Wed 9 Jan 2013
The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum
Posted by anaglyph under Australiana, Creepy, Insane People, Strange Lands, Tragedy
[7] Comments
Late last Saturday evening, Violet Towne and I spent several hours in an abandoned lunatic asylum. Now I know there are those among you who will feign surprise that this is anything out of the ordinary (I’m looking at you, Queen Willy) but it has been, in fact, nearly 25 years since my last Abandoned Lunatic Asylum Adventure.
The place we visited is called Aradale, formerly Ararat Lunatic Asylum, one of three asylums built in southern Australia in the late 1800s for the express purpose of accommodating ‘the growing number of ‘lunatics’ in the colony of Victoria’. Aradale is set on a small hill overlooking the Victorian country town of Ararat, a former goldrush settlement which now sports a population of about 7000 people. It’s about an hour’s drive to Ballarat, the nearest center of any significant size, and a further two hours to Melbourne.
Aradale offers three types of tours: a standard historical tour by the volunteer group The Friends of J Ward, ((J Ward is an annexe of Aradale, and is a goldrush-era high security prison that was seconded by Ararat Asylum in the 1880s as a repository for its ‘criminally insane’ inmates. It can be found in the town of Ararat, a few kilometers from Aradale. VT and I did the historical tour of J Ward on the morning after our Aradale visit. It’s also quite a grim and amazing place.)) and a ‘theatrical ghost tour’ and a ‘ghost hunting tour’ run by a company called Australian Ghost Adventures
I am, as you know dear Cowpokes, quite skeptical of all things ‘haunted’, but I’m nevertheless partial to a bit of gothic fun, so VT and I nixed the straight historical tour in favour of one of the more ghostly options. Since the ghost ‘hunting’ tour sounded like it might attract the same kind of loonies formerly housed in the asylum, ((The ghost hunting tour offers all the technical accoutrements that have become associated with this contemporary folly – night-vision cameras & goggles, EMF detectors (which may as well be called WTF detectors), spirit boxes (more on those in an upcoming post), air temperature monitors and all manner of other nitwittery. It was also about four times as expensive as a result.)) the ‘theatrical’ affair seemed the best bet.
In the end, it was a great choice. After leaving our motel at around 9pm (where the manager warned us that she’d once hosted a ‘total skeptic’ who was ‘completely converted’ after his visit to Aradale…) ((A claim which I took with a large grain of scoff.)) we headed out to the asylum and up the suitably forbidding yew-lined driveway.
At the door of Ararat Lunatic Asylum, we were greeted by a chap in funereal attire who enquired ghoulishly after our health, and effusively espoused the benefits of the hospital’s location, situated as it is in such a way on the hill as to take the maximum advantage of ‘the cleansing airs’ (a contrivance in keeping with the prevailing wisdom of Victorian mental health practice). He told the assembled group that, in the manner of the historical facts accumulated from patient records in Victorian asylums, about two thirds of us would be able to leave the hospital at the end of the evening, but that one third would be staying for the rest of their lives. ((He neglected to mention at this time that a good number of the patients who left the hospital prematurely did so in pine boxes…)) The ensuing two-hour tour continued in a similar manner, with our guide proving to be an entertaining raconteur as he led us up corridors and down stairways by lantern light, through the length of the shadowy and labyrinthine edifice.
I fear that it wasn’t the terrifying and ghastly ordeal that some of our party expected, but for me the blend of tempered gallows humour and well-researched historical detail was just about right. I must confess that I was expecting probable episodes of faux haunting, but none eventuated, and the only notable ‘scares’ came from our guide when he appeared cadaverously from the shadows in some unnoticed nook in the corridor. The building itself was the star of this show, and those who really wanted to see ghosts almost certainly went away thinking they had. ((At one stage, two impressionable women on the tour were besides themselves when they noticed a ‘chill breeze’ on their legs. Yes ladies – that would be the cool wind from outside blowing under the door into the warm room we were in…))
Places like Aradale are, as I’ve mentioned previously on The Cow, among the creepiest and most disturbing structures on the planet, when you consider the thousands upon thousands of suffering souls who once wandered their dark and echoic corridors. No-one needs to do much to make a tour through them a very memorable and unsettling experience.
It was pretty gloomy for most of the time we were inside the hospital, ((Outside, by contrast, the skies were ablaze with the most incredible starry vistas I’ve seen in ages.)) so I wasn’t able to get many good interior shots of our adventure, but there are some nice photos of the rooms and halls of Aradale on the Aradale Ghost Tours site.
