A NIGHT WITH THE GHOSTS
The local Aboriginals call it ‘Binoomea’ – Dark Places.
It’s believed to be the world’s oldest known open caves system, with more than 40 kilometres of remarkable caverns still undergoing exploration.
We know it as Jenolan Caves.
I’ve been here many times, yet the journey along the narrow road called ‘Six Foot Track’ with its hairpin turns and crumbling rock walls, seems like a descent into madness each and every time.
This sloping road, in places little wider than our car, was first designed for horse and carriage and later for automobiles that would line up for hours to wait for their turn on the one way road – traffic driving out in the morning, and new traffic driving in during the afternoon.
Increasingly there is an unearthly stillness as we approach the Grand Archway at the mouth of the caves.
It’s as if the vast Australian bush has caved in on itself and exposed an entrance to the Underworld.
At the epicentre of this unearthly stillness is Caves House, the isolated and once majestic Victorian Tudor-style hotel believed by many to be haunted.
It is a place of strange isolation, and it brings to mind the hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. It is nestled between the Dark Places.
This is where we will lodge for the night.
Five o’clock. Having checked in, my husband and I peruse the grounds of this extraordinary place, taking photographs in the fading light. He wears a fetching bowler hat, and I am in Neo-Victorian fancy dress (long ruffled Victorian dress, corset, gloves).
We experience what it is to be intensely ignored, like the homeless man on the street that shouts about hellfire and brimstone. The instant we appear, tourists look the other way.
Don’t make eye contact with the crazy people.
Seven o’clock. It is time for The Lord Carrington Ball. In September 1887 the then Governor made an official visit, and it is for this wonderfully flimsy reason that we are dressed up.
We sip a drink at the bar, and a gentleman appears on the staircase below us in period dress, with a suspiciously impressive grey handlebar moustache.
He announces himself as Lord Carrington, complete with the appropriate old-world English accent, and thus the evening’s formal proceedings begin.
Our hostess, who is resplendent in a gold and cream Victorian dress with bustle and train, performs a solo Operatic rendition of God Save The Queen as her train flows down the steps, and with great sense of occasion, Lord Carrington invites the guests of the ball for dinner in the Grand Dining Room.
The two make their way past the bar, arm in arm, train trailing behind, and through the frosted glass doors of the dining room, known these says simply as Chisolm’s restaurant. Promptly they exit the dining room again, having been told to wait while other customers depart the restaurant for the nightly Ghost Tour through the caves.
Undeterred by this hiccup, our group waits. By now it is clear that there are eight of us. I’m not sure if it can be called a ball, per say, when it has attracted only eight customers, not including our Lord Carrington, our pianist and Victorian-frocked hostess. But the old-fashioned set menu, period entertainment and a string quartet must go on.
Now that our outfits have context, the other guests seem more relaxed about taking in our eccentric garb.
We wait for the dining room to become available as gape-mouthed guests in sensible jeans and hiking boots, wool jumpers and Gor-Tex jackets ogle us. Our hostess’s train is so long that her husband – who is holding a Corona and dressed in a wonderfully over-sized white front tuxedo with splendid conductor’s tails – delicately describes her movement in the dress as ‘like manoeuvring an aircraft carrier’.
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