It also attracts the odd visitor intrigued by the Vulcan’s fame as a haunted hotel. It’s said a prostitute called Rosie was strangled there in the 1880s and her apparition pops up from time-to-time.
The Ballarat was built with sun-dried bricks and in 1866 Edward Dooley sold it to Patrick Hanrahan who added a billiard hall.
In the early 1880s it was discovered that Hanrahan’s pub encroached on to the main street and major alterations were needed. By September 1886 Hanrahan was bankrupt and the Ballarat was on the market.
Fate was not kind to Patrick and Margaret Hanrahan. They had lost their infant son James in 1871 and in June 1887 their 13-year-old daughter Caroline died. In 1895 their 17-year-old son Edward drowned while swimming in the Enterprise claim dam.
In 1914 Patrick’s brother, Moses, was fatally injured when he fell a hundred feet into the Scandinavian Water Race workings. Patrick left the Ballarat to return to mining and in 1890 the new publican was Michael Nolan.
In 1895 Nolan was successful in the ballot for a small grazing run at Blackstone but died at the age of 43 in 1897 and his wife Rose Ann took over the pub which she put on the market late in 1899.
Rose Ann remarried, this time to Alfred Harry Vernon King, the manager of the Bank of New South Wales, who featured in a celebrated court case of 1904 over his role in handling the estate of miner Thomas Keenan, and the couple retained ownership of the pub property.
Patrick Sexton and his sister Ellen took over the lease of the Ballarat and were popular publicans — so much so that when they announced they were leaving only two years later, a grand banquet was held at which Patrick’s contributions to the curling, racing and athletics clubs were highly praised — but within two weeks it was learned that they were moving only a hundred yards up the road to the Vulcan.
The Ballarat was now in the hands of Robert McLintock, who left in 1905 to run a pub in Greymouth. He was replaced by veteran miner Harry Excell, who soon gave way to Josephine Kenning.
In 1906 Rose Vernon King put the Ballarat on the market and it was passed in at £1150 ($200,000 in 2026). Josephine stayed on until Hugh Browne became licensee in 1908 but was almost immediately followed by David Grant, of Middlemarch, who was bankrupt within a year. He had gone into the hotel with only £90 and was heavily mortgaged.
The winter was a bad one and the hotel was in poor condition. Speight’s took over the lease and Grant was left with "twopence in his pocket". More drama came at the same time when an employee at the Ballarat attempted to commit suicide after heavy drinking. William Weller was convicted and taken to Christchurch to face a charge of deserting his wife.
Late in 1908 Patrick Doyle became the publican but died within a year and his wife Ada took over until the owner Alfred Vernon King took up the licence in 1910 and then sold the property to Patrick Sexton of the Vulcan in 1911. Sexton forfeited the licence when he failed to meet the necessary conditions and his intention may always have been to close down the Ballarat which soon became something of a decaying relic.
By 1923, still without a licence, it was home to a solitary boarder. In 1931 the Vulcan Hotel was destroyed by fire and its licence was transferred to the old Ballarat Hotel where William and Ellen O’Dowd ran it as the Vulcan Hotel for about 15 years.
Many publicans later, and more than once threatened with permanent closure, it remains today a jewel in the Central Otago crown.
And Rosie the murder victim? If she was done away with in the 1880s it would have been when the Vulcan was the Ballarat but there are no newspaper reports of any such foul deed at St Bathans.
Nevertheless, the story is too good to dismiss out of hand. It has been seriously examined by experts on ghostly matters and the guests who stay in Room 1 and sense a "presence" have a tale to tell.
As for the long-gone original Vulcan Hotel: that’s a great story for a later column — but with no need to be ghostwritten.
— Jim Sullivan is a Patearoa writer.
