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The creepiest abandoned asylum tours in the U.S.

Poor, unfortunate souls.

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Created by Destination Strange - May 2nd 2017

I t's hard to think of anything creepier than an abandoned sanatorium or asylum. The very concept of locking away the mentally ill, let alone in such inhumane conditions as the patients of these asylums experienced, is horrifying today. Between 1825 and 1865, the number of asylums in the US skyrocketed from nine to 62... and that wasn't even the peak. Thankfully, a better understanding of mental illness and increased accountability have rendered most of these institutions obsolete, especially in the 1950s, with the invention of antipsychotic medication... but in many cases, the buildings (often beautiful, ornate old structures) remain, a grim reminder of an era of lobotomies, straight jackets, and electroshock "treatments". Here are a few abandoned asylums you can tour today.

Rolling Hills Asylum

East Bethany, NY

Rolling Hills Asylum started its life as a poor house in 1826; it was originally created to care for orphaned children, destitute elderly, the physically handicapped, alcoholics, the mentally unstable and morally corrupt, even criminals, the homeless and the very poor. It was a functioning farm and the "inmates" (yes, they were all referred to as "inmates" regardless of their situation) did all of the work; those who were a danger to themselves or others were housed in a different building. Today, it is, without a doubt, very haunted, possibly by the spirits of those buried in the forgotten cemetery onsite. Historical tours, flashlight tours, ghost hunts, and horror movie screenings all take place here periodically... in case you've ever wanted to watch a scary movie in a haunted insane asylum.

Willard Asylum For The Chronic Insane

The Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane opened in 1869 and quickly filled up with patients. Most of them spent the rest of their lives here on the grounds of the asylum. They were free to walk around, use the gym and bowling alley, or work on the farm, and were likely better off than they would have been at home... but they were still confined to the grounds, and many were subjected to brutal treatments. Willard was abandoned in 1995, and today the grounds are used as training facilities for the Department of Correctional Facilities. You can't really visit per se, but there's an exhibit that goes on display periodically that features the recently discovered suitcases containing the belongings of some of the inmates. Seeing what the institutionalized brought along with them, dolls, clothes, newspaper clippings, drawings... it's a humanizing experience that's incredibly powerful.

Pennhurst Asylum

Spring City, PA

As if being an actual abandoned, haunted asylum wasn't enough, Pennhurst Asylum (aka Eastern Pennsylvania State Institution for the Feeble-Minded and Epileptic) operates as a haunted house during the Halloween season. Historically, it had a massive campus with 3,350 beds and was known for its often brutal treatment of patients. In the late 60s, an expose on the harsh conditions caught widespread attention, and in the 80s, workers were charged with abuse and assault of the patients and each other. Finally, a federal abuse lawsuit forced the closure of the asylum. If you're really dedicated to ghost hunting, you can rent out the place and do some investigating on your own... if you dare!

Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum

Construction on the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum began in 1858, and was completed in 1864. The building, which was designed in the Kirkbride Plan style, was self-sufficient, meaning it had its own farm, waterworks, and even a cemetery located on the 666 acres of land (spooky!). The long staggered "wings" of the asylum were built specifically to bring in fresh-air and sunlight, and to give patients privacy, which was something many were not used to during that time period.

Initially the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was only supposed to hold 250 patients, but at its peak in 1949 the asylum was holding upwards of 2,600 people in dangerously overcrowded conditions. At the time the hospital was home to people being treated for various conditions including, "epileptics, alcoholics, drugs addicts, and non-educable mental defectives", but by 1949 local newspapers were reporting on the poor sanitization and dangerous conditions at the hospital. Unable to keep its doors open any longer, Trans-Allegheny officially closed in May of 1994.

For many years the asylum had a reputation for being an extremely dangerous and violent place with many reports of patients attacking and even killing one another. There are stories of female employees who were raped and killed by patients not being properly monitored thanks to overcrowding and understaffing. One woman's body was even discovered after two months at the bottom of an unused staircase, where she had been killed and dumped.

Many believe that all of this death and violence that took place inside the hospital helped to create one of the most haunted buildings in the country, and often visitors report having run-ins with spirits still trapped inside. Many of those experiences include the sound of gurneys being moved, screams coming from inside the electro-shock room when there is no one else around, and strange shadows. The most active part of the building is rumored to be the fourth floor, where many have experienced banging, screaming, and even the spirit of a soldier named Jacob who has been seen walking the empty corridors in the night.

In 2007 the building was bought at auction for $1.5 million and even though the National Historic Landmark offers both historical tours and ghost tours, the survival of the building is still at risk. Guests are invited to take one (or all) of the 5 unique historical tours, and fans of the paranormal are in luck because TALA offers 8-hour ghost hunts of different wards depending on what you're interested in.

Historical tours run between March 29th to November 2nd, but make sure to book your appointment ahead of time. The hospital offers day time ghost hunts, and flashlight tours that will run you anywhere between 10 to 40 bucks, which for a 2 hour guided tour is pretty darn awesome.

St Albans Sanatorium

Radford, VA

St Albans Lutheran Boys School opened in 1892, and in 1916, it was converted into a hospital for the mentally ill. Electroshock therapy, insulin coma therapy, and hydro shock therapy didn't stop many patient suicides, and you can sense a lot of the dark energy here even just by coming onto the property. They offer tours and events on the property a few times a year, and ghost hunts are very popular at St Albans, so if you're feeling brave enough to explore, keep your eyes peeled.

Waverly Hills Sanatorium

Louisville, KY

Waverly Hills Sanatorium was actually built to house patients with tuberculosis, a very contagious disease that, in the 19th century had reached epidemic proportions. Hundreds of patients passed through the doors of the sanatorium and most never left; even though they weren't classified as mentally ill and didn't experience EST or ice baths, they still endured some pretty harsh conditions, including extreme isolation. By the time a cure was discovered in the 1940s, many had succumbed to TB here, and today, you can tour the incredibly haunted estate.

