The Dreamworld Big Brother House Haunting

Big Brother Australia came to the Gold Coast in 2001. Construction of the house began in February that year. The first housemates moved in on 23 April 2001. The compound stood on Foxwell Road, Coomera, next to the Dreamworld theme park. It was a short walk from Dreamworld Studios, a venue that began in 1986 as the Music Bowl, became the Dreamworld Amphitheatre, and took the name Dreamworld Studios in 2001.

The show ran on Network Ten from 2001 to 2008. It returned on the Nine Network from 2012 to 2014. Through all of it, the house was watched around the clock. Live crews worked the night shifts.

The crew talked about a child. Numerous production staff, camera operators among them, claimed to have witnessed the presence of a young girl. She "couldn't have been older than seven," by one account. She wore a white dress. According to the crew, nobody had reported her before the show arrived.

They heard her too. A child's voice. And there was fog, appearing late at night and early in the morning, in the hours when the crews kept watch. On a fan forum, one poster wrote that current and former camera people and crew "talk about it every season."

The story reached the public on 31 August 2013. During the Nine revival, the official Big Brother website published it under the headline "The Big Brother Housemate You've Yet To Meet…". The article was later taken offline and survives only in web archives. No names, job titles or numbers of witnesses have ever been published. No housemate is on record as a witness.

Believers have offered several origins for the girl. One points to a highway accident nearby. Another to a grave from an old farmhouse on the land where the house was built. A third suggests a spirit wandering from Coomera Cemetery, dating to the late 1800s and about 1 km away, a place that is itself said to be haunted. A ghost hunter on the forum blamed "traumatic events" linked to the swampland around Dreamworld.

Commentators raise a different point. The story first appeared on the show's own promotional website, during a season, under a light headline. And in a house covered by so many cameras, no evidence was ever produced. Camera operators were reportedly not allowed to bring phones or personal cameras inside, which one blogger offers as the reason no private footage exists either. No official conclusion was ever reached.

The house outlived the show as a ruin. In 2019, MuiTube toured the abandoned building on video, and Pedestrian.tv headlined it "Here's A Haunting Vid Of The Abandoned Big Brother House At The Gold Coast." Then, on 22 June 2019, at about 2:15pm, the house burned. Four children aged 11 to 15 were charged. The house and studios were demolished in August 2019, and the land went to the Steel Taipan roller coaster.

The girl in the white dress is not the park's only ghost. Dreamworld staff folklore tells of Jack Darke, said to be a gold prospector from the 1800s killed by a buzzsaw, a legend tied to the BuzzSaw ride. On 27 July 2025, a new Big Brother house at Dreamworld was announced. The old house is gone. Its quietest resident has never been explained.