New Zealand's old curse. I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Leib. And this is Ghost Town.

In Dunedin, New Zealand's Quaint 7th largest city is a massive sprawling castle.

Well, mock castle to be exact. Built by William Larnuck, a troubled big banker,

turned businessman, turned broke parliamentarian, who navigated failure after failure.

So why did the life of someone so successful, a celebrity in the 1800s, who had a happy home,

wealth, and a booming business, a burgeoning political career, just suddenly spiral?

People point to Larnuck Castle. Many say that Larnuck's life rested on the house's whims,

and since building the massive compound, everything just kind of went to shit. A curse? Who knows?

You can decide as we take you through the story of the Larnuck House, a haunted hotbed and New

Zealand's only castle. This is kind of a throwback episode, I would say. We haven't done a haunted

episode in a while. There's a lot of rich history to this kind of dependent on place. But really,

before the castle, or the mansion, or whatever you'd like to call it, is the man. William James

Mundy Larnuck. He was born on January 27th in 1833 to high society Australians with a lot of wealth

and a lot of influence. To give you some context, growing up, Larnuck was pals with a man named

W.J. T. Clark, set at that time to be the richest man in Australia. In his late 20s, Larnuck married a

woman named Eliza Jane Geys and moved quickly up the Bank of New South Wales' corporate ladder.

In 1867, he was picked by the London Board of the Bank of Otago to replace their New Zealand

manager. So Lannuck arrived in Dundin in September of 1867 and got to it. William Larnuck was pretty

good at being a banker in rural New Zealand. He got into land speculating, farming and timber and

also made huge profits in investing in those sectors. Being a man about town and in the business

already, Larnuck decided to build himself a massive Gothic revival home he called the camp.

Building the camp took almost seven years and involved hundreds of workers,

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