Cedar Lane Cemetery

Milledgeville, GA

Cedar Lane Cemetery is home to rows upon rows of numbered iron markers. What these markers represent are the souls of the insane that died at Milledgeville's Central State Hospital, which at one point was the world's largest insane asylum. However, the insane asylum in Milledgeville was sorely lacking in effective burial methods. It's believed that the fields around where the asylum once stood are the site of a secret mass grave, where tens of thousands of souls are interred, without identification by way of grave markers. The hospital was built in 1842 in response to social reform movements. By 1872, the ratio of patients to physicians was a shocking rate of 112-1.

During the 40s the hospital had about 10,000 patients, who lived there for about 20 years on average. During this time shock therapy was introduced on a massive scale. As if that wasn't bad enough, in 1951, lobotomies were introduced. 125 patients received lobotomies. By this point, local area newspapers began to take note of the deteriorating conditions and frequently ran reports of patient abuse. Despite all this, people continued to send unwanted patients here. By the 60s the hospital housed over 12,000 patients.

Some patients were lucky enough to be discharged from the hospital eventually, following treatment. Unfortunately, many, many others were not as lucky. For these unlucky patients, what waited for them after death was burial in an unmarked mass grave. It's believed over 30,000 of these neglected souls are now buried throughout the surrounding grounds.

In the late 1930s, an African-American cemetery was dug up and the bodies were removed, often placed in small boxes, and marked with a lone metal pole. Each new body was identified numerically. There are six cemeteries that went neglected for decades. Many consider this mass burial ground to be the world's largest for the mentally ill.

The historic marker at the cemetery states the following:

"In 1997, a cemetery restoration began here triggered a movement to memorialize patients buried at state psychiatric hospitals nationwide. After discovering nearby neglected cemeteries interred some 25,000 people, members of the Georgia Consumer Council pledge to restore the burial grounds and build a memorial. A grassroots campaign raised funds to erect the adjacent gate and display 2,000 numbered iron markers displaced from graves over the years. A life-size bronze angel was placed 175 yards south of here to serve as a perpetual guardian."

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6 Haunted Asylums You Can Actually Visit

Care to step inside?

Crumbling corridors, broken windows, the anonymous graves of former patients. Few places are as haunting as an abandoned asylum. While many of these institutions from the 19th and early 20th centuries are now gone, some still stand. A few facilities even offer tours.

Visitors to the haunted asylums below report disembodied voices, meandering apparitions, and eerie noises echoing through the halls. Care to step inside?

1. Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum - Weston, West Virginia

• Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Built in the mid-1800s, the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum  was originally intended to house as many as 250 patients. However, during the height of its use in the 1950s, nearly 2,400 souls were packed into the building, creating extremely poor living conditions. The facility was not known to treat its patients well—those who could not be “controlled” were locked in cages. Ultimately, the operation was shut down and the building completely vacated by the mid 1990s. In 2007, the hospital was sold by the state to private buyers, who now operate ghost tours in the allegedly haunted asylum. Visitors can take guided trips through the building or, if they feel especially daring, spend the night inside. Prior guests report spectral sightings, strange noises, and disembodied voices. Unsurprising, given the gruesome history of those who lived and died within the old hospital’s walls. Note: tours are on hold until March 26 while the building undergoes restoration.

Related: CORRIDOR OF HORRORS: THE TRANS-ALLEGHENY LUNATIC ASYLUM

2. Rolling Hills Asylum – East Bethany, New York

• Photo Credit: Jennifer Kirkland / Flickr

Rolling Hills Asylum , originally called Genesee County Poor Farm, was created as a “poorhouse.” The term was used throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to describe state-run compounds that housed orphans, the poor, petty criminals, the mentally ill, and anyone else deemed unfit for mainstream society. While such asylums were ostensibly created to protect the vulnerable, they often ended up marginalizing them further—residents were called “inmates,” regardless of the reason why they lived at the poorhouse. Able-bodied inmates were required to work the land, caring for animals and sustaining the community. Many spent the remainder of their lives inside; there are up to 1,700 documented deaths at Rolling Hills, and likely many more that went unmentioned. Those who died were buried in unmarked graves on the property. Today, visitors can spend hours at the site, participating in various tours and exploring the once-populated farm. Many claim experiencing various creepy paranormal activity, ranging from disembodied voices and doors forced shut, to screams in the night and flickering shadow people. Explore if you dare!

3. Century Manor Insane Asylum –Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

• Photo Credit: Dean McCoy / Flickr

Opened in 1876, Ontario’s Century Manor Insane Asylum was a beautiful facility for the region’s psychiatric patients. The building itself, built on a hill with a stunning view of Hamilton, was thought to calm the most troubled of minds. If the scenery didn’t do the trick (which it often did not), doctors frequently turned to shock therapy and lobotomies for treatment. Other procedures included salt rubs, morphine injections, and being locked in a coffin-like crib. Making a ghastly situation even worse was the tradition of Hamilton residents treating the asylum as entertainment. Locals often brought picnic baskets to the grounds and had a laugh at the behaviors of patients. Locals also knew to listen for the steam whistle alarm, which signaled the escape of a seriously ill individual, and served as a warning to usher playing children inside. The facility became a museum in the 1980s, and is now part of the Hamilton Ghost Tour circuit.

Related: A REAL LIFE DR. JEKYLL / MR. HYDE: MURDER IN LITTLE EGYPT

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4. Waverly Hills Sanatorium – Louisville, Kentucky

The commonly held belief that Waverly Hills served as an insane asylum is inaccurate. It was actually a tuberculosis ward and, later, a home for the elderly with declining mental conditions. That said, the facility’s troubled history and its catalog of paranormal encounters make it a perfect fit for this list. Waverly Hills began in 1883 as a small, one-room schoolhouse built by Major Thomas H. Hays for the education of his daughters, as the family lived too far from existing schools. In 1908, Kentucky’s Board of Tuberculosis Hospitals purchased the property to establish a sanatorium and combat the state’s tuberculosis epidemic. Originally a two-story building, Waverly Hills Sanatorium soon expanded into a sprawling campus to support the ever-increasing number of patients. In fact, Waverly Hills was a self-contained city—complete with its own postal code. Patients, doctors, nurses, and staff were permanent residents of the complex.

