BRISBANE: Work to repair Brisbane’s City Hall building could disrupt more than just its resident politicians.

The three-year repair job might also disturb its ghostly inhabitants, with rumours a photograph has emerged of one of its most talked-about poltergeists, a woman in an old-fashioned dress.

City Hall will be closed late next year for an estimated $200 million restoration project.

Jack Sim, who runs a ghost tour in Brisbane, says there is no doubt City Hall is haunted.

In the early 1980s there were claims Brisbane City Council had closed a whole section of City Hall because it was haunted, Mr Sim said. At the time former Alderman Clarrie O’Sullivan told Mr Sim the section was abandoned for some time after a council worker committed suicide in one of the rooms in the 1940s.

“Over a long period of time the legend became that it was haunted by this man,” Mr Sim said.

“Night watchmen back in the 50s, 60s and 70s used to jokingly say that there was a ghost up there.

“The third floor, that is where the ghost was claimed to be in 1980s, was redeveloped into a creche and that didn’t stop the ghost, he kept making appearances,” Mr Sim said.

When the clock tower was renovated a construction worker claimed to have seen a ghost which presented as silhouette of a man standing in an area off-limits to the public.

Mr Sim has dedicated a chapter on City Hall in his book Haunted Brisbane.

But State Library of Queensland Heritage Collections librarian Brian Randall said the myth of the female ghost was the most persistent of the three separate ghosts said to haunt the building.

One possible theory on her identity gleaned from Randall’s research was a story about a woman who drowned in a waterway on the site before City Hall was built.

Opened in 1930, City Hall was built on inexpensive swampland over a creek, leading to today’s problems of subsidence and water rot.