Not sure what you remember of the Spielberg movie Poltergeist. All about a housing estate built on an old cemetery where the graves are rehoused and their disturbed spirits strike back with a malevolent revenge.

I reminded a construction honcho of this a while back as he exited a George St site in Newtown, where Sacred Heart College has been building a new sports/wellness centre. He was taken somewhat aback.

My mistake, as it unfolded. I thought the construction site huts had been plonked on top of the old SHC cemetery. Very bad juju, if so. Seventy-odd of our dear Sisters of Mercy requiescating in pace in there and if you know anything of Catholic corporal punishment, and its natural extension, eternal damnation, you wouldn’t be so cavalier with the supernatural.

Old aerial pics from the 1920s and ‘30s show a much more modestly populated boneyard and, as the site honcho pointed out, well back from the George St fence I thought it juxtaposed.

I’ve visited the cemetery on official business twice in recent years, with two aunts laid to rest there. Moving and respectful affairs both but curious as well, in light of the cemetery’s anecdotal history.

The old site, school and cemetery, was christened God’s Acre, high on the Newtown hill, for the best view across the slopes down to Corio Bay on land, the Sunville Homestead, bought for 3000 quid from the pioneering Belcher family way back when.

All very proper. Not exactly the kind of place you’d expect eerie, outlaw, candlelight cemetery burials in the dead of night. Especially not burials conducted by the pious Sisters of Mercy themselves.

But back a century or thereabouts, as families started building more homes in Newtown, a certain disdain arose about the idea of a cemetery in their midst.

Conveyed to the aldermen of Newtown council, this brought about a by-law banning the burials. So the sisters told me.

Naturally, the Christ brides were mortified. But they complied and, for many years, they buried their dearly departed sisters way out at East Geelong. It was a sad state of affairs but the nuns bucked up when the last of the founding sisters died.

They couldn’t bear the idea of her being buried ‘out there’, said the late principal Sister Philomene Carroll, who, incidentally, is in the cemetery too.

So they decided they would hold a secret funeral and bury her at night. And after a requiem Mass in the college chapel, she was buried by candlelight.

Lovely stuff but it didn’t sit well with the neighbouring parvenus, who sooked and whinged to the council, which in its wisdom fined the nuns a shilling. They paid up but refused to re-inter the late sister to East Geelong.

Story goes that a few years later, the brother of one of the sisters, a bishop, went in to bat for the nuns and had the by-law overturned after which the sisters could be buried in the convent grounds.

God love them, and my aunties Sr Leonie and Sr Bernadette too, who boarded, taught and lived at the college. They’re buried at home, with their sisters.

Funny story, kind of. When Leonie, or Joan as she’d been born, departed the rain was pelting down. The SHC kids provided a gorgeous guard of honour but sensibly stayed inside.

One of our number, an elderly cousin, skidded on her rear exiting the chapel. We charged ourselves with the pallbearer’s hipflask for a black-umbrella journey to the ossuary. Not unlike a Roman battlefield turtle manoeuvre.

As we set to lower her down, however, the muddy side of the grave gave way and affairs took a 30-degree turn. The undertakers kicked us out, steering us toward cucumber sandwiches and teapots in a nearby marquee. Buzz off, they said, they’d fix things later.

By hurricane light, I like to think.

This story appeared in the Geelong Advertiser 20 April 2026