Perhaps the creepiest feature of Waverly Hills is the tunnel that leads from the first floor of the sanatorium to the bottom of the hill. This subterranean passageway—later dubbed “the body chute”—was used to dispose of the dead out of eyesight of living patients. With this kind of eerie history, as well as the sheer numbers of patients who died slow and painful deaths on the premises (some reports suggest 8,000!), it’s easy to understand why urban explorers with a taste for the supernatural are attracted to Waverly Hills. Visitors can book organized tours and ghost hunting expeditions through its winding corridors and 400+ rooms.

5. Pennhurst Asylum – Spring City, Pennsylvania

• Photo Credit: Fredd Dunn / Flickr

Pennhurst State School and Hospital is another example of a self-sustaining city/asylum with a dark and troubled history. Founded in 1903, the immense campus housed society’s “feeble-minded” individuals. Upon admission, patients were “classed” as either being insane or an imbecile, epileptic or healthy, and having a dental ranking of good, poor, or treated. For years the facility provided what was, at best, subhuman treatment of its patients and residents. In 1983, nine employees were charged with abuse. Yet it wasn’t until a 1987 abuse case that the entire operation was shut down. Reports of paranormal activity and eerie sightings soon surfaced. Now, Pennhurst is reopened as Pennhurst Asylum Haunted House and can be toured by those curious to explore it.

Related: BEDLAM: THE HORRORS OF LONDON’S MOST NOTORIOUS INSANE ASYLUM

6. Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane – Ovid, New York

Opening in 1869, Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane was once the largest asylum in the United States, and was in operation until 1995. Part of the campus continues to operate as a New York State rehabilitation facility. Consequently, the unused portion of Willard was originally off-limits to the public. However, public interest in the site’s history, not to mention the desire to see what spirits still linger within, led officials to open the building once a year for tours. Similar to the other abandoned intuitions on this list, the fate of many of Willard’s patients are unknown—though in 1995, some 400 patient suitcases were uncovered in the attic. Fair warning: The announcements of these yearly tours are often hard to track down for anyone living outside the Finger Lakes region.

Feature photo: Bob Jagendorf / Flickr . Other photos: Wikimedia Commons, Jennifer Kirkland / Flickr , Dean McCoy / Flickr , Fred Dunn / Flickr .

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October 16, 2017

Open House Melbourne: former Kew asylum opens doors for rare public viewing

For more than 100 years, the Kew asylum was closed off to society as a haven for the mentally ill. But its grand Italianate towers, shimmering like a palace, were visible from across Melbourne.

For the past 23 years, the buildings have housed the upmarket Willsmere residential complex – which is also gated and not open to the public.

This year, for the first time, Willsmere will be part of Open House Melbourne, for which resident volunteers will give guided tours of what they call their own private botanic gardens.

Visitors to the Willsmere tours, that must be pre-booked from July 18, will learn how the asylum had a class system. There is a preserved ward, now a museum, where well-off patients paid for their own hilltop rooms with great views, whereas paupers slept in large dormitories down the hill.

The main building is a wedding-cake beauty with French-style mansard roofs. Two other towers were built to house water tanks, but now contain penthouses worth up to $2 million.

Outside, there are brick “haha” walls, named because they are built into the hill, so you can see over them, but up close are too high to climb over.

Two huts called fever tents were built in 1907 during a typhoid outbreak. Elsewhere you can also see the barred bluestone cells that housed the most disturbed patients.

The 137ha Kew Lunatic Asylum opened in 1871, intended as a paradise where agitated patients could do farm work in fresh air amid lovely gardens and buildings.

But overcrowding (the planned 600 patients ballooned to 1000), poor sanitation and poor government funding made it so squalid it helped prompt an 1884-86 royal commission. It gained a reputation as a last resort for drunks, mad people and “idiots”.

With deinstitutionalisation, the asylum closed in 1988 and the state government sold the site to developers. The residential complex opened in 1993.

Willsmere Owners Corporation chair Jack Lord said Willsmere is not open to the public, but that could change if the Open House tours are successful.

He said the tours could showcase Willsmere as a desirable place to live. But he also said that in the past, residents hadn’t “fulfilled our responsibility” to share the site’s heritage with the public.

Barbara Burton, a Willsmere resident of 22 years, said some visitors might come for the gardens, architecture or history. Others will have a personal connection – 10 years ago, she discovered her uncle had died at the asylum.

The ninth Open House Melbourne, July 30 and 31, features 140 buildings, including Anzac House in Collins Street and the Sun Theatre in Yarraville. The program will be out on July 1 .

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Accessibility, discovery centre, lunatic asylum.

Take a guided tour through the cavernous wall and halls of the institution that treated and housed Victoria's mentally ill for over 126 years.

Aradale Asylum was an Australian psychiatric hospital, located in Ararat, a rural city in Victoria, Australia. Now a ghost "town", Aradale was once known as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum.

Aradale and its two sister asylums at Kew and Beechworth were commissioned to accommodate the growing number of "lunatics" in the colony of Victoria. Construction began in 1865 and was opened for patients in 1867. It was closed as an asylum in 1993. At its height, Aradale had up to 1000 patients and is a large complex with up to 70 interesting historic abandoned buildings.

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The skin-prickling tour inside Aradale, an abandoned ‘lunatic asylum’

The smell of antiseptic still permeates the air inside the hulking buildings, now decaying so badly they are literally used as sets for horror movies.

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I’ve never been inside a morgue before.

The small brick building is at the bottom of a hill, painted white with a neat label on the wall.

Right next to it, built into the towering wall of the lunatic asylum, is a small door the local undertaker used to collect the bodies of deceased patients and prepare them for burial.

The site of the cold locker, the mortuary fridge, sends chills down my spine. There are four doors, one of which is propped open with the tray pulled out, as if waiting for its next body. Opposite is the autopsy table, its stainless-steel gleaming even though the facility was abandoned in 1993.

I’m touring Aradale , an imposing former mental hospital that towers over the town of Ararat in western Victoria, with a group. Even though we’re here with a guide, it feels… slightly uneasy.

Like we’re breaking the rules and sneaking in somewhere we shouldn’t, visiting a place with many secrets. At its peak, in the 1970s, it housed about 1000 patients, as well as a huge number of staff members, in 63 buildings set on 600 acres of land that formed a self-sufficient farm.

