two-storey wooden venue opened in 1909 by widowed proprietress Mary Agnes Everden.

The hall narrowly escaped destruction in a 1925 fire that gutted its living quarters and scorched the stairs. In 1928, Birch, Carroll and Coyle announced plans to remove the hall and replace it with their grand new theatre.

But it seems not everything was removed.

According to a BRC Now article, staff working in the building during its Blockbuster Video days reported strange happenings, posters falling on their own, videos flying off shelves, and an eerie heaviness around the upper back stairs, a spot quietly dubbed a “no-go zone.”

Danny Carswell, son of former usherette Delsie Carswell (who worked at the theatre from 1949 to 1954), suggested the spirits might be those of night cleaners who once worked alongside his mother. Yet one can’t help but wonder- could the “presence” belong to someone further back in history?

Perhaps Mr. Barns, the devout landowner, still lingers in disapproval of the “immoral” modern films shown on his land. Or maybe it’s Mrs. Everden, the hall’s proud proprietress, unwilling to let go of the building she once called her own.

Whether you believe in ghosts or simply enjoy some good local history, the Wintergarden Theatre reminds us of Bundaberg’s layered entertainment history. Sometimes, it might make itself known with a cheeky “boo!” in the corridor.