Melbourne has always had a dark side — and after a couple of drinks, it tends to become considerably more interesting.

Hidden Bars & Creepy Tales combines two of our favourite things: strange Melbourne history and finding excellent bars that you probably would have walked straight past.

Over the course of the night, we’ll wander through some of the oldest parts of the CBD, duck down laneways and stop at three handpicked bars along the way. We make the reservations, you choose what you want to drink, and between stops we’ll introduce you to a very different Melbourne from the one in the guidebooks.

This is a city built over graveyards, where pubs once had some fairly unusual uses, supposedly haunted laneways sit beside some of Melbourne’s busiest streets, and generations of Melburnians have found increasingly creative ways to terrify one another.

We’ll get into Melbourne’s strange obsession with ghosts and the supernatural, including a period when dressing up as a ghost and jumping out at strangers was apparently considered a perfectly reasonable way to spend an evening.

There are murder mysteries, moral panics, old superstitions and some genuinely bizarre characters. We’ll wander through a Chinatown that once terrified respectable Melbourne, hear about a detective who became indispensable to the police despite having a few interesting habits of his own, and delve into some of the stories that filled Melbourne’s newspapers with scandal.

There’s also true crime. We’ll cover cases that shocked the city, a wartime killer who terrified Melbourne during some of its darkest nights, and the extraordinary story of a convicted murderer who some researchers believe may have been responsible for crimes on the other side of the world.

And because Melburnians have always had a slightly questionable relationship with death, we’ll also explore what happened to bodies before the city had a proper morgue, why thousands of people once turned up to see the dead for entertainment, and why there are parts of central Melbourne where you might want to think twice before digging a particularly deep hole.

Despite the subject matter, this isn’t a blood-and-guts ghost tour. The stories can be dark, but we’re much more interested in the strange people, ridiculous details, forgotten history and very Melbourne moments surrounding them.

Your guide will also take you to three of Melbourne’s favourite hidden drinking spots, with plenty of time at each to grab a drink and have a chat before we head back out into the laneways.

Part history tour, part bar crawl and part collection of stories that really shouldn’t be true.

Unfortunately, most of them are.