If the minutiae of historic incarcerations, executions, and the reasons for them are your jam, you can’t miss the Old Melbourne Gaol. Located in Russell Street, in the Melbourne CBD, construction of the OMG (I did lol when I acronymed that) began in 1839, opening its doors to the criminally inclined in 1845. By 1850, it was already chockers.
Extension wings and purpose-built, female-only cellblocks were added in 1864, covering an entire city block, and featured bathhouses, a hospital, exercise yards, a chapel, and accommodation for staff and their families, along with three floors of cells. Each floor was an indicator of the gravity of the crime committed, and those convicted of the most serious offences would start their incarceration on the lowest floor, in solitary confinement 23 hours a day. The last hour they were permitted exercise but made to wear “silence masks,” which look like a ghoulish precursor to KKK hoods.
The foreboding bluestone building was witness to 133 executions by hanging, and the scaffold can still be seen today, jutting ominously from the first-floor landing at the rear end of the cell block. It was confronting to see the trapdoor underneath, and impossible not to try to imagine what the inmates suffered in their final moments on earth.
Prisoners were buried in unmarked graves in the penitentiary grounds, so no surprises there would be some pretty pissed-off spirits haunting this site. Woo Woo tales abound, the most prolific being of the ghosts who haunt cell 17. Deemed the “paranormal epicentre,” people who visited this cell reported something gripping their throats, being unable to breathe, the tugging of clothes, being prevented from leaving, or being pushed outside by forces unseen. Of course I went into cell 17, and nada.
Many of the cells are exhibition rooms, chronicling the lives of the inmates through collections of photos, personal letters, and news clippings. Of great curiosity to me, the Gun Alley Murder case of Colin Campbell Ross, an Australian wine bar owner accused and executed for the murder of Alma Tirtschke (12 years old). Despite flimsy evidence relating to an auburn hair of the victim and hairs on blankets in the wine saloon, along with information provided by two dubious characters (a prostitute and a fortune teller), and motivated by trial by media (Murdoch’s mob) and public hysteria, he was executed in 1922. To add insult to injury (if that’s at all possible here), the executioner didn’t get the rope to body weight to trap door quotient correct, and Ross spent 40 minutes strangling to death!
In a spectacular example of wrongful execution, forensic experts re-examined the hair sample in 1998 and concluded they did not match, and ten years later Ross was posthumously pardoned; however, the conviction still stands.
Celebrity inmates at the Old Melbourne Gaol include Ned Kelly and Frederick Bailey Deeming (suspected but not proven) serial killer Jack the Ripper, both of whom have creepy death masks on display. The masks were made by Maximillian Kreitmayer, a seriously weird dude (he had an anatomical museum that included wax models of sexual organs decayed by venereal disease…ew!) The objective of the death mask was for the now-discredited science of phrenology, the detailed study of the shape and size of the cranium, as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities – go figure!
After hanging, the head would be shaved and a plaster cast applied, which would later be used to create wax replicas for study. To say it was spooky moving from cell to cell, reading about the lives of those incarcerated whilst simultaneously being watched by their death masks, would be an understatement.
Old gaol stories of yore expose the obtuse humanness that could find a public hanging a social event. Researching this story revealed some fascinating anecdotes about human nature, an interesting rabbit hole to go down. We spent a couple of hours at the Old Melbourne Gaol and realistically only scraped the surface. It’s most definitely somewhere that warrants more than one visit, if only to plumb the supernatural on a night tour. Go!