The morgue isn’t even the creepiest part. One decaying dormitory, set on the second floor of the hulking main building, is so unnerving it has literally been used as the set for a horror movie. Another building - labelled TC8, which once housed elderly women - still reeks of antiseptic.

Or maybe I’m imagining that. It could also be the mould on the ceiling.

“Ararat was considered to be the ‘maddest place on earth’ back in the 1850s,” the tour guide says.

A promising amount of the valuable rock was found in the area during the Victorian gold rush, sparking a frenzy that caused the town to swell to more than 30,000 people.

However, conditions were harsh, competition was fierce, and the local quartz failed to deliver the quantities uncovered in other areas. Many risked it all to be left devastated and broke.

“It was a good recipe for mental illness,” he remarks wryly.

At the time, the government was loaded, raking in the spoils of an unmatched era of prosperity. Needing something to do with the ‘lunatics’, as patients were called at the time, they created three asylums: one in the inner-east Melbourne suburb of Kew, one in Beechworth in the state’s high country, and Aradale. Each was magnificent in its design and modern in its construction.

There were lots of reasons a person could be locked inside.

Some patients had illnesses we now recognise as depression, schizophrenia, or eating disorders. Some were institutionalised for life with conditions such as Down Syndrome or epilepsy. Some suffered acquired brain injuries or were otherwise unable to look after themselves. Aradale also housed many pregnant girls, whose babies were forcibly adopted, before they were released.

Untold numbers were locked in simply because they were too much effort for their families, with tragic outcomes. We hear the story of one woman who had five children and was "not herself". Not knowing what to do with her, her husband had her admitted to Aradale and left her locked away for 29 years until her death. With hindsight, the guide says, it’s likely she was experiencing postnatal depression, something that is now well understood and highly treatable.

The maddest of the mad, the criminally insane, were housed just down the road at J-Ward . Technically a wing of the hospital, the intimidating bluestone prison was for the wild and violent men who endangered themselves and their communities and could never be rehabilitated.

Of course, many simply needed protection. For them, the word ‘asylum’ undoubtedly rings true. They lived in the mighty facility with the assistance of dedicated staff, following training programs designed to assimilate them as closely as possible to ordinary life so they could live well.

Along with the scary stories and sad stories, there are some light-hearted moments. One time, a local plumber was called to fix a blockage - only to discover not one, not two, but 27 hand towels stuffed down a single toilet, having provided much amusement to cheeky male patients.

It’s terrifying. It’s tragic. And it’s an incredibly fascinating look into our psychiatric history.

By day, you can visit with Friends of J Ward , which runs tours at 2pm every Wednesday and Sunday. By night, you can book via Eerie Tours - just beware the ghosts of those who never left.

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Exclusive Willsmere March Tours

In partnership with open house melbourne, the former lunatic asylum, willsmere, in kew will open its doors for a day of special tours..

Having been a part of the Open House Melbourne July Weekend program in previous years, the residents of Willsmere, are excited to offer a number of special tours in March 2018.

Established in 1870, Willsmere is a rare and mostly intact 19th-century former lunatic asylum, and an architectural marvel of Melbourne.

Spread over 25 acres above Yarra Bend Park, and at one time forming the highest constructed point in Melbourne, the Italianate and French Second Empire buildings were designed with the aim of portraying Melbourne as a civilised and benevolent city. The design included innovative ‘ha-ha’ walls that retained views without the feeling of being enclosed.

In 1993, Willsmere was converted to private residences with the addition of townhouses, however, it retains a heritage listing. The central administration block comprises a three-storey building with attic Mansard roof and cupola, with two double-storey wings extending to each side which include four-storey Mansard roofed towers, and courtyards lined with iron columned verandas.

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Our programming exists on what always was and always will be the land of the people of the Kulin nation. We pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging, as well as to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the wider Melbourne community and beyond. Indigenous sovereignty has never been ceded in Australia and we are mindful of this in everything we do, given our focus on the modern built environment.

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Top Attractions in Kew

Kew Lunatic Asylum

Kew Lunatic Asylum is a decommissioned psychiatric hospital located between Princess Street and Yarra Boulevard in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Operational from 1871 to 1988, Kew was one of the largest asylums ever built in Australia. Later known as Willsmere, the complex of buildings were constructed between 1864 and 1872 to the design of architects G.W. Vivian and Frederick Kawerau of the Victorian Public Works Office to house the growing number of "lunatics", "inebriates", and "idiots" in the Colony of Victoria. The first purpose built asylum in the Colony of Victoria, Kew was also larger and more expensive than its sister asylums at Ararat and Beechworth. The asylum's buildings are typical examples of the Italianate architecture style which was popular in Victorian Melbourne. Designed to be elegant, beautiful, yet substantial, and to be viewed as "a magnificent asylum for the insane" with the aim of portraying Melbourne as a civilised and benevolent city whilst avoiding the jail-like appearance of other asylums. These aims were furthered by the use of low ha-ha walls and extensively landscaped grounds. Long considered of cultural and historic significance to Melbourne, Kew Asylum and its complex of buildings were registered on the Register of the National Estate in March 1978. Despite initial grand plans and ideals, Kew Asylum had a difficult and chequered history, contributing to several inquiries throughout its 117 years of operation, including a Royal Commission. Overcrowding, mismanagement, lack of resources, poor sanitation and disease were common criticisms during the asylum's first five decades; out-dated facilities and institutionalisation were criticisms of Kew's later period. Kew continued to operate throughout the 20th century as a "hospital for the insane", "mental hospital", or "psychiatric hospital", treating acute, long-term and geriatric patients until it closed in December 1988. The main building and surrounding grounds were sold by the State Government in the 1980s and were redeveloped as residential properties.

McIntyre River Residence

Peter McIntyres River Residence is one of the famous Australian architects most notable designs. Built during a Post World-War Two period that was defined architecturally by the International Style, it stands as a testament to the architectural whims and intentions of Melbourne in the 1950s. The McIntyre River Residence quintessentially embodies Peter McIntyres striking style as well as the Post War Melbourne Regional style. The June 1956 issue of Vogue in the US commented that the house was, like some exotic bird of paradise perched high on the densely wooded bank.

