manly quarantine station ghost tour reviews

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

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QUARANTINE STATION GHOST TOURS (Manly) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

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Quarantine Station Ghost Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024) - Tripadvisor

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

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Quarantine Station Ghost Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

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Manly’s Q Station Ghost Tours–A Review

Q station ghost tours.

Manly’s Q Station, originally known as Quarantine Station, was just as the name implies- a place for passengers arriving in Sydney who were sick, potentially exposed to disease, or were known to have a communicable disease, so that they could be separated from the general population until they were healthy again (or, sadly, until they passed away).

Q Station has now transitioned from a place of disease and outbreak to a serene and historic part of Manly , offering accommodation, a great restaurant, and, of course- the ghost tours. Manly’s Q Station ghost tours are a unique and unusual thing to check out- here’s everything you need to know, including my own spooky experiences.

I’ll cut to the chase- I have done a lot of ghost tours throughout the world, as I love the history, stories, and tales of the supernatural.

Nowhere I’ve ever been has scared me as much as Q Station, and there is a disturbing energy all throughout the grounds, which are now part of Sydney Harbour National Park . While there are plenty of unique places in NSW, Q Station has to be one of the most unusual and eerie.

Quarantine Station Sydney history

In theory, quarantine for ship passengers coming to Sydney who were unwell was, and is, a great way to stop the spread of communicable diseases. In reality, medical knowledge in the 19th century was not what it is today, racism and classism played a large role in what type of treatment you received, staff and nurses often fell unwell due to lack of hygienic practices, and hundreds and thousands died within Q Station Manly, including many children. As I am sure you can imagine, a lot of terrible things happened here over the years, perhaps the reason for the ghost tours today.

The beautiful North Head, just a few minutes’ drive from Manly, has long been a site of Aboriginal importance and cultural significance. It then operated from the 1830s until 1984 as a quarantine and treatment site for a range of terrible diseases, including smallpox, Spanish Influenza, or the bubonic plague. After the operations stopped, it became a park, and now offers a range of tours, accommodation, catering, events, and weddings.

Personally, one of the most haunted places in Sydney wouldn’t be my top destination for a wedding, but to each his own.

Q Station Ghostly Encounters

There are historical and educational tours available at Q Station , but it is perhaps best known for their ghost tours. There’s a range of tours available:

Best to consult Q Station for up to date prices and times and tours generally run 2-3 hours. Prices range from $38-$125.

The Ghostly Encounters seemed like the best choice- it offered a start time of 5:30pm or 8pm, perfect since the 5:30pm start meant I wouldn’t get home too late, and it seemed a good mix of not too terrifying and not too mundane.

I don’t want to give away all the details of the tour, as it is really worth exploring for yourself. However, I will say our tour guide was completely fantastic- meeting us on the pier with a few oil burning lanterns to set the ambiance, we set off to explore the grounds of Q Station.

He was fairly new to the role, and had a real no-nonsense approach- however he was extremely knowledgeable, a great storyteller, and it was clear from some of his actions and stories that he had come across things on the tours he clearly had not expected when he took the job. This was made all the more believable by his manner and stoic outlook.

The Ghostly Encounters tour was scheduled for 2 ½ hours but went for nearly three. Time flew by though, although by the end I think we were all pretty emotionally drained- keep reading to see why.

Starting off along the tram tracks used to move luggage from the ships to the decontamination room and then up the hill to the various cottages and rooms, the full moon on the night certainly added to the intrigue.

The tour goes throughout the property, not just pointing out places of interest, but actually taking the group inside darkened buildings on the property, including the former hospital, luggage decontamination rooms, a former workers’ cottage frozen in time, and the infamous acid showers (more on this to come).

Looking for more Sydney ghost tour reviews? Definitely check out Cockatoo Island . If you’re heading west, don’t miss Fremantle Prison .

Did I see any ghosts? The spooky truth of Q Station ghost tours

There were two particular experiences that have haunted me, at least only figuratively, ever since my tour. Appreciate that many are pretty skeptical about this sort of thing. I’ve always been pretty sensitive to things out of the ordinary, but I try to also remain rational and level-headed with all things paranormal. Two parts of the tour really got me though.

Here’s what happened.

Holding room

After I got home from the tour, I poured myself a strong drink to steel my nerves and went to bed with the lights on. Point being, I forgot to write it down the actual name of the room where this encounter took place. However, it was a series of two holding rooms for those being kept at quarantine station, located next to the luggage decontamination room.

