The hill above Junee, New South Wales, rises gently from the flat agricultural town, topped by a double-storey Victorian manor with wide verandas and iron lacework that Christopher William Crawley built in 1885. From a distance it looks prosperous and settled. It is known across Australia as the country’s most haunted house.
When Crawley died, his widow withdrew—not for a period of mourning, but for decades. She left the homestead only on rare occasions for church, spending her remaining years seated on the upper veranda, watching the town below without descending to it. She outlived her husband by twenty-three years and died in 1933. The house left the family in 1948 and passed to caretakers, one of whom—Jack Simpson—was shot and killed on the front porch in 1960. The man who shot him had, by accounts of the time, become disturbed by repeated viewings of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, released that same year.
The Ryan family purchased the property in 1963 when it had fallen into serious disrepair and restored it as a tourist attraction and private residence. The upper veranda generates the most consistent accounts: a presence near the chair where Mrs. Crawley sat, a weight in the air on the upper level distinct from the ground floor. The chapel produces its own reports at night. The coach house is considered among the most active areas by investigators. Australian and international television programs have filmed there for decades, and the accumulated accounts from independent visitors continue to draw people to the hill above Junee.
Story Source: Documentary TV episode titled “A Big Country” (ABC Australia, 1977)
Address: 1 Homestead Lane, Junee, NSW 2663, Australia
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