Lurid tales shock in cemetery tour

Tour guide Gregor Campbell takes a group of local history buffs on a tour of Dunedin’s Northern Cemetery as part of the Otepoti Dunedin Heritage Festival yesterday morning.

Mr Campbell, who also hosted a tour of the Southern Cemetery on Saturday, said participants enjoyed the tours, and were shocked at some of the more lurid tales of those interred at the cemetery.

While he had done private tours for friends before, this was his first time running them for the festival, and he was keen to take part in future events, he said.

He became hooked on cemetery research several years ago after discovering a headstone that proclaimed its owner was ‘‘brutally murdered’’, and has kept a blog recording stories from the cemeteries called ‘‘In Loving Memory’’.

The heritage festival ran throughout the weekend, and had a theme of adaptive reuse of heritage buildings.