Thursday, July 28, 2005

Meet Miss Sabrina the new hearse at SEXPO

That's right, Miss Sabrina the newest addition to the Destiny Tours fleet has now been converted to RHD and will be on show from Friday 29th to Sunday 31st July at the Sydney SEXPO Moore Park.
This will be the first and last opportunity to see her whilst she is still a hearse, as she will soon be undergoing major surgery to transform her into a beautiful tourist vehicle. Let me know what you think!

Monday, July 18, 2005

The truth on the haunted hearses

Who needs to go into a haunted building when you are travelling in a mobile haunted location, one of the Destiny Tours hearses? Many people have travelled in Morticia the former hearse / ambulance perhaps without realising that the truth out there....here is a compelling report from a recent passenger on the Weird Sydney Ghost and History Tour: (note that as requested I have changed the names).

Allan First of all, your tour in Sydney is amazing, to say the least. I’m sorry for the delay in returning your e-mail. I’ve been waiting for my friend Jenny’s account of what happened that night, but she hasn’t given it to me yet. I hope that you will have time to read my full account below, and I hope that my input is helpful. I don’t remember everything in order, so I will try to group it together how it best makes sense. Please bear with me in the telling. Jenny first asked me if I wanted to take this tour about a week before we got to Sydney. One of her friends had found it online and asked if we would like to join their tour on Monday, July 4th, and we said yes. At the last minute (about June 31st’), a scheduling conflict came up that would prevent Jenny and me from going on the tour with the group we had signed up with, and I suggested that she and I take our own tour the following night. She agreed. I think I should mention that I don’t believe in coincidence. Things happen for a reason. If we had gone on t he 4th, we would have ridden in Elvira, but on the 5th, we rode in Morticia instead. We arrived for the tour on the evening of July 5th, and I have to say that honestly, I thought nothing would happen. I expected a few good ghost stories, maybe a fright or two, and then to go home after an evening of good fun, unchanged. But I was wrong. As soon as we climbed into Morticia, I could tell that the night was going to be something more than entertaining. Jenny’s eyes went wide as soon as she sat down, and the look she gave me told me that she knew something was out of the ordinary. At that point, I was still so excited by the prospect of the tour that I wasn’t open to the things that were going on around me. Jenny was my first indication. She sat on the backwards seat directly behind the driver, and I was next to her in the center backwards seat. The driver had not given us any history on the vehicle yet when she doubled over and held her stomach. I asked her what was wrong and she replied, “I feel like I did when they thought my appendix burst.” About five minutes later, the driver told us about the girl who died of a burst appendix in Moticia’s past life as an ambulance. I could feel other presences in the car with us. In the front seat on the left side there was the spirit of an old man. Since Morticia used to be an American car, I got the impression that he was a hearse driver in his life who tried to continue his job after death. I didn’t see him, but I got the feeling that he might have died of a heart attack. I also felt the presence of someone who might have been a nurse or a paramedic. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female, but Jenny told me that it had to be a woman. “She” is the one who strokes the hair of the person in the center backwards seat, and she means it to be comforting. The feeling accompanied with it seems to whisper, “It’s ok now. Everything will be alright.” At one point during the hearse ride, I felt a sharp pain run through my hand and down my little finger, and at the same time I saw in my mind a very graphic picture of a man who had been in an accident. His little finger was almost completely severed, he had blood running down his face, and some of his teeth were missing. His finger was the most vivid part of the picture. He must have had other injuries too, but I didn’t see them. I think he died in the ambulance. I also felt two pains in the left side of my back that I can only describe as gunshot. One was beneath my left shoulder blade and the other was lower, just to the left of the small of my back. I’m not sure if the gunshot wound guy and the broken finger guy were the same person or two different people, but they seemed very close to each other. A little more than halfway through the tour, Jenny and I switched seats. When I was sitting behind the driver, I repeatedly felt a very small hand play with the fingers of my left hand. I think it was the appendix girl, but I’m not sure. How old was she? 9 or 10 years old? I pulled my hand away once, but then I let her do what she wanted to. She just wanted to play, and she felt so sad because she had no one to play with. There are more spirits in Morticia, but they didn’t try to communicate, so I don’t know anything about them except that they are