Spirit on Tap

[Lady Gryphon]

Spirit on Tap
The Criterion hotel
An apparition at a Queensland pub is driving patrons and staff to drink
The ghost at the Criterion (didn't wait long to make her presence felt. When
Leigh and Carolyn Turnbull arrived in Rockhampton, in May of 1991. On their
first night as managers of the pub, Carolyn Turnbull says, "I looked over at
the end of the bed and there she was, standing there, not looking at me, but
looking at Leigh. It was a woman's shape." When Leigh Stirred, she says,
"the form disappeared, she just faded away."
The Criterion ghost, which local legend identifies as the shape of a young,
unnamed chambermaid who committed suicide in the hotel's staff quarters in
the late 1890's after being jilted by her stablehand lover.
The Turnbulls sighting was not the spectres first reported appearance. In
December 1986, a barman at the hotel was locking up the laundry when he was
chilled to the bone. "I saw a woman standing in front of me, the odd thing
was I could see right through her. I don't know how long we looked at each
other, but it seemed like a lifetime. Then she walked around the corner and
dissapeared."
Two chambermaids often complained of creases appearing in freshly made beds
when no-one else was in the rooms.
Guests and other staff have also reported lights inexplicably switching on
and off, and beds shuddering and shaking.
It was in the kitchen that the ghost allegedly made another appearance in
May 1993. Late at night, Carolyn Turnbull was impaling a breakfast order -
On a spike when the ghost ''(quite slender, quite tall," materialised near
the doorway leading into the back of the kitchen. Though she says she was
unafraid, Carolyn closed the back door and walked to the main part of the
hotel. "By the time she got to the back of the kitchen and turned around,
her whole back was wet. she was going out the back passageway and up the
stairs. She gave the impression this was very much her territory."
A visitor to the hotel's main bar two months later rekindled the ghostly
tale. "He was a gentleman they'd never seen before and haven't seen since,"
says Carolyn of the dark-haired man in his late 20s or early 30s, dressed as
if from a county town. "He was having a beer, and then he began telling me
what the ghost looked like, exactly as I had seen her, in the period costume
and long hair, on that night. I was quite taken aback." Carolyn says she had
not described the ghost to anyone. Could the mystery patron have also been a
ghost, perhaps the spirit of the stablehand who caused the woman to suicide?
--
Dorothy (O)^(~)
"May you always walk in sunshine."
Ghosts & Other Haunts (NZ Ghosts)
http://go.to/nzghosts