Brisbane Ghost Tours: Haunted Brisbane by Night

Brisbane started life as a penal settlement for convicts who had reoffended in New South Wales, the place you were sent when you'd already been sent somewhere. It ran from 1825 until 1842, and it left the city with a convict-built windmill that doubled as a gallows, a commandant still remembered as the Tyrant of Moreton Bay, and a habit of building over its past rather than tearing it down. That makes for good ghost stories, and the best way to hear them is on foot, after dark, with someone who knows where the bodies are buried. Sometimes literally.

This guide covers the tours worth booking, the haunted places you can walk past on your own, and what's on for Halloween.

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If you only do one, do this. It's a two-hour evening walk through the CBD, starting under the awning at the King George Square doors of City Hall, and it covers the city's convict years through to its haunted hotels: the Printer's Devil, Victoria Bridge, the spectre of Captain Logan and the Tyrant of Moreton Bay himself. It runs in the rain, it isn't suitable for children under 10, and it doesn't finish where it starts, so plan your way home (the guides will walk you back if you ask).

It pairs well with our City Essentials heritage walk by daylight. Do the walk in the afternoon, then come back after dark and hear what the guidebooks leave out.

Toowong Cemetery is Queensland's largest: about 44 hectares of hillside with roughly 120,000 burials, established in 1866 and formally opened in 1875. It's heritage-listed, overgrown in the best way, and genuinely unsettling at night.

Two groups run tours here:

The cemetery gates are open 6am to 6pm, so if you'd rather see it by day first, it makes a peaceful morning wander. Buses on Mt Coot-tha Road stop close to the main entrance.

Ghost Tours Australia also runs night tours of South Brisbane Cemetery in Dutton Park (Saturdays, 7:30pm), and shorter haunted-history walks at Lutwyche and Nundah cemeteries on selected Saturdays. There's a three-hour Haunted Brisbane coach tour too, if walking isn't for you.

This is the one everyone asks about. Boggo Road held prisoners from 1883 until 1992, and 42 people were hanged there between 1883 and 1913, including Ellen Thomson, the only woman ever executed in Queensland, and Ernest Austin, the state's last execution. Its "Ghosts & Gallows" tour was Brisbane's most famous.

Sadly, the gaol has been closed to visitors since March 2022 because of the Cross River Rail works next door, and there's no reopening date yet. You can still see its walls from Annerley Road in Dutton Park, near Boggo Road station (renamed from Park Road in 2024).

None of these need a ticket. Together they make a decent self-guided evening loop through the CBD and Spring Hill.

Queensland's oldest surviving building, built by convicts in 1828. When the wind dropped, convicts were made to work a treadmill to turn the grindstones, and it was used as punishment too; a prisoner died in it in 1829. On 3 July 1841 two Aboriginal men, Mullan and Nungavil, were hanged from a beam run out of an upper window, the first legal executions in Brisbane. It's about a ten-minute uphill walk from Central station. The inside isn't regularly open, but the outside is the point.

Opened in 1930, with a 64-metre clock tower. Local folklore says the tower is haunted by a lift operator who fell to his death. It's also where the CBD ghost tour begins, so you can see it before you hear about it.

Built in 1923 for Dr James Mayne and his sister Mary, children of Patrick Mayne, a butcher whose fortune came with a long-whispered murder story. The arcade's ghost is said to be a woman in a bonnet. Walk through it during shopping hours; it's one of the city's most beautiful interiors either way.

The convict settlement moved from Redcliffe to the site of today's CBD in May 1825. Its commandant, Patrick Logan, is remembered as the Tyrant of Moreton Bay: in 1828 alone, more than 11,000 lashes were handed out to 200 convicts. Logan died in 1830 on an expedition, and the cause has been disputed ever since. The City Essentials walk covers the few buildings that survive from those years.

Halloween falls on a Saturday this year, and Ghost Tours Australia has extra sessions on Saturday 31 October:

Book ahead. The Halloween sessions are the first to sell out every year.