Location: Founded after the 1857 Gold Rush in Victoria Province, Australia, Ararat is located 205 kilometers (115 miles) west of Melbourne. The Palmer House is located at 3 Port Fairy Road in Ararat alongside the National A8 Highway.

Description Of Place: The Palmer house is a simple one-story three-bedroom house with a fenced in backyard within a residential neighborhood. The house has a unique layout with the kitchen and dining area in back and living quarters in front.

Ghostly Manifestations: In typical urban mythology, the modern haunted house is often considered and described as a lonely abandoned house with Gothic or Victorian overtones, often secluded from the road and hidden behind trees from view in an area of town or a back road not usually traveled by locals. It's a visceral image still evoked and perpetuated by Hollywood and horror fiction writers. Very few people realize that even these abandoned and neglected edifices had to have been at one time homes for the living. Such structures as the horror genre may suggest do not crop up out from the Earth as the skeletal warriors from a Ray Harryhausen movie. It is perhaps that much more fascinating or even incredulous when neighbors learn rumors or overhear stories of a ghost appearing or making themselves at home just a few doors from their own homes in residential neighbors.

In Winter 2005, most of Southeast Australia was intrigued by news of the ghost of Alice Palmer being reported haunting her former home in the housing community of Ararat, Australia. Alice had been an attractive sixteen-year-old girl, the eldest of two children born to Russell and June Palmer. During a family outing on December 21, 2005 near Ararat's Norval Dam, Alice drowned while swimming with her brother Matt. Her water-logged body wasn't found for three days, later recovered late into the evening from a storm drainage system where it had drifted from her original spot. Her funeral was January 2005.

Ten days later, Russell Palmer started hearing strange sounds from the yard and house. Once they appeared in the house, they seemed to occur much of the time from Alice's room which had been left and undisturbed just as she had left it. Family friends described strange feelings in the house as if they were being watched as well as cursory glances of something they barely saw passing through the house. June remarked that she was having nightmares with Alice coming home dripping wet and entering her room. Her door seemed to open and close itself, sometimes two or three times a night until they removed it off the hinges.

"Ted days after Ali's funeral, " Russell recalled. "Stuff started happening around the house. Noises on the roof, sounds from outside the window and other sounds of movement from Ali's old room. So, we returned the door to Ali's room and got a pest controller to come check for termites, but it didn't help at all. The door kept slamming, and we still kept getting strange noises from the room."

"There was just something really strange about the house." Georgia "Georgie" Ritter was the Palmer's next door neighbor. She came over often during the days Alice was missing to lend support and she even came around the family several times after the funeral. "It just had a strange feeling about it. I really can't explain to you what it was exactly... You'd just go in there and you'd have a really strange feeling in your gut."

Georgie recalled sitting in chairs and felt someone standing over her she couldn't see. From the sitting room, she thought she saw someone entering Alice's old room, but when she walked past the open door of the room, it would be empty. She never described these feelings openly with the family, but it was becoming obvious that they were experiencing things as well. Even Alice's mother, June Palmer, was having strange feelings in the absence of her daughter.

"I started having these nightmares." She describes. "They were so distressing that I wouldn't want to open my eyes. I'd wake up, but I didn't want to open my eyes. There was one nightmare; it was quite vivid and recurring. Alice would come down the hall, still dripping from the van and stood at the foot of the bed, just staring at us. It was so terrifying I didn't want to open my eyes."

"One night in late February," Russell describes an experience. "I came home from work and was sitting in the kitchen, and I heard a noise come from Ai's room. So, I went into Ali's room, and I really don't know why, but I found myself sitting in the chair in front of the dresser. Before I could work out what I was doing there, Ali walked in. She walked up to her desk and started sharpening a pencil and looked like she was checking for a text message on her phone. I was completely freaked out. She was completely oblivious to my presence, and then, I don't know what happened, I must have nudged the bed or squeaked my shoe, but she went completely rigid. I knew then that she knew I was there, and she slowly turned around, looked me right in the eyes for what felt like forever and came right at me. She stood right up to me, and said, "Get out! Get out!" I just got up and got out as fast as I could, later finding myself at the kitchen unsure of what I had experienced."

Alice's boyfriend, Jason Whittle, also received phantom phone calls at time. His phone would ring at times with Alice's ID on it, but when he picked up, the line would click off. When he tried calling the number back, thinking someone was using her phone, he received automated messages the line was out of service. To this day, he is still not sure what to make of these calls.

Alice's brother, Matt, during this time, was a recurring by-standers to these events. He was with his father during the sounds in the house, and he was with his mother as she struggled with the loss, but he didn't have many experiences beyond hearing the sounds in the house. He did wake up a few times with strange injuries, as if someone was striking him in his sleep, but he never could find a plausible excuse for them.