D'Estaville

d’Estaville Estate was a 32-acre property where a bluestone house built by architects Knight Kerr for Sir William Foster Stawell was completed in 1859 in Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. d’Estaville is architecturally important as a unique example of only residential work of Knight Kerr and in exhibiting the aesthetic characteristics of the Italianate architecture style. In Stawells later years, the decision was made to subdivide the large property and sell off land. dEstaville now refers to the bluestone building at 7 Barry Street, the original property which now remains at the location.

Kew Lunatic Asylum is a decommissioned psychiatric hospital located between Princess Street and Yarra Boulevard in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. Operational from 1871 to 1988, Kew was one of the largest asylums ever built in Australia. Later known as Willsmere, the complex of buildings were constructed between 1864 and 1872 to the design of architects G.W. Vivian and Frederick Kawerau of the Victorian Public Works Office to house the growing number of "lunatics", "inebriates", and "idiots" in the Colony of Victoria. The first purpose built asylum in the Colony of Victoria, Kew was also larger and more expensive than its sister asylums at Ararat and Beechworth. The asylum's buildings are typical examples of the French Second Empire style which was popular in Victorian Melbourne. Designed to be elegant, beautiful, yet substantial, and to be viewed as "a magnificent asylum for the insane" with the aim of portraying Melbourne as a civilised and benevolent city whilst avoiding the jail-like appearance of other asylums. These aims were furthered by the use of low Ha-Ha walls and extensively landscaped grounds. Long considered of cultural and historic significance to Melbourne, Kew Asylum and its complex of buildings were registered on the Register of the National Estate in March 1978. Despite initial grand plans and ideals, Kew Asylum had a difficult and chequered history contributing to several inquiries throughout its 117 years of operation, including a Royal Commission. Overcrowding, mismanagement, lack of resources, poor sanitation and disease were common criticisms during the asylum's first five decades; out-dated facilities and institutionalisation were criticisms of Kew's later period. Kew continued to operate throughout the 20th century as a "Hospital for the Insane", "Mental Hospital", or "Psychiatric Hospital", treating acute, long-term and geriatric patients until it closed in December 1988. The main building and surrounding grounds were sold by the State Government in the 1980s and were redeveloped as residential properties.

Lyon Housemuseum

The Lyon Housemuseum is a hybrid residence and contemporary art museum located in Melbourne, Australia. The Housemuseum displays the Lyon Collection of Australian contemporary art in a purpose designed building. The building is open to the public for pre-booked guided tours, school visits and other events on designated days each year. The Housemuseum also hosts a series of public talks and lectures on contemporary art, architecture, art history and museology which are open to the public. The annual Housemuseum Lecture is published in the form of a small book. The first book in this series, Meaning in Space by Leon van Schaik, was published in 2011.

Boroondara General Cemetery

Boroondara General Cemetery, often referred to as Kew cemetery, is one of the oldest cemeteries in Victoria, Australia. The cemetery, located in Kew, a suburb of Melbourne, is listed as a heritage place on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Springthorpe Memorial

The Springthorpe Memorial is an elaborate Victorian era memorial located within Boroondara General Cemetery in Kew, Victoria, a suburb of Melbourne, Australia. The memorial was built by Melbourne doctor John Springthorpe, in honour of his wife, Annie Springthorpe, who died in 1897 at the age of 30 while giving birth to their fourth child. Construction began in 1897, and the memorial was unveiled in 1901. The Springthorpe Memorial is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. The centrepiece of the memorial, commissioned by the grieving Dr Springthorpe, is a marble sculpture by Bertram Mackennal. A figure of the deceased lies on a sarcophagus while an angel, standing beside her, places a wreath by her head. A sorrowful, draped female figure sits beside the sarcophagus, clutching a lyre. The sculpted figures are housed in a structure derivative of a Greek temple, designed by Melbourne architect Harold Desbrowe-Annear. It has dark marble columns, granite pediments and entablatures adorned with serpent-head gargoyles at each corner, and a stained glass domed roof. The latter is made up of hundreds of ruby-coloured glass pieces supported by radiating ironwork. On a fine day sunlight, streaming through the roof, imparts a reddish glow on the sculpture below. The memorial is located in a garden setting which the curator of Melbournes Royal Botanic Gardens, William Guilfoyle, was commissioned to design. However, the layout seen today probably has little in common with his original design. The base of the memorial, surrounded by an iron picket balustrade, is paved with red tiles which have various verses inscribed on them in gold lettering. There are also inscriptions on each pediment and entablature of the temple structure, in both English and Greek. Nowhere on the memorial is there any mention of the deceased’s name, the most specific reference being the following inscription: My own true love Pattern daughter perfect mother and ideal wife Born on the 26th day of January 1867 Married on the 26th day of January 1887 Buried on the 26th day of January 1897

Kew House is a residential house, located at 6 Hodgson Street in Kew, Victoria, Australia. The house was designed by Australian architect Sean Godsell in 1996–1997. It is designed in a rectangular shape that cantilevers 5.5 m over a slope from the street. Sean Godsell was born in Melbourne in 1960 and is a new generation of architect in the 1990s who insists on the traditions of Modernism and the crusades for the difference in family houses design. He is the son of David Godsell who completed a number of notable homes in the bayside area of Melbourne in the 1960s and was a prominent local architect. He is influenced by Le Corbusier while his father was more of a Frank Lloyd Wright man.

