Daily Photo – Is the Vulcan Hotel Really Haunted?

By the time I arrived in St Bathans, the temperature had climbed to a positively tropical three degrees, although thanks to the heavy snow that had fallen several days earlier, it still felt like the sort of day where a thick pair of socks was an essential item of clothing. The tiny gold-mining settlement was only just coming to life and while it wasn’t completely deserted, it’s quietness wasn’t particularly surprising. St Bathans has a main street of roughly 500 metres, a handful of historic buildings and the general atmosphere of a place that has never been particularly interested in keeping up with the modern world.

At the centre of it all is the Vulcan Hotel, a building that looks as though it’s been sitting there quietly watching Central Otago change around it. It is also reputed to have a resident who has been around for considerably longer than most of the current guests. Her name is Rosie, and apparently she is a ghost.

The story most commonly told is that Rosie was a young prostitute who was murdered in Room 1 of the hotel for her small amount of gold in the 1880s, supposedly by a client. Her ghost is said to haunt Room 1, where guests have reported seeing her, feeling her presence or experiencing the sort of unexplained disturbances that are particularly easy to explain, except for the fact that you’re staying in a 19th-century hotel in the middle of nowhere. There is, however, a slight problem with the story. There doesn’t appear to be any contemporary newspaper report of a woman being murdered at St Bathans in the 1880s.

There is an even more awkward historical detail. The famous building known as the Vulcan Hotel wasn’t actually the Vulcan Hotel in the 1880s. It was the Ballarat Hotel. The original Vulcan was a different building altogether and was destroyed by fire in 1931, after which the Ballarat became the hotel we know today. So Rosie, if she really was murdered there, was technically murdered in the Ballarat Hotel, which makes the whole thing rather harder to put neatly on a tourist brochure and kind of spoils the Room 1 story. 

However, there is another version of the story, one that is considerably more elaborate. It all starts with an anonymous, hand-sewn booklet called The Tragic Tale of the Vulcan Ghost, by a Lady who tells the story of a woman named Rosie O’Dowd. Rosie supposedly came from an impoverished family and began working at the hotel when she was only twelve years old. The years passed and she eventually fell in love with a wealthy traveller named Piers Osmond, who regularly stayed in Room 1. Osmond gave Rosie a snow globe, got her pregnant and then disappeared, which seems a particularly efficient way of destroying someone’s life.

Rosie then lost her baby during childbirth and, overcome by grief, apparently went mad outside Room 1 before disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again, well in living form at least. Her body was never found, but her spirit supposedly returned, leaving the Vulcan with at least one permanent resident. 

It is a wonderful story, but there is very little evidence to suggest that Rosie O’Dowd or Piers Osmond actually existed. There are no obvious historical records confirming the romance, the pregnancy, the snow globe or Rosie’s disappearance. In fact, there are several different versions of Rosie’s story, with different names, different occupations and different accounts of how she died. The more you look, the more the historical Rosie seems to dissolve into folklore.

But standing outside the Vulcan in a tiny settlement at the end of a long Central Otago road, I found that I didn’t really care. St Bathans is full of stories from its gold-mining past, and Rosie is simply another one that has survived because people like having a ghost attached to an old hotel. The miners have gone, the goldfields have disappeared beneath the tussock and the streets are now so quiet that you can stand in the middle of them without having to worry about traffic.

Whether Rosie O’Dowd ever walked into Room 1, whether Piers Osmond ever stayed there, or whether a snow globe ever sat on its bedside table is impossible to say. But somewhere along the way, somebody gave the Vulcan Hotel a ghost, gave her a name and gave her a rather tragic story. And now, more than a century later, Rosie remains in St Bathans, haunting the local hotel.

Which, for a ghost, is probably about as Central Otago as you can get.