Monte Cristo Homestead

A late-Victorian homestead on a hill above Junee, New South Wales, built by Christopher Crawley in the 1880s. The owners say the ghost of Mrs Crawley, the builder's widow, has been seen there many times.

Wikipedia describes Monte Cristo as a two-storey late-Victorian manor on a hill above Junee, New South Wales. The sources differ on the builder and the year. Wikipedia names Christopher William Crawley and gives 1885. Australian Geographic gives Christopher Crawley and 1884. The owners' site calls him William Christopher Crawley.

The owners' site says Crawley died in the house on 14 December 1910, aged 69. Australian Geographic reported in 2018 that the house then passed to his widow, Elizabeth Crawley, who never got over his death and lived as a recluse from then on. She turned the upstairs box room into a chapel and gave herself to the Bible. Australian Geographic says she went out of the house just twice before she died of a ruptured appendix.

The owners' site, which reproduces Peter Underwood's article on the house, says Mrs Crawley's ghost has often been seen in the room that was hers. Australian Geographic lists apparitions, orbs, poltergeist activity and unexplained noises, which people put down to the house's sad history.

The owners' timeline records that a caretaker, Jack Simpson, was shot by a youth who had watched Hitchcock's Psycho three times. After that, the timeline says, no one would take the caretaker's job and vandals had free run of the house.