And while we’re on the subject of lunatic asylums, if you’ve never heard the story I referred to up in the first paragraph, of how I was lost, by myself, in the middle of the night in an abandoned asylum in London, it’s here (and even for those of you who do know it, it’s worth a revisit – I’ve updated that post to include some more information about Stone House Asylum, and I’ve linked to an UrbEx site that has an enormous and beautiful gallery of interior photographs).
7 Responses to “ The Lunatics Have Taken Over the Asylum ”
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I am easily confused – perhaps I need a vacation in a place like this, to help straighten me out.
One thing that confused me was footnote iv:
“two thirds of us would be able to leave the hospital at the end of the evening, but […] one third would be staying for the rest of their lives. [iv: He neglected to mention at this time that a good number of the patients who left the hospital prematurely did so in pine boxes…]”
The only way I can put those together in a way that makes sense is that some of the 2/3 were to be buried alive.
Should I vacation there, then, I shall definitely be investing in the extra fee for a safety coffin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
Yes, I kinda realised that I hadn’t made that terribly clear. Patients who ‘left’ the asylum before the end of their proposed stay (that is, died, or escaped without ever being caught) were somehow counted on the books as cured, it seems. Or, at least, the manner of their leaving was not scrutinized.
There’s an interesting thing about the concept of the incarceration of ‘lunatics’ in Victorian times, and it speaks volumes about the Victorian psyche: they knew that what they were doing was distasteful. This can be seen most clearly in the phenomenon of the ‘ha-ha wall’, which was used extensively in asylums of this period (and can be seen in Aradale in fact). A ha-ha wall is built in such a way that from the outside of the hospital, the wall looks very low so as not to suggest ‘imprisonment’. From the inside it’s a different matter – about twelve feet away from the wall, the ground falls away steeply so that the effective wall surface presented to the patient is about twice as high.
It’s probable that many of the doctors and nurses thought they were doing some good for the poor mad people (and sometimes not so mad people) locked up in these grim prisons, but there is also a level of duplicity going on here – appearances were everything.
I did a house tour at short notice once and, my dates being a bit sketchy, I “talked up” the supposed haunting by a 19th century spinster aunt.As we left the haunted room, I picked up a big potted plant[likely to be a trip hazard]and some old bat screamed, quite convinced some paranormal force was at work.
Either I was damn’ good or some people are damn’ gullible.
But asylums are spooky for the very sad and real reasons of their existence, aren’t they?
If your default assumptions about the world include the idea that there can be such things as ghosts, well then, these places would surely be where you’d find them.
Sadly, many of the people on the tour were prepared to believe that even the slightest normal thing (like the cool breeze under the door) was of some unearthly origin. Participating in one of these tours is an illuminating insight into how malleable people’s experiences of reality are. I guarantee I could have scared the shit out of some of these folks with a handful of marbles and a tape recorder with some sound effects.
Violet Town and I are unsure of whether there was, in fact, some manipulation of this kind going on. If there was, it was extremely subtle (and I tip my hat to the ghost tours dudes for not overplaying their hand). For instance, at one stage, while we were in one of the main internal courtyards, a fluorescent light flickered on and off briefly in a window in the women’s ward. It was such a small event (which went totally unremarked upon by the guide) that the only people who saw it were those who were actually facing that direction for that brief moment.
Later, after the guide had told his one and only ‘ghost’ story (involving the sound he heard once of a relentless banging on a cell door), there was a very faint, constant banging somewhere back the way we’d come. Again, if this was intentional, I admire the incredible understatement of it.
Either event could be easily explained, of course, without resorting to supernatural intervention.
I would love to do this. Love the understated nature of the theatrical tour – always appreciate subtle.
All I have done is picnic in the Old Melbourne Cemetery – in the godly light of day. Great view of the Dandenongs.
Have toured Pentridge B4 it was converted into yuppy units. Definitely V/spooky in the solitary cells.
Maybe human anger and terror somehow accumulates in places of much pain – I know this is completely unscientific, but some places are definitely ambient and others not so.
Quite honestly, I don’t think it’s anything to do with the place itself. I think it’s what we superimpose on it with our knowledge of what it once was. That’s why you don’t generally find old supermarkets or old train terminals are ‘haunted’ (unless there’s a special circumstance of course).
Aradale is one of three asylums built in the 1880s in Victoria, the two companions being Beechworth and Kew. Kew has now been converted into expensive housing, and as far as I know, there have been no ‘hauntings’ reported in that complex since the remodelling. Any ghosts would simply not be worth their ectoplasm if a few licks of paint and a chaise longue could chase them away.
And pictures I’ve seen of the apartments certainly aren’t carrying an ambience of gloom!