there. The above mentioned experiences are just the ones associated with the hearse itself, but other strange things happened in several of the sights we visited. As I stated above, I don’t remember everything in order. On the tour, there is a large house that belonged to someone who went to jail, and now the house is being turned into apartments. He bought the land from some nuns. Jenny said she saw a nun there, behind the gate, and although I didn’t see her at the time I was able to describe her in detail later. This nun wore gray, not black, with a white apron, and her habit was white, coming up on both sides to form nun’s wings. She seemed very upset, as if she didn’t want anyone to enter that property. At Mortuary Station there is a terrible feeling of grief, anguish, and people crying. But it’s more than what I would expect from a train station, even one used for the purpose Mortuary Station was meant for. The souls feel trapped behind the fence that surrounds the station, and they are crying for help. They can’t leave. When I put my hand through the fence I felt warm waves wash over it repeatedly. It felt like dozens of hands, all wet with warm tears, were grabbing desperately at my arm asking me to help them. That was the creepiest part of the night. At the Kastle, they didn’t mention a ghost at first. We took the tour, and when we went into the second room upstairs I felt like something was watching me, reflected in the mirrors. Later, our mistress guide told us that one of the employees had died on her way to work once. At that point I had to ask if she had had a room in that house, upstairs, and had we been there? She answered that, yes, the second upstairs room had been hers. I thought of the letter M, though if that stood for Mistress or part of her name, I guess I’ll never know. Another stop was one of the prisons where gallows once stood. We were told on the tour that people sometimes feel a tight noose around their necks as they pass that place. Both Jenny and I felt a tight pain in the left side of our throats, and we both had trouble breathing. It could have been a noose, but my personal impression is that it was an injury, something that went through someone’s throat and might have killed them. There was definitely blood involved. I could be wrong, but I think it’s yet another spirit of the hearse playing an elaborate joke by inflicting his pain at that exact time in the tour. For passengers expecting to feel the pressure of a noose, it could easily be mistaken for one. The last experience of the night that I can clearly remember was outside of the 202 house where a lady disappeared. I saw a woman in very old fashion skirts and boots walk up the stairs to the front door with a ring of keys in her hand. The feeling was one of homecoming, how you feel at the end of a long workday when you know you’ll finally get a chance to rest, but it was unclear if it was her soul returning to her home again, or if she was revisiting the moment right before her abduction. We drove away before I could tell. I experienced several other things that night: a man’s yell from the Harbor Bridge, distant feelings of eeriness from several of the places we passed without stopping, a feeling of watchfulness from a window in an old hospital. But none of those experiences were really clear enough to describe. At one point, our driver mentioned that Morticia is soon to be retired. When he said that, there was a wave of emotion that washed through the hearse. The emotions were too many to mention, but there was a very sad overtone. Morticia, and the spirits inside her, are not ready to go. They are asking for more time. At the end of the tour, we related some of our experiences to the driver. I’m not entirely certain that he believed us. It was one of the more interesting evenings I’ve had in my life, and by far the best tour I’ve ever been on. Nothing on the tour was scary at all, as I had expected it to be. I left that evening with a feeling of enlightenment, and Jenny and I agree that the tour was a fun experience. But I have one more strange bit to add. I mentioned above that I felt a pain in my hand and saw a broken finger. The day after the tour, I took a really bad fall, and I broke my finger. Jenny was not with me at the time, but when I spoke with her that night she said, “Oh, I thought he was trying to tell me something, but I didn’t know what. I think he was trying to warn you.” For the record, I only cracked the bone and I’ll be fine in a few weeks; it wasn’t anything nearly as bad as what I saw in my vision. Even so, it’s ironic that this is the only bone I’ve ever broken... Jenny and I are planning to come back to Australia in a few years, and we are very interested in going on other ghost tours offered around the country. I hope that I have not rambled for too long. Our driver that night mentioned that you might be interested in our experiences. If you have any questions or comments about anything in this e-mail, please feel free to e-mail me back. If you intend to distribute this story, I would ask that our names and company affiliations please remain anonymous. Thank you for a great tour, and I hope to visit Destiny Tours again when I next return to Australia!