Raheen is an historic 19th-century Italianate mansion located at 92 Studley Park Road in the Melbourne, Australia, suburb of Kew. It was built in the 1870s, and its name means "little fort" in Gaelic. Raheen was once the residence of Archbishop Daniel Mannix, the former Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne. The Catholic Church purchased the property. The first section of Raheen was commenced in 1870 with an extension added in 1884. It was designed by William Salway and built for Edward Latham of the Carlton Brewery. Sir Henry Wrixon, prominent Melbourne barrister and solicitor, later owned and resided at the property. In 1917 Raheen was purchased by the Catholic Church and became the official residence of Archbishop Mannix, as well as four other Catholic archbishops of Melbourne. In 1981 the Church sold the property and it again reverted to a private residence. Raheen was constructed as a two-storey house in the Italianate style with a four-storey tower over the entrance and single-storey extension. It was designed in an asymmetric and arcaded form, and is built of red brick with cement render. The property retains its garden layout, including an Italianate garden, outbuildings, fence and gates, and internal features including the original stairwell, library, ballroom and cast iron tower stairs. Raheen is of historic and architectural significance to the State of Victoria. Raheen is of historic importance because of its association with Melbournes elite businessmen through Latham and Wrixon, and illustrates not only the importance of the brewery business and the legal profession in nineteenth century Melbourne, but also the importance of a residence in indicating success and status in society. The house is of historic importance through its association with the Catholic Church and illustrates the status sought by church hierarchy for Melbournes Catholics and the Church prior to the mid-twentieth century. It is also historically important because of its association with Archbishop Dr Daniel Mannix who played a significant role within the Melbourne Archdiocese, as also in Melbourne politics particularly during the Conscription debates of the First World War. Raheen is architecturally important in exhibiting an unusual integration of features in the combination of red brick and cement rendering. The house is architecturally important in exhibiting good design and aesthetic characteristics of the Italianate style, as well as in internal features and garden design. It was purchased in 1981 by the Australian businessman Richard Pratt and his family and currently is not open to the public. Pratt extensively renovated the house and gardens, including the addition of a new wing designed by Glen Murcutt. The site is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

Freiberg House

The Freiberg House, designed by Melbourne based Architects Chancellor and Patrick, was built in 1958-60 on a sloping site as a residence for the Freiberg family and is located at 26 Yarravale Road Kew, Victoria. The Freiberg is an example of post-war architecture in Victoria featuring a two and a half storey geometric structure with a modified cruciform plan. Featured on the cover of Best Australian Houses, edited by Neil Clerehan, the Freiberg house was significant for its use of traditional Australian forms and materials, combined with the Melbourne post-war interest in avant-garde planning, forms and structure. It is also notable for having the first entirely native garden planned by Edna Walling, with whom Chancellor and Patrick was a long-time collaborator.

Genazzano FCJ College

Genazzano FCJ College is a Roman Catholic, day and boarding school for girls, located in Kew, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Established in 1889 by the Faithful Companions of Jesus , the college has a non-selective enrolment policy and currently caters for approximately 1,100 students from Early Learning Centre to Year 12, including 50 boarders from Years 8 to 12. Genazzano is a member of the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia , the Association of Independent Schools of Victoria , the Alliance of Girls' Schools Australasia. and a founding member of Girls Sport Victoria .

Kew railway station

Kew railway station was the terminus of the Kew railway line, Australia. It was opened on 19 December 1887. The line ceased operations in August 1952, but the line and station were officially closed on 13 May 1957 and subsequently demolished. The headquarters of VicRoads now stands on the site.

Xavier College

Xavier College is a Roman Catholic, day and boarding school predominantly for boys, founded in 1872 by the Society of Jesus, with its main campus located in Kew, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Classes started in 1878. The college is part of the international network of Jesuit schools begun in Messina, Sicily in 1548. Originally an all-boys school, the College now offers co-education until Year 4, and an all-boys environment from then on. In 2011 the school had 2,085 students on roll, including 76 boarders. The school is in the Archdiocese of Melbourne, and is affiliated with the Junior School Heads Association of Australia , the Association of Heads of Independent Schools of Australia , the Australian Boarding Schools' Association , and the Associated Public Schools of Victoria . In December 2010 The Age reported that, based on the number of alumni who had received a top Order of Australia honour, Xavier College ranked equal tenth among Australian schools. Grant Thomas described the school as 'the best-connected school in Melbourne'. Its notable alumni include, two State Governors, two Deputy Prime Ministers, one State Premier, two Deputy Premiers and numerous Supreme Court Justices.

East Kew railway station

East Kew was a railway station on the Outer Circle railway line, located in the suburb of Kew, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The station opened with the line on 24 March 1891, and closed with the line on 12 April 1893. It was located on the west side of Normanby Road, and was the site of a crossing loop with a platform on each track. A goods siding was also provided at the Riversdale end. The station was reopened on 11 February 1925, for goods traffic only, and was the terminus of the reopened section of the Outer Circle line from Deepdene railway station. Three loop sidings were provided, along with a headshunt, and there was a dead end extension at the Riversdale end. The headshunt, which crossed Normanby Road, was abolished in about 1935 to eliminate the level crossing, and the sidings became dead-end. Goods services were withdrawn on 6 September 1943, and the line back to Riversdale closed.

Willsmere railway station

Willsmere was a railway station on the Outer Circle, located in the suburb of Kew, Melbourne, Australia. The station was named after the estate of early Kew settlers H.S. and Thomas Wills. Willsmere was opened with the line in 1891, and closed with it in 1893, with 2 side platforms and a loop off the main line to the south. The station platforms and buildings were believed to have been removed around 1930.

Kew Cottages

Medical terms in this article are in the context of what was legally correct usage for that period where they appear in the text. Therefore "feeble-minded", "idiot", "imbecile", "lunatic", etc., should not be taken at their modern significance. Kew Cottages aka Kew Idiot Asylum, Kew Idiot Ward, Kew Children's Cottages and finally as Kew Residential Services is a decommissioned special development school and residential service located in Kew, an eastern suburb of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The Children's Cottages at Kew were first opened in 1887 as the "Idiot Ward" of Kew Asylum. Located on the asylum's grounds, the children's cottages were established to provide separate accommodation for child inmates who had previously been housed with adult patients. Although the Cottages only admitted children as patients, many of those children remained in residence at the Cottages as adults. The function of the institution was to provide accommodation and educational instruction for intellectually disabled children. Some Wards of the State and other various "difficult" children were also admitted. Shortly after opening, the Idiot Ward began functioning separately from the Kew Lunatic Asylum, and became known as the Kew Idiot Asylum from 1887 until c.1929. From 1929 they have been known as the "Children's Cottages, Kew" or alternatively "Kew Cottages Training Centre". The institution was finally closed in July 2008, after the grounds were redeveloped from 2001 to October 2006.

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‘Madness stripped away the niceties’: Tara Calaby imagines herself into a 19th-century  asylum

Professor of History, School Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences, University of Newcastle

Disclosure statement

Catharine Coleborne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

University of Newcastle provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU.

