'It was never a big deal for us': Growing up in a haunted house

Not many Australians can say they grew up in a haunted mansion, but this was Christopher Morgan’s reality when his family moved from suburban Sydney to Bathurst in 1968.

When Morgan was six, his parents bought the historic Abercrombie House, situated on just over 20 hectares of land. Built of sandstone and granite in the 1870s for the Stewart family, Abercrombie has 50 rooms, 30 fireplaces and seven stairwells.

It was a Scottish mansion intended for the well-to-do of the Victorian era, not a family of five from Sydney. “My mother and father stood in the paddock and looked at it and said, ‘oh my God, it’s a national treasure’,” Morgan says.

Today, genealogy and history has had a resurgence in popularity, as evidenced by TV shows such as Downton Abbey and Who Do You Think You Are? .

But in 1968 Australia, it was a very different story. “It was the ‘summer of love’ when they bought this … the Vietnam war was on, so Victorian mansions in the country were a bit of [a symbol] of a bygone era. It was only after they bought it that the heritage thing really took off,” Morgan says.

The Morgans would spend the next 40 years slowly restoring the house but for the three children, it was a place of excitement and wonder.

“I read the Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis when I was a boy and I remember I just couldn’t help thinking I was living in that world. We experienced our first real winter because the house is freezing, so we were lighting the fires. We were living a storybook life,” he says.

Rather than being overwhelmed by the size and scale of the property, Morgan’s father had a philosophy on how they would live in such a house.

Every one of the 50 rooms had to have a name, a purpose, the doors had to stay open and something had to be done in each of them.

They managed to expand into the spaces and bought furniture from clearance sales to fill the rooms. “There was always a piano or organ for sale, so my dad bought them all. They were always $40,” says Morgan.

The drawing room has a 1920s Steinway grand piano and the ballroom has a 108-year-old upright piano. The minstrels gallery in the ballroom has the oldest pipe organ on mainland Australia.

The land includes an orchard that was originally tended by the Stewart family. James Stewart was so fond of the orchard, he was buried there before his body was moved to the local cemetery. His memorial is still on the land.

“There was a period when it felt a bit ghostly. It was never a big deal for us, more of a curiosity. We would look down towards the orchard and there would be a man standing there. You would go down there and there was nobody. Sometimes you got a feeling in a room that someone was there, and you knew there wasn’t,” Morgan says.

For the house to survive and escape the fate of many of the stately houses of Europe, the Morgans knew it had to earn its keep.

In 1969, they opened the house for tours and have continued to do so ever since. This year will be the 50th anniversary of the Morgans’ first tour.

Christopher Morgan sold glasses of orange juice and cups of tea on that first opening, then moved on to being a parking marshal when he was eight and conducted his first tour at 14.

“My advice to the Historic Houses Trust of NSW would be to try and put a family in all of those historic properties,” says Morgan. “It adds incredible character and depth to a heritage experience for visitors.”