Our guide brought us into one of the pitch-black holding rooms, asking us to just be still and wait, open to experience whatever we may feel, see, or smell. I really can’t explain what happened next, but after a few minutes of standing in the dark, I had the experience of some sort of thing being right in front of me, just a few inches from my face.

Instinctively, I swatted it away with my hand and jumped (really awkwardly), and then the space was empty again. It all happened in less than a second or two, and I don’t think anyone else on the tour noticed my weird knee-jerk reaction.

I have no idea if it was in my mind or not, or what really happened, but I am completely sure what it felt like- someone trying to unnerve you by turning up very close to you unexpectedly. Or, perhaps he was just lonely. Or, it was my overactive imagination. I really cannot figure this one out.

However, the next encounter was impossible to miss.

Gravediggers Cottage

This small cottage was home to workers on the property, and was left in the state when it was last occupied, around the ’80s. It makes the cozy, two-bedroom cottage a bit of a time warp, complete with period furniture and appliances. Under normal circumstances, this would have been the most interesting thing going on here- if a poltergeist hadn’t been present.

Poltergeists are one type of spirit I’ve never put much stock in. A ghost that has the energy to move things on their own? I (was) unsure.

Going into the cottage, our guide warned us that unusual things happened in the cottage very regularly, and was known to be haunted by the spirits of two former workers, who perhaps weren’t the type of men you’d bring home to a family dinner.

In the first bedroom, our guide (who smartly waited by the front door), asked us to check out whether the wardrobe door was open or shut. Weird question, but ok. One side was open, the other shut. It was about then that the closed side flew open, and then slammed shut again before reopening. I don’t believe there was a form of trickery involved on behalf of Q Station, and it was genuinely one of the most frightening things I’ve experienced.

Yes, I did pretty much jump into the arms of some other girls on the tour (thanks, bachelorette party gals.). There was no wind and nothing that could have caused the movement with such malevolent force.

After coming out of the cottage, our guide explained that he and other guides have been in the house in the daytime, and found the same wardrobe doors impossible to open. He said it gave him the chills every time he entered, hence his wise choice to remain close the exit while we were inside- I think we all wanted to make a quick exit after that.

In addition to the above, we explored areas with terrible smells, despite regular cleaning and maintenance, and with such an eerie feeling throughout most of the buildings. In the most anticipated building, the acid showers, I didn’t experience anything weird, although others in the group did.

Looking for more adrenaline rushes in Sydney? I can’t promise any ghosts, but the Sydney BridgeClimb will get your heart racing! Check our our review here . 

The showers were designed for disinfection, with carbolic acid used to cause the quarantined individual’s top layer of skin to peel off, over several days, in an attempt to prevent the spread of disease.

The design of the room itself, with rows and rows of identical shower blocks, is disorienting, a la the garden maze of the Shining, and I couldn’t spend more than a minute or two in there before I felt compelled to get out. Even the photos taken from that room are just from the entrance, as I couldn’t deal with going in any further after my initial loop of the building.

Is Q Station haunted? From me, it’s a definitive yes. But I don’t expect you to believe me- I’m not sure I would believe the above if someone else told me. Rather, I encourage you to go and experience it for yourself, and then let me know what you think! Would love to hear your stories of Q Station ghosts or Q Station Manly reviews.

Q Station accommodation

Q Station has a range of beautiful rooms and cottages to stay in, and the hotel is managed by Accor Hotels. Manly is an awesome place to spend some time, and spending the night after a ghost tour could be really fun/terrifying. I didn’t spend the night but it would make a really unique getaway.

If you dare- click here to learn more and to book your Q Station accommodation

What else to do at Q Station?

Q Station is a really gorgeous area- spend some time strolling the grounds, taking photos, checking out the mini-museum at the Visitor Centre, or have a bite to eat.

There are also a few Quarantine Station history tours that look really great, and I’d consider going back (in daylight!) to check them out.

There’s a small cafe next to the museum, or the Boilerhouse Restaurant for a more formal meal. I haven’t been there myself, but I have friends who have and rate it pretty highly, and the menu looks fantastic. Reservations are recommended.

Q Station address

It can be slightly confusing to find Q Station- the official address is 1 North Head Scenic Drive, Manly NSW, which your GPS should be able to pick up. If in doubt, there are signs pointing to Q Station, so try to follow them. The parklands do have a few windy roads leading in different directions though, and it’s not lit well at night.

