Walhalla, and the Quiet Kind of Haunted

Third time now we’ve stayed in Walhalla, and I still can’t quite explain what it is about the place. Officially it’s meant to be the most haunted town in Victoria. Unofficially, it’s the most peaceful few days I get all year.

For anyone who hasn’t made the trip, Walhalla is a old gold-mining town tucked into a valley in Gippsland, a couple of hours east of the city. No mobile reception. One pub. A cemetery cut into the hillside so steep that a myth grew up in the 1950s claiming they buried people standing upright, just to make the slope work. It’s not true, apparently, but it’s the sort of detail that tells you everything about the place. People have been making up stories about Walhalla for a hundred years, and the town just sits there, letting them.

I took my daughter through the cemetery on this trip, the way my own school took me through one decades ago. She wasn’t spooked, just quietly interested, reading headstones and asking who these people were and how they ended up dying so young. That’s the thing about old cemeteries; they’re not scary so much as sobering. A reminder that a town full of people once thought this was the centre of the world, and now it’s a handful of houses and a very good pie shop.

The drive in and out is its own experience. Narrow, winding, no room for error, and every local I’ve spoken to about it says the same thing: respect the road or it’ll bite you. I believe them. It’s the kind of drive where you stop talking and just concentrate, which is maybe the point. You don’t arrive in Walhalla so much as decompress into it.

What gets me is how differently people respond to the same set of facts. Some see an isolated valley town with a spooky graveyard and think “creepy.” I see the same thing and think “finally, some quiet.” I don’t think either reaction is wrong. It’s just interesting that a place can hold both at once, the eerie and the restful, without needing to resolve into one or the other.

There’s talk online of doing more with the old cricket ground, of leaning into the “living museum” angle a bit harder. I get the appeal, and also I quietly hope they don’t overdo it. Walhalla works because it’s under-visited. The moment it becomes a destination with a car park and a gift shop the size of the town, something will drain out of it. Some places are better left slightly inconvenient to get to.

I keep half-joking with my wife about a holiday house up there one day, knowing full well it’d mean a two-hour drive on a road that scares me even now. Doesn’t stop me thinking about it. There’s something appealing about a town that’s basically decided to stop growing, sitting quietly in its valley while the rest of the state gets louder around it.