The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Benalla Cemetery contains them all - The Good who sought to improve the life of others and the community; the Bad who used their power and influence for their own immoral purposes; and it contains the truly Ugly.

This is your opportunity to visit the graves and stories of all three groups to relive their lives and deeds. Members from Benalla Cemetery trust will recount stories of the graves.

Starting at dusk on Saturday 4 May, guides from Benalla's cemetery trust who have researched the stories of many of the cemetery's occupants will escort you from grave to interesting grave. As they move among the graves, they will relate the stories that they have discovered. Benalla cemetery has stories a-plenty - of the good, the bad and the ugly. For example, a brutal killer lies in Benalla's cemetery. He murdered his best mate. Another murdered his workmate – by accident?! The cemetery also contains a woman who enlisted as a nurse in the Great War after her brother died at Gallipolli as well as the remains of a man who used his influence to keep his sons safe during that same war and yet bullied others to enlist. What an ironic outcome there was to those two stories!

Another man posed as a respectable citizen and hid his long convict past. Another woman widowed in her first year of marriage in a horrible accident ran a quarantine hospital during the Influenza Epidemic. Then there was the man who received 5,787 votes from locals to be christened Benalla’s ugliest man in 1926.

The stories related will range across the man who married the wrong woman; the man who was swept from a bridge after being encouraged to cross it in flood, and a witness to a brutal unsolved murder. From murders committed in the 1860s through the explosion of an iron killing three children in 1909 to the deaths of polio victims in the 1950s - the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Benalla cemetery has it all. A walk among the gravestones in the dark give the walk extra creepiness. We will have a portable speaker so you can hear all of the stories.

Bring a torch. The ground in the cemetery is uneven and is unsuitable at night for wheelchairs and for people who are unsteady on their feet.