The Brisbane Arcade Ghost and Patrick Mayne's Confession

It was an uneventful autumn day, about ten years ago, just before closing time at Kellie's Antiques in the Brisbane Arcade. The shop manager, Susan Gaylard, was polishing a 19th-century silver English teapot when she saw a woman whisk past her front window. This wasn't a last-minute shopper trying to beat the clock; the woman had her hair up in a bun and wore a beautiful black old-fashioned dress with a big bustle. Ms. Gaylard knew she wasn't a real person, saying she was "too quick."

That was Ms. Gaylard's first experience with the Ghost of Brisbane Arcade. Since then, she and other shopkeepers have had peculiar moments, like glass cabinet doors in her second-storey boutique swinging open for no apparent reason, always in the quiet lull of late afternoon. There's also an all-pervading sense of serene energy, not of this time. Years ago, after Ms. Gaylard mentioned her initial ghostly encounter on TV, a woman rushed into her shop the next day, eager to report a near-identical sighting from when she was a little girl, around four or five years old. She'd seen the same woman in the black dress walking straight through the front glass window of one of the shops.

Even Judy Bushell, the founder of the Room with Roses teashop, who recently retired after more than 30 years, has had experiences. She says she's never seen anyone, but has been alone in the building late at night and heard doors opening when no one was there. Security guards over the years have reported sightings of a female figure walking along the gallery level and footsteps after dark in the staff-only quarters. Some say the mysterious woman in black is a former shopkeeper, while others believe she is Mary McIntosh, the wife of Patrick Mayne, eternally walking the building.

The ground beneath the arcade has a dark history. In 1844, Irish immigrant Patrick Mayne arrived in Kangaroo Point and married Mary McIntosh. Five years later, he invested sudden and unexplained wealth in a butcher's shop, coach-house, and residence on Queen Street, paying in cash an amount equivalent to about five years' wages for a slaughterman. Mayne acquired more prime inner-city real estate, but despite their affluence, the Maynes were shunned as Patrick's fits of insanity and alcohol-fueled violence, including attacking perceived enemies with his stockwhip, grew more frequent.

In 1865, on his deathbed, Mayne confessed that 17 years earlier, he had murdered a man and someone else had been hanged for it. The victim was a drunken timber-gatherer named Robert Cox, who had boasted of his earnings from a large cedar find. Police described it as one of the most savage slayings they had seen. Cox's legs and torso were found in the Brisbane River, his entrails in a well, and his severed head propped up in a shed.

After Mayne's and Mary's deaths, their children became benefactors to churches and charities. None of them married, and they tore down their parents' butcher shop and childhood home. In 1923, they built the Brisbane Arcade on the scandal-ridden site. Three years later, Patrick's offspring bought land at St Lucia and donated it to the University of Queensland, with all profits from the Brisbane Arcade Trust supporting the university. Today, Brisbane Arcade is operated by the trustees of the estate of Dr. James Mayne and Mary Emelia Mayne, Patrick's youngest two children, with proceeds going to UQ's medical school.