Kissed by a Nun

March 11, 2015

In the Blue Mountains, at Jenolan Caves, the tour guides have great stories.

Overexcited nuns, polar bear taggers and ghosts! The tour guides at Jenolan Caves have great stories. To get several examples, all I had to do was to walk into the Jenolan Ticket Office and ask the ticket seller. I said, “Hi Alan! What’s your best Jenolan story – the one you’re most likely to tell at dinner parties?”

He thought about it for about 10 seconds only, and said, “Well, one day I was guiding a group on a River Cave tour. One of the visitors was a very old lady, thin and only about half my height.

“The River Cave is not an easy tour, and as we went along, she said to me, ‘If you get me through this, I’ll give you a kiss.’ So, as she seemed like a sweet little old lady, I said, ‘Well you’re on!’

“River Cave visitors have to climb down a long, steep, old metal ladder. This little old lady got almost to the bottom of the ladder and stopped at the last 2 rungs, where I was waiting to help her down. Our heads were level. Without warning, she reached forward and with both hands, grabbed me by the ears, pulled my head towards her, kissed me on the forehead and said, ‘Now you can tell your friends you’ve been kissed by a nun!’

“Ha! Ha! Now, that’s one of my favourite stories!"

Alan Cupitt has been a cave guide at Jenolan for 16 years. He said, “The most special thing about working as a cave guide is the people you meet on tours. I remember standing on the top platform in the Temple of Baal cave one day, and a visitor was so moved by the beauty of the cave that she burst into tears.

“I once met a girl on a Lucas Cave tour who worked in the Yukon. She said she was one of only 6 women, and approximately 30 people, whose job it was to jump out of helicopters and tag polar bears! As you can imagine, she was fascinating!”

I said, “What about a ghost story?”

Alan said, “I was taking a group through the Imperial Cave one evening, and we stopped to wait for everyone to catch up. Uneasily, a young couple came up and started telling me that they had just been in Caves House dining room for dinner and something strange happened. As the tour group gathered around us, the woman said that when they were sitting at dinner, her partner said to her, ‘There’s a woman over there, staring at us’. Well, no one else could see the woman.”

Alan asked the man, “What did she look like?”

The man said, “She looked to be in her 40s or 50s, in period dress of around 100 years ago. Her hair was pulled severely up and back.”

Alan said, “Well, that put the wind up me! It put the wind up all of us for the rest of the tour!” Alan went on to explain that the apparition roughly fit the description of Lucinda Wilson. She and her husband Jeremiah built the original Caves House, and she was, more or less, the accommodation manager.