Queen+Victoria+Market





Queen Victoria Market! The place where you can buy exotic food, clothes and other assorted items, but it is not what it seems. Down below the bustling shops lie the dead bodies of roughly 9000 early Melbournians. What you may not know is that before the market was built in 1878, it used to be a cemetery. The closure of the cemetery caused quite a lot of controversy at the time, due to the thousands of bodies that would be forgotten.

The first part of the cemetery that was built over was the area known as the undesirable section. This is where all the Aboriginals, Jews and criminals were buried. Eventually they ran out of room, so the government decided to build over the rest of the cemetery. Before that happened however, arou nd 500- 1000 bodies where moved to the Fawkner cemetery including John Batman. In 1994, a sculpture was built on the corner of Queen and Therry streets in memory of the pioneers buried there. Just recently, the government was going to build an underground car park to address the parking issue. However, since it's a well known fact that many corpses are still subterranean and unmoved, it has caused the cancellation of the plan.

Aboriginals are traditionally meant to be buried at their birthplace. However, there has been a case of two Tasmanian Aboriginal brothers, Bob and Jack, who were executed a century ago for the murder of a whaler. They got buried in the Undesirable’s section of the cemetery hence forth denying their Aboriginal tradition. As my group and I were wandering through the market, we asked several older shopkeepers if any of them had witnessed anything strange. Most said no, but one older man said that he once faintly heard a group of aborigines’ singing and dancing. The sound was coming from the fruit and vegetable section but he could not see anything. The man's story peaked our curiosity, so we investigated it further. We found out that a select few, infact, have heard singing and music coming from the fruit section. Some say that the ghosts are seeking revenge. Is the Queen Victoria Market haunted? We may never know...

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