The Monte Cristo Haunting of Junee, New South Wales, Australia

Just off the Hume highway in New South Wales, a short distance from Wagga Wagga, is the quaint and sleepy town of Junee. Drive through the peaceful streets, and you will be stopped in your tracks by the sight of an imposing mansion house squatting high on a hill and casting its gloomy shadow down on the town and its residents.

This is the infamous Monte Cristo, Australia's "most haunted house". Over countless years, a catalogue of ghastly incidents and horrific deaths has plagued this dark and brooding homestead. At least seven ghoulish residents are reputed to be at large in both the house and the grounds.

Monte Cristo, meaning "Mount of Christ," was built in 1884 by Christopher William Crawley, a local farmer whose luck changed when he acquired some land under provision of the Robertson's Act of 1861. He was married to Elizabeth, a hard and brutal woman who ruled her husband with an iron fist. She habitually wore black-lace dresses, lace caps, and a cape with a stand-up, beaded collar. Local residents laughed behind her back and took to calling her "Queen Victoria" in private.

Christopher Crawley died at Monte Cristo on December 14,1910, at age sixty-nine. The constant rubbing of his starched collars resulted in gangrenous abscess on his neck, which, in turn, caused his heart to fail. Following his death, Elizabeth retreated into deep mourning, converting an upstairs box room into a chapel that she rarely left. In fact, she is reputed to have left the homestead only twice in the twenty-three years between her husband's death and her own death, from a ruptured appendix, on August 12,1933, at age ninety-two.

In 1948, the last of the Crawleys left the homestead, and Monte Cristo fell victim to rot and vandalism.