"Alice did use to pound on me growing up, but it was never malicious." He adds. "It was more like good-natured horseplay. Often competitive but never destructive."

During this time, Matt delved deeper into his hobby of photography, having strayed from it some time prior. He was taking still life photos and existential images of himself and objects in creative surroundings, but he also caught what seemed to confirm Alice was haunting the house. During a series of photos of the backyard in its various seasonal changes, he caught a photo on April 28, 2006 of what looked like Alice standing behind the house and staring up at the it. It was alarming enough to hit the local WIN Network new of the area, but his father was convinced it meant Alice was still alive. Skeptical of his identification of Alice's remains, he requested an exhumation and a few weeks, later, DNA analysis confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the remains were those of Alice Palmer.

However, it was not the last photo of Alice to be caught of her spirit. Twenty days prior, on April 3, 2006, a retired man named Bob Smeet took a photo of the trees near Nerval Dam where Alice's body had been recovered from the storm drain system. After the release of the backyard photo, he and his wife were looking over the photos near the dam and were stunned to discover an image of Alice looking back at them from the distance.

"It damned near knocked me off my feet she did." Smeet later responded. "I had never seen a ghost before."

More and more photos turned up. Using a motion picture camera, Matt caught a figure drifting from the lounge area in the house toward the front door. June by this time was getting counseling from a psychologist named Ray Kennery who had billed himself as a psychic healer. During a séance in the kitchen on June 20, Alice's face, much more detailed this time, appeared in the back hall watching from a far. Ray afterward set up his own camera shooting down the hall, and on July 15, he caught a reflection of Alice's face in a small table mirror at the end of the hall. The activity, video and photos were the talk and speculation of town for several weeks, and the Palmers turned down researchers trying to investigate their house. Police were also called to chase trespassers out of the backyard where the initial photo had been caught.

The ghostly uproar came to a screeching halt when it was learned the images had all been faked. Local couple Doug and Cathy Withers had been vacationing near Norval Dam on the same day Bob Smeet had been there and caught his photo. Their analysis of their video from that day did not locate Alice's ghost, but they did capture footage of Matt walking around in Alice's coat. After some prodding, he soon revealed faking the other images at the house including the backyard image with photos of Alice and videos of her on strategically placed monitors. However, he has always maintained he was trying to help his grieving mother get closure; his intention was never to commit deception on the public.

Though those photos turned out to be faked, others photos in the house turned out to have actually captured Alice's presence haunting the house. During the weekend of August 22, 2006, Ray took Matt out of town on a three-day trip and left his cameras going in the house. On their return, they had twenty-one hours of footage to review and among the video, they caught an image of Alice standing over her parent's bed in their room on the side of the screen. The startling footage was not revealed publicly until two years later during the "Lake Mungo" documentary on Alice's drowning, the paranormal activity afterward and the repercussions of her death.

The Palmers lived in the old house on Port Fairy Road for only about another year before they moved. It wasn't such the hauntings or the public attention that forced them to move but rather the urge for a fresh start in their lives. Nevertheless, the rumors of the house being haunted lingered a while longer and it stayed on the market for a year and a half before it was purchased in 2008 by divorcee Blair Alcott from Sydney for her two daughters, Jo and Natalie. Jo was sixteen, the same age Alice had been at the time of her unfortunate death. Natalie was thirteen. Blair's sister, Marcia, a traveling medical sales representative, was a recurring guest. Though they had an "inkling" of the house being haunted, they didn't take it seriously at first.

“I had the afternoon off." Blair recalled the incident with a strong Aussie accent. "I’d come home and I guess it was about three o’clock in the afternoon, I’d try to get some sleep. I probably only dozed for a few minutes when I felt what seemed like someone standing over me. I opened my eyes, I think I blinked once cause I wasn't wearing my glasses, and I looked up to this young lady I didn't know with dark hair.

"She looked confused and... startled... as if she didn't know who I was or what I was doing there. She was almost in white, but her clothes had some color, like a faded out photograph, but she turned away from the door like she was leaving, and by the time I got up and walked three paces to the door, I don’t know what happened, she just turned the corner and disappeared.”

Blair said he looked high and low for the mysterious girl, and even though the doors were locked from the inside, she was nowhere to be found. She told her sister that she thought she’d seen a ghost, but Marcia refused to believe her.

"I didn't believe in that stuff." Marcia confesses. "Every time I've heard people talk about ghosts, I always just rolled my eyes and pretended to listen and say things like, "So you say." but I never cared for that stuff. Even though things happen in the house, I'm not ready to think it's ghosts."