On arrival, all parking is located outside the visitor check-in for the Q Station ghost tours, hotel check-in, or for dinner or lunch reservations. From there, it’s about a 10-minute walk downhill to the restaurant and tour meeting points. However, courtesy vans operate all around the property. I walked down myself to get a better look around, although I’d definitely recommend taking one back up to your car or accommodation after the tour, as the hills are really steep. Also, it’s dark and creepy and you’ll probably be terrified (well, at least if you’re me…).

If you’re in any doubt of where you need to be, I found the staff to be really helpful. The tours depart from down by the pier, next to the Q Station Cafe and Boilerhouse Restaurant.

If driving at night, be extra cautious for bandicoots, which are protected native marsupials, and also very small. They are very common in North Head, and also very sweet looking if you’re lucky enough to come across one.

• Sunset at Q Station can be insanely gorgeous- depending what time your tour is, I’d really recommend arriving early so that you can see the sunset, and maybe dinner or a drink at Boilerhouse. There’s also a small museum to explore.
• If you don’t like other people (of the living variety, that is), private tours can be arranged- contact Q Station for more information.
• The Ghostly Encounters tour includes a fair bit of walking, including over dark, uneven, and unlit spaces. It also includes entry into pitch black and rather macabre parts of Q Station, so make sure you’re ok with this before signing up.

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'This place is pure evil': Are you brave enough to enter Sydney’s most haunted bathroom?

More than one thing goes bump in the night on the grounds of Sydney's oldest Quarantine Station

Time Out’s team of photographers are accustomed to being sent to all kinds of weird and wonderful places – a couple of recent commissions include a shoot at the Kastle , Sydney’s last full-service BDSM dungeon, and a videography piece about the Sydney sculptures with the best butts. So staff snapper Cassandra Hannagan thought nothing of being dispatched to Manly’s Quarantine Station to photograph what is purported to be the city’s most haunted bathroom. “Sounds like a fun job,” she replied to an email outlining the brief. Fun, however, would not be a word she’d choose to describe the eventual experience.

The possessed plumbing in question is found within the infamous Gravedigger’s Cottage, a popular if not divisive stop on Q Station’s ghost tours. It’s so named, not because a gravedigger actually lived here (the 19th-century cottage was actually housing for doctors), but because it is flanked on two sides by the Quarantine Station’s cemeteries, and most chillingly, because the apparition of a man in a black cloak and wide-brimmed hat – the uniform of a gravedigger – has been sighted within the house on multiple occasions. 

Shadowy spectres are not the most frightening thing that visitors to this ghoulish abode have encountered. The sensation of hands wrapping around the throat, of being pushed down from the chest, and of being submerged underwater, have been reported by countless people. Spiritual mediums and paranormal investigators believe an unknown woman was attacked and murdered within the cottage – drowned in the bathtub.

Hannagan knew very little of this ominous history as she entered the Gravedigger’s Cottage with her camera. Almost immediately, she got an unexpected surprise. “I sensed what felt like a thumb pressing under my chin. It was really quite painful so I had to run the hell out of there, swearing profusely,” she recalls. “There was definitely something going on with the floorboards, and by the end of the shoot, I felt prickly heat all over my body. I was running in and out of there like a madwoman.”

To the average person, this sequence of events would be downright blood curdling, but for ghost tour guide Melinda Minns, it’s just another day on the job. She’s seen reactions almost identical to Hannagan’s on numerous occasions over the five years that she’s worked at Q Station. “Just like so many others that come through, [Cassandra] picked up on the negative energy straight away,” Minns says with a knowing smile. “The energy is so strong, a lot of people on our tour will just walk in there and know immediately that something bad has happened here. I had one guy who walked into the bathroom, and before I’d said anything about it he said, ‘This place is pure evil.’ So many people have that same reaction.”

Including Minns herself, as she recounts in one particularly frightening experience she had while guiding a tour in the cottage. “I had a full group, and everything was going ahead quite normally. But then, all of a sudden, I felt like the floor was coming up towards me, like I was being pushed down. Then my hearing went – I could still hear people talking to me, but it was like I was underwater.”

In fact, so many people have had such strong physical reactions to the gravedigger’s cottage, from unexplained pains to panic attacks and even loss of consciousness, that it’s sometimes left off the ghost tour itinerary. “It all comes down to the guide making a call based on who is on the tour,” Minns explains. “If you have a lot of people who are clearly quite anxious or very nervous, you tend to think, ‘Ok, we might do another building instead.’”

