I was greeted in Ravenswood by a rundown corrugated metal miners' shack. In the late 1800's, gold was discovered in the Elephine Creek here, and the ensuing boom created Australia's first inland town. By the 1930's, however, richer veins of gold further inland, such as Charters Towers, caused the industry to fade in Ravenswood, and the town was dismantled or simply abandoned. I walked around, checking out the old mine shafts and rusted equipment. A few people actually do still live in and around Ravenswood, so I checked out the buildings, some original, some new but built in the style of. I ate lunch in the Imperial Hotel with a group of cowboy-hatted students from a local agricultural college. Here I learned that the hotel was haunted, a spirit lurking in room 12A. Of course we had to check this out, and since the innkeeper had said we could look where ever we liked, we crept up the creaky stairs and fanned out to located the room. Upon finding it (the rooms were ordered 12, 12A, 14), we burst in to see a figure lying in the bed. Although my first instinct was that it was the ghost (and secretly it remains so), it turns out the the night staff were simply crashed out before their shift. Laughing we took off down the hall. It turns out that the ghost manifests itself as a cold chill and musty scent in the billiard room, or as a legless, capped apparition floating over the bed, adjusting his tie. You can book rooms at the Imperial, and request which room you'd like to stay in....
Afterwards, I jumped into the car, back to the coast and Townsville (for returning the car, and seeing if the party from Maggie was a go).