About a month later, Marcia was sitting around watching TV with Jo and her friends and Blair was reading a book by the window. Marcia had remained skeptical in the house as footsteps creaked the floorboards at night and doors that were closed opened up, but things had yet to escalate around them.

“I had my little dog Prince beside me on a pillow." Blair recalled. "And I just happened to look down at the end of the couch and I saw this white smoky thing hovering by the lamp there. The first thing I thought was fire, but by that time, Prince who had been at attention of this presence had gotten up on his feet started barking as if he'd got his hackles in a stir. As soon as he started barking and growling, we all looked up to this waft of smoke which then just disappeared. It was just there one second, and gone the next."

Even though Jo had just barely seen the apparition before it vanished, she and her sister, Natalie, were convinced the house was haunted. Determined to make contact, they enlisted a friend with a Ouija Board and tried to make contact with who they were convinced was the ghost of Alice Palmer.

"To put it bluntly," She replies. "We didn't get much response the first time, but then our friend, Leonard, who owned the board suggested we try it out in Alice's room than the living room another day. Now, either we weren't doing it right or she didn't want to talk to us, but we were surprised by my mother coming home from work and rushed to hide what we were doing. We didn't want to be caught with the board in the house so we hid it under the bed and went to meet mom coming in through the kitchen. Anyway, several minutes later, we're there talking about the stuff we talk about when we hear a loud crash from the hallway. We rush to see what it was, and it's the Ouija Board on the floor against the wall outside my mom's room, which was Alice's, and then that's when we had a lot of explaining to do.

"I think Alice was warning me against having that board in this house."

Over time, the Alcott's experienced Alice's presence moving through the house, sounds of a slight gasp or sigh behind them and doors left open that creaked closed, but they never grew afraid of her. Intermittent drops of water appeared on the floor where there weren't pipes, even after days of no rain. At night, there was almost a constant palpable presence of being watched, but both Jo and Natalie learned to deal with it by always having the television on. At times, it went off by itself or blnked out then off by itself.

"It was an old TV." Marcia adds. "So we replaced it for a new one, but the next week, it all starts all over again. I think someone in the neighborhood is on the same frequency as our remote control."

Unlike the Palmers, Blair actually allowed Lionel Bond and Austin Kibrick of the Sydney Center for Paranormal Studies to investigate their home and look for answers. Armed with a truckload of electronic equipment, the two psychologists showed up at the Old Palmer House on April 2010 and set up cameras and other recording devices as well as completing medical studies of the Alcotts and soil and structure analysis.

“It definitely had an oppressive ambience to it, almost a depressive type of feeling." Bond mentions. "After being in the house for several hours, we all began to experience odd headaches.”

According to Bond, Alice's old bedroom received the highest amount of electromagnetic activity. He took a number of Polaroid photos in there of misty images that distorted and washed out everything in the room. Thinking it was a bad pack of film, he tried again and got the same sort of photos. Kibrick then tried a digital camera and got varying results.

“There was a vague humanoid shape in the forefront of the picture. It may be a reflection of some unusual environmental effect. It may be a strange artifact of the human psyche, or it may be a contact with a dimension of existence that’s beyond our imagination.”

History: The Palmer House is part of a residential district built in or around 1965 on what was then empty cattle ground. There have been several previous tenants who have yet to describe any activity.

Identity of Ghost: Alice Palmer was a sixteen year-old Ararat resident who lived with her family at the Port Fairy address before her unfortunate death on December 5, 2001. Described as affable, out-going and well-loved by her family and friends, everyone who knew her described her as particularly secretive in the last few months of her life. The "Lake Mungo" documentary connects this secrecy with clandestine affairs with Brett Toohey and his wife, Marissa, who Alice often worked for as a babysitter. Others connect Alice's death with a presence she seemed to catch on film at the Lake Mungo Campgrounds north of Ararat the summer before. Recovered from her phone at the camp grounds, she seemed to catch footage of a presence that resembled her. While many believe that it was just Alice filmed with her own camera, Russell Palmer reveals that the presence was a premonition of her death as it looks exactly like Alice's condition as she was when her body was recovered at Norval Dam.

Source/Comments: Lake Mungo (2008) - Activity loosely based on the Bellamy House in Los Angeles, California, the Kelsey House in Virginia City, Nevada and the Mann House in Lake Wales, Florida.

"Ararat Youth Lost On Vacation," by Charlotte Keena, December 22, 2006, Ararat Advertiser

"Local Family Haunted by Daughter's Death," by Charlotte Keena, May 1, 2006, Ararat Advertiser

"Is Local Ararat House Haunted." by Ethan Sloat, September 2007, Ararat Advertiser