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Kew Asylum, when it opened in 1872, was the larger of two public institutions in wider Melbourne that housed people with mental illness. Grand and imposing , it opened a few years after the overcrowded Yarra Bend Asylum.

A new historical novel, set at Kew Asylum in 1890s Melbourne, prises open this world – inviting contemporary readers into the taboo subjects of women’s mental breakdown and institutional confinement, through a same-sex romantic love story.

Review: House of Longing – Tara Calaby (Text Publishing)

As a researcher of psychiatric institutions, I’ve often wondered about the potential and power of fiction to bring this hidden history of hospitalisation to life. People in the historical record have often struck me as remarkable, full of personality.

We can hear their words – scribbled in the margins of the clinical case notes, or in patient and family letters – as if they were spoken aloud. Far from being invisible or forgotten, decades of historical research using patient records has brought these experiences to light, but mostly inside academic studies.

Tara Calaby, whose novel is based on research, draws on these voices and writes in between the gaps, or at the interstices, of historical evidence. Her imagination fleshes out experiences that are hard for historians to access; she enters the interior lives of people from the past.

Her protagonist, Charlotte, becomes a cipher for the reader.

Charlotte had once read a newspaper report that had compared madwomen to wild animals. She knew, now, that lunatics were no more bestial than the men and women who gathered in Melbourne tea rooms to gossip and be seen. Madness stripped away the niceties, that was all: the base drives of fear and hunger and wrath and lust were simply more visible here.

Read more: Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are 'mad' when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important

Women’s secrets

Charlotte Ross lives with her father George. Together they supply Melbourne’s professional middle class and elites with stationery: inks, paper, pens and ledgers. George is a widower who has grown a respectable and specialist business that allows Charlotte to maintain her role as an unmarried daughter in gainful employment, thus encountering people and the public world through the shop. The book opens with reference to the “noise and bustle of Elizabeth Street”.

While she possibly considers herself “plain” when judged alongside Melbourne’s society women and their fashionable dresses, Charlotte is a strong character with considerable presence. Her capacity for deep thought and ability to attune to the emotional states of other people are both strengths and weaknesses as the events of her life unfold; some tragic, others with vibrant potential and possibility.

When Charlotte encounters Flora Dalton, a doctor’s daughter, an instant attraction sparks something in her. The book’s title, House of Longing , refers to a hidden desire both women slowly begin to acknowledge openly – but also to the many lives and desires of the women Charlotte later meets in the psychiatric institution.

Nineteenth-century Melbourne, with its much-rehearsed preoccupations with class, gender and social reputation, proves the perfect setting for Calaby to explore women’s secret emotional and sexual experiences in a world constrained by gender conventions. Calaby centres questions of women’s independence from men in this society.

Alert to the narrative of psychiatric illness and the language used in this book, I was interested in the way Charlotte and Flora use the word “mad” early in their friendship. As two women who possess a keen and wry sense of the world around them, they initially make light of the notion of losing reason, of the way “losing one’s senses” might be a “a freedom”.

Charlotte and Flora experience freedom by spending time together dressed as young men, camping in the bush east of Melbourne.

As soon as they thought it safe to do so, Charlotte and Flora ventured into the trees – deep enough to ensure privacy but not so far from the road as to risk getting lost – and exchanged their dresses for shirts and trousers.

At first Charlotte finds the trousers “strangely confining compared to skirts” but later, when she changes back into her dress, she finds that clothing newly “constraining”, suggesting a gentle shift in her identity has taken place.

Here, too, Calaby seems to draw on the historical record: it wasn’t unheard of for women to escape their stifling lives by dressing as men in the 1890s. Accounts of women “passing” as men in the colonial era were reported in newspapers and documented in medical and institutional records, as recorded by historians Lucy Chesser , Ruth Ford and Robin Eames .

Charlotte and Flora’s time in the bush gifts them a sense of physical freedom, where they can express bodily difference and sexual desire away from the scrutiny of men. They are literally clothed as gender-neutral, unfettered by the terrible stiffness of women’s dress fabrics and cuts. Flora neither resembles a “boy” nor a “woman”, but is “vulnerable, waiflike” in this experiment with her gender.

On her return to the city, Charlotte experiences a personal tragedy – and chooses a more dramatic escape from her oppressive clothing, stifling social expectations and somewhat lonely life as a solo woman.

Yet instead of liberation, she finds herself in an institutional setting purposefully designed to constrain, confine and sequester women: the lunatic asylum at Kew. Here, the novel’s action begins to revolve around the worlds of women and their keepers.

Read more: Trans people aren’t new, and neither is their oppression: a history of gender crossing in 19th-century Australia

Darkest moments and recovery

In the late 19th century, police were the “first responders” to trauma and mental distress, responsible for taking individuals to the institutions. Physicians were then required to certify a person as needing hospitalisation. Charlotte is arrested by police, then hospitalised, where she is observed by doctors.

Readers less well-acquainted than I am with the processes of 19th-century asylum admissions will likely be horrified by Charlotte’s experience: stripped of clothing, talked about (rather than to); made subject to the medical men. Notes are taken about her body, clothes, deportment and speech. She is noted as “stubborn”.

Charlotte becomes increasingly aware of the dynamics of the wards and the personalities of doctors and attendant nursing staff. She forms friendships and alliances with other women who represent the range of “types” of patients in the period: the elderly and feeble women; the very young and vulnerable; the tough and scrappy women like Mary, whose life outside was marked by policing and arrests, rape and violence, and ultimately survival; young Eliza, whose baby has died; and the immigrant women like Inge, whose time in the institution was possibly safer for her than her home and marriage.

Calaby describes the asylum’s daily routine, such as menus, the gendered work regime for patients, and the hopeful intercession of visitors and advocates. Her characters are well-drawn portraits of women inmates, but also of the nuances in their care.

Some doctors were sympathetic figures who worked for the recovery of patients. Some nursing staff physically harmed patients. In Attending the Mad , an important, well-regarded history of labour in the asylum, Lee-Ann Monk examines another side of the silenced experiences of both the “mad” and those who worked to manage and care for the confined. Miss Simmons, a controlling nurse who handles the women roughly, reflects the various kind and mean attendant identities in the historical record. The novel’s inmates experience her “care” as “punishment”.

