Royal Botanical Garden: Unexplained incidents at one of Sydney’s most famous landmarks
One of the country’s best known landmarks teems with people during the day, but there have been multiple reports of unexplained incidents.
It’s one of Australia’s most visited tourist attractions – its green expanse is featured in a million tourist snaps, the perfect foreground for any photo of the Sydney Opera House and Harbour Bridge.
On a day of blue skies, with the sun streaming down, Sydney’s Royal Botanical Garden is blissfully serene as it bustles with joggers, picnickers and amblers.
But those who have spent longer in its 26 hectares suspect something darker may lurk among the rare plants and heritage buildings.
“I don’t love being here by myself,” a Royal Botanical Garden (RBG) staff member says of the 1856 built Rathborne Lodge, tucked away within earshot of the constantly rumbling Cahill Expressway.
“I’ve just heard so many ghost stories. Last week it was thundering and so dark I was like, ‘Any ghosts in here today? Well we’re hanging out OK.’”
In this lodge, a mysterious woman has been sighted; another is said to haunt the Garden’s main building; elsewhere the so-called “umbrella man” has been seen wandering around after dark looking for somewhere to rest.
“The history of this place is very deep,” the Garden’s librarian Miguel Garcia tells news.com.au.
“The Gadigal people had a dreaming place here; Aboriginal ceremonies were held here. And the Garden has been the centre of science, society and culture and Sydney itself since the First Fleet.
“You could say the survival of the colony was dependent on the Garden because the first nine acres of corn were planted here.”
Legless lady of the Herbarium
The Garden was established in 1816. And perhaps some echoes still remain of the people who have passed through the area during its illustrious two century history.
“Look down there,” says Mr Garcia pointing towards the dimly lit and silent corridors of the National Herbarium of New South Wales – housed within the RBG’s administration block – where plant specimens are packed in airtight crates and stacked floor to ceiling.
“Imagine at night when all the lights are off. It’s really kind of spooky.”
Indeed, one unsettling spirit is said to haunt the Herbarium.
Right now the 1.4 million plants that are stored in the Herbarium are being moved to a purpose-built new facility at the RBG’s site in Mount Annan, near Campbelltown in the city’s southwest.
A herbarium is like a physical encyclopaedia of plant life. Specimens are carefully dried, pressed and stored so they can be examined decades, even centuries, later. Some of the specimens here date back to the 18th century and Captain Cook’s voyages around the Pacific or were collected by botanists Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander.
As the plants are moved, around a million of them are being digitised – carefully photographed – so the Herbarium’s delicate contents can be accessed online.
When the last staff member takes the last specimen to its new home later this year, they will leave one thing behind: a very unwelcome visitor.
“People have told me that working here late at night that they have heard odd noises and a couple of people actually told me about seeing a half torso image of a woman,” Mr Garcia says.
He has never seen or sensed the legless lady of the Herbarium. But Juliet Scrine, who runs the Garden’s ghost tour, tells news.com.au she feels a tingle in her bones in certain corners of the park.
“I would say a third of the people who come on the tour feel something,” she says.
Twice a month she takes Sydneysiders and tourists on a circuit of the park – a mostly outdoor exploration of a side of the Garden few get to see.
After dark, when all the other visitors have left, it’s just her, her guests and whatever ethereal figure decides to join the group that evening.
The mystery of Eleanor
“We know there’s definitely one body in the Garden, and others that have been documented,” Ms Scrine says.
Botanist Allan Cunningham’s remains have been interred in an obelisk in the grounds. Arabanoo, an Indigenous man who was kidnapped as part of a somewhat brutal plan to aid understanding between the colonists and the locals, is also thought to be buried in the area. He lays somewhere between the RBG and the nearby site of First Government House. It’s possible he ended up entombed beneath the Cahill Expressway, Ms Scrine says.
Neither Mr Cunningham nor Arabanoo are thought to haunt the parklands. But it’s possible a women called Eleanor does.
Potentially she resided at Rathborne Lodge, and that’s where Ms Scrine sometimes feels a chill.
Like many of the other modest but beautiful old lodges that pepper the park, it was mostly used as accommodation for grounds staff before they became today’s offices or events spaces. Rathborne Lodge was the grandest of the lot, having been built as a residence for the Governor’s gardener.
It was a gardener who first saw the woman, clad from top to toe in Victorian garb, framed in one of the lodge’s windows, gazing out. It’s an almost impossible feat as when you enter the lodge the window is on a staircase and not somewhere you could easily clamber up to.
“I can feel something in my fingers in this room,” says Ms Scrine as we enter what would have been the lodge’s lounge.
One guest, she says, told her they thought the presence was of a women called Eleanor who loved music.
“Some people, they can feel things. One guy felt a hand on his shoulder. I’ve had people come in this room and they have had to leave.”
The umbrella man
Whether an Eleanor ever lived at the lodge isn’t known. Indeed there’s not much history to many of the spectres; few seem to have links back to known residents of the Garden.
But that’s not the case with the so-called “umbrella man,” said to be the apparition of a homeless man who instead made the RBG his home until his untimely demise.
“He had a little shack down in the Domain (next to the RBG). But because it was unsightly, it was torn down,” Mr Garcia says.
“So he had all of his personal materials loaded into a shopping trolley and when he wanted to bed down for the night, he would take out the umbrellas and make a little shelter for himself, hence the name ‘umbrella man’.
“And unfortunately, the poor man was murdered. I don’t know if the police ever found out who murdered him. I don’t think anybody cared enough really, which is very sad,” he says.
In November 1998, the body of a man identified as Adam Murray was located at the Domain. Mr Murray was a former art dealer and technician who found himself on the streets after his marriage broke down, reported the Sydney Morning Herald.
He would spend his days watching the “nine-to-fivers” rushing around, and at night he would make his umbrella home.
“Rangers have told me stories about how sometimes in their wanderings they have seen somebody walking around with a trolley, very much like this man, and when they go investigate, there would be nobody there.”
Mr Garcia isn’t necessarily taken with such flights of fancy. But there’s no doubt the park is rich with history of the colony and the Indigenous people who lived there long before the British arrived.
“Some people say that these are psychic footprints, echoes of dramatic and highly charged emotional events.
“If you believe that,” he adds.
But on a lonely night, after the sun finally sets over the harbour and the visitors all leave, when the Garden is left to the bats and the roosting birds and the city feels a long way away – maybe you’ll feel a tingle too.
The Royal Botanical Garden’s ‘Ghostly Garden Tours’ take place every few weeks with the next tour at 8pm on Friday, January 28.