A honeymoon spent chasing ghosts across Otago was the origin of a supernatural thriller on a Dunedin stage.
Actors Lizzie Tollemache and David Ladderman celebrated their second wedding anniversary last Saturday.
After getting married, the time-poor actors needed to start researching their supernatural thriller The Dunstan Creek Haunting, which is based on true events.
The newlyweds decided to combine the research with a honeymoon in a New Zealand province brimming with spooky stories.
Otago had plenty of haunted places with a "weird energy", making it the perfect honeymoon destination, Tollemache said.
"We just followed the ghosts ... we had some real creepy times," Tollemache said.
The haunted honeymoon started at the lonely graves at Millers Flat, then the Danseys Pass Coach Inn, and at Vulcan Hotel in St Bathans.However, the "first real fright" occurred when they were staying in the old jail at St Bathans, she said.
The sound of footsteps outside their room and scratching noises on the exterior walls of the jail remain unexplained.
The next honeymoon stop was the stone huts at Doctors Point, down the Clutha River from Alexandra.
In one of the abandoned huts were blacksmith’s tools from the 1930s, Tollemache said.
"For whatever reason, the blacksmith walked away from all of his tools ... it’s a weird place," she said.
The two weeks of research ended with a stay at Larnach Castle and learning its "bleak" history.
"That was a whole other kind of weird," Tollemache said.
After returning home to Christchurch, the newlyweds unpacked the research notes from the honeymoon.
Many of the notes were transcripts of ghost stories told to them by locals in pubs.
"It was the best place to get information, because a lot of the stuff is not available online. You have to talk to people to find it out," Tollemache said.
"Gee, we heard some good stories," Ladderman said.
The four-night run at Fortune Theatre in Dunedin ends today.