Simmons slaps patients, and makes one young patient, Eliza, empty the “domestics” each morning: “It shouldn’t be her duty, but Simmons says it’s a punishment. For what, I don’t know. Eliza does everything she’s told to”, Inge tells Charlotte.

As it evolved, psychiatric practice became more reliant on the language of diagnosis. Charlotte – a witness to this professionalisation of mental health treatment – notices the way “classes” of patient are given roles or privileges, or deprived, within the institution.

My own research has examined the blurred line between the asylum, families and the outside world. Patients could leave on trial, as Charlotte is able to do. “Recovery” was possible, though often assessed through the performance of appropriate gendered behaviour such as letter-writing, tasks such as needlework, mixing at social events like the asylum ball, or attending church services. All these practices formed part of the “moral therapy” of the day.

Read more: Hidden women of history: Catherine Hay Thomson, the Australian undercover journalist who went inside asylums and hospitals

Constraint and resistance

From the start of the book, where Charlotte is forcibly fed through a tube, we understand that submission to the institution is not a choice. She is pinned down by two female attendants and a rubber tube is forced through her nostril by a doctor:

She tried to struggle, but the women held her tightly: she could move only her head. […] this was an assault she never could have imagined. Her sinuses stung, her eyes watered; it felt like the tube must surely pass into her brain.

Inquiries into Kew Asylum in 1876 and the Royal Commission into asylums in Victoria in the late 1880s both took evidence from many people, including inmates.

We have access to their voices of protest and reflection, and to their understanding of the violent treatment they sometimes received – as well as the carelessness that allowed accidents to happen, such as the novel’s horrific one in the asylum’s laundry, where a young inmate has her hand crushed in the mangle, leaving it “like a piece of butcher’s meat, misshapen and pulverised”. These voices of protest and complaint are reflected in Calaby’s novel, and also underscore the agency some women patients had in the space of the official inquiry.

In the 1876 Kew Inquiry, I found the recorded words of women to be loud, full of purpose, and self aware. One patient, Margaret Henderson, gave formal evidence about being treated with “plunge baths” by attendants who held her under water:

I may have been dong something objectionable to them before I would be put into a bath, and I would look to be punished by it […] they said it was a thing belonging to the asylum, and I was to submit to it.

Patients emerged in the inquiry as powerful advocates for others who were weaker than themselves, just as we see in Calaby’s novel. Laid bare in the evidence of investigations carried out about the state of asylums during the 19th century, “madness” or mental breakdown was exposed as complex, troubling and unknowable. But the inquiry also reflected a changing understanding of mental illness and its treatment, leading to greater scrutiny of medical men, asylum practices and the quality of care provided.

Kew Asylum and its population was a microcosm of the wider world of deprivation, control, violence, poverty and class that shaped the colonial world.

House of Longing examines the well-documented need for support for inmates from outside the asylum’s walls to achieve “recovery” and release. It also hints at the stumbling efforts of the medical fraternity to understand how to care for the mentally ill, who were women and men from all walks of life.

And it’s a hopeful story about love and courage – which suggests alternative futures for women seeking independence from marriage and social norms.

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Kew asylum history in brief, warning about distressing information, patient information.

• Auspice: Hospitals for the Insane Branch 1867–1905; Lunacy Department, located in Chief Secretary's Department 1905–34; Department of Mental Hygiene, located in Chief Secretary's Department 1937–44; Department of Health I 1944–52; Mental Hygiene Authority [statutory authority] 1952–62; Mental Health Authority [statutory authority] 1962–78; Health Commission of Victoria 1978–85; Department of Health II 1985–92 (mental health)/ Community Services Victoria 1985–92 (intellectual disability)
• Name: Kew Lunatic Asylum (1872–1956); Kew Mental Hospital (1956–c.60s); Willsmere Mental Hospital (c.1960s–82); Willsmere Unit (1982–89)

In 1856, construction of the Kew Asylum commenced, based on the newly-built Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in London. Some architects and medical personnel rejected this institutional arrangement as inappropriate, and proposed an alternative system of cottages arranged around a common centre.

Work was abandoned for a decade, but in 1872 the Kew Asylum was completed and 214 patients were already in residence when it opened, partly due to Yarra Bend Asylum being over-capacity. Within five years, the asylum housed 1000 men, women and children.

Kew Asylum was continually criticised by the medical and social services professions. Within a decade of its opening, the institution had become so dilapidated that it was described by the Victorian Branch of the British Medical Association as ‘a disgrace to the community’.

In the 1880s, it was proposed to close both the Kew and Yarra Bend asylums and replace them with four new facilities. Action was delayed by the onset of the 1890s depression.

During the ensuing years, enquiries, governments and mental health authorities attempted to close and demolish the building. In 1939 Larundel opened, but plans for it to replace the Kew Asylum were delayed by World War II.

The Children’s Cottages at Kew had been established in 1887. In 1956, the Children's Cottages were officially separated from the Kew Mental Hospital which was called Willsmere Mental Hospital in the 1960s and had shifted its role to care of psychogeriatric patients from throughout Victoria.

In 1982, Willsmere became the Willsmere Unit.

Willsmere Unit provided long term back-up psychogeriatric services to catchment areas of Footscray, Royal Park and Dandenong Hospitals and shared responsibility for Southern Region (Region 8) with Larundel Hospital. It also administered the Camberwell Community Mental Health Clinic.

The services provided to psychogeriatric patients included acute assessment (including day-care programs), rehabilitation, family relief care, long-term care, community services and medical services. Most beds, however, were usually occupied by long-term patients, limiting provision of some other services. In 1985, psychogeriatric patients accounted for 93 per cent of 471 beds at Willsmere.

Before its closure, Willsmere Unit also provided acute adult psychiatric services on a regional basis, comprising Hawthorn, Camberwell, Kew, Box Hill and Doncaster–Templestowe.

The hospital also provided for a 22-bed surgical unit and a 28-bed medical unit.

In 1989, Willsmere Unit was decommissioned.

This guide contains information that some people may find distressing. If you experienced abuse as