Tasmanian-born Adam Poultney was taking a few run-of-the-mill pictures of his wife, Tania, and their children Tarrah, 10, and Lochlan, 7 without realising he'd captured what appears to be the image of a ghost dressed in a "wide-brim hat and a long coat".
It wasn't until the next day when Tarrah was going through the photos - taken with a digital camera - that the family realised a ghost had haunted some of their captured memories.
"The kids were very excited to see a ghost," Mr Poultney said.
"They kept asking: 'When are we going to see a ghost, dad?', but we walked away without actually seeing one.
"But when Tarrah started going through the photos, she noticed this ghostly apparition standing behind the fly-screen at Trentham Cottage."
Mr Poultney said the family, who live in NSW, had been through the house just moments before, and it had been empty begging the question who or what was in the photo.
Port Arthur Historic Site tour supervisor Colin Knight said the description of the ghost matched similar sightings of former Port Arthur clergyman George Eastman, who reportedly became the first ghost of Port Arthur after he died at The Parsonage in 1870.
"The 'hat and coat' description is one we hear a lot of down here, and we believe it to be the ghost of the Rev Eastman, who is definitely one of the most spotted ghosts in the area" Mr Knight said.
He said the site had had more than 10,000 ghost sightings reported in the past 20 years, with many images of supposed ghosts captured on film and digital cameras.
"Some of them could be reflections from windows or shadows, but there are certainly a lot of them that we can't explain," Mr Knight said. "There's no pattern to them.
Source: The Mercury, Australia