I felt like the floor was coming up towards me, like I was being pushed down. Then my hearing went – I could still hear people talking to me, but it was like I was underwater

Not that this short-changes visitors who come to Q Station in search of the paranormal. Ghostly happenings have been reported throughout the complex, which sits perched on Manly’s North Head. Since the 1830s, ships suspected of harbouring disease have been stopped just offshore, so passengers and crew could disembark on Quarantine Beach and begin their 40-day isolation. Of the thousands who arrived at Quarantine Station, hundreds would never leave, including a sizable number during the last global pandemic, the 1918 Spanish Flu outbreak, which killed as many as 6,387 people in Sydney alone. All of that death, all of that suffering, has left an indelible mark on Q Station, believers say, with a range of hauntings – from a threatening shadow figure in the old nurses’ quarters to the handsy spectre of a flirtatious mortician known by guides as ‘Mr Slimey’ – reported throughout the grounds. 

Skeptics might explain this hive of paranormal activity away as a marketing ploy to fleece would-be ghost hunters, but Minns and her fellow tour guides are careful not to imagine phantoms in every shadowy corner just for the scare factor. “You really do have to try and debunk things, because people get jumpy and there will be a tiny noise and they’ll go ‘Oh god, what was that?’. And sometimes, it was just the window. Sometimes, it was just someone walking past making the floorboards creak. We had one incident recently where a possum ran over the roof and scared the living daylights out of us. So we do try to explain as much as we can,” Minns says. “But when you get people independently experiencing the same thing in the same place, over time, then that’s something you can’t dismiss. That’s when it really makes you think that there’s something in here, that it can’t just be a coincidence.”

Q Station continued to be used as a quarantine facility until 1984, at which time the land on which it sits was acquired by the Commonwealth to preserve it as national parkland. Today, Q Station offers conference facilities, overnight accommodation, and of course its ghost tours, which include the fascinating details of this facility’s history. Or at least, the history that is officially documented. Minns concedes there are gaps in the records, but these can sometimes be filled by paranormal investigators who look to the spirit world for answers.

The Gravedigger's Cottage is a case in point. While it is all but certain that a gravedigger would not have lived here – such menial workers would have called a tent home, rather than a two-bed house – very little is known about its former occupants. Investigators have used equipment such as a spirit box – a device that cycles through radio channels at random and can allegedly be used by the dead to communicate – to learn more from the great beyond, with some notable success. The spectre in the wide-brimmed hat, while seemingly foreboding, is a more tragic character in reality, who probably met his end within the cottage. His name is Sam and while he has not yet revealed the manner of his death, he has strongly refuted, in various ghostly ways, that suicide was the cause. The female presence in the bathroom has also been similarly reached, and has often been described as weeping, sat crouched in the bathtub.

Alongside these spooky histories, there are other, more sobering stories from Q Station’s past that have taken on a greater significance in recent months. Minns has spent the last few years recounting the all but forgotten history of the Spanish Flu epidemic, but as the world continues to struggle against the tightening grip of a similar once-in-a-century health crisis, the commonalities between the two have been increasingly startling for her. “Just like today, the doctors and nurses were on the front lines – particularly the nurses, who would have to work long hours and support these poor dying patients. They would be the only ones there to hold their hands as they passed, because they weren’t allowed visitors. It’s always been quite heartbreaking to think of what they would have gone through, but seeing the reality for medical professionals in the world today, especially in countries where hundreds are dying daily, it really does bring home what a remarkable, selfless thing it would have been to work here a century ago.”

Q Station is currently taking bookings for its ghost tours which run Thursday to Sunday. Tickets from $55 per adult. 

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These former insane asylums, abandoned roads, converted gaols and chilly tunnels may not appear to be the stuff of nightmares in the sensical light of day, but one too many shadowy coincidences coupled with gruesome histories beg to differ.

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Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

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Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

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Similar Experiences

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

QUARANTINE STATION GHOST TOURS (Manly) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go

Quarantine Station Ghost Tours

• See all photos

Similar Experiences

Most Recent: Reviews ordered by most recent publish date in descending order.

Detailed Reviews: Reviews ordered by recency and descriptiveness of user-identified themes such as waiting time, length of visit, general tips, and location information.

QUARANTINE STATION GHOST TOURS (Manly) - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go