Andy listening to ghost lady - note mysterious crosses on wall behind...

As we walked back to the hotel we passed a sign for a psychic, now this is something that we have always both been quite curious about, but I would never dare go to one in case they told me something bad that I would dwell on for ever! We have only seen them in Blackpool before, and unfortunately (?!) it was closed when Andy went to go then. We thought Sydney would surely have a far better quality of psychics than Blackpool (“I’m sensing…. Nonce”) so Andy went in to see about having a reading done! They were very busy people there, so he booked an appointment for the Friday morning with Petra who reads the tarot cards! We must have been in quite a spiritual mood that afternoon because we decided to book a ghost walk for that evening around the old parts of Sydney. Now, I am very sceptical about all this but I thought even if it is a load of rubbish, at least we’ll get a nice walk around the old parts of Sydney!
We met near the harbour and stood in a circle as a woman dressed in the usual ghost-tour-leader uniform of black long skirt, black boots, black cape and black hat proceeded to give us all a ‘prop’ relating to the ghosts of Sydney. My heart sank as she delved into her bag and dished out big rubber rates on a neck chain for people to wear for the tour and I studiously tried to avoid eye contact as she selected people from the group. There was only one prop that wasn’t to be worn around the neck, and this was given to Andy. Andy had to wear a sailor’s hat for the duration of the tour!!! Ha ha, luckily I managed to get away with wearing a choker! We all trooped off, looking like we had just got off the funny bus, and started hearing about the ghostly goings on in Sydney! It was quite interesting actually because she told us a lot about the history of the area, I wasn’t convinced about a lot of the stories but if you treat it light-heartedly then you can enjoy the evening, which we did. I even had to act out being murdered and had the pressure of having to scream in front of everyone! It was interesting to hear how the plague hit Sydney in January 1900, hundreds of years after the London plague, it was spread from the waterfront and the rats carried it into the city. The death toll was only about 100 however, compared with the plague in London in 1665 which claimed about 100000. They also have very steeply descending narrow streets which people used to throw rubbish into so that when the tide came up at the harbour the rubbish would simply be washed away.

We returned to our hotel room to find confirmation that we were staying at a special hotel… a plate with 2 huge cookies on our bed, and the room had been cleaned and tidied whilst we were away (actually, quite embarrassing as we were rushing to get out and had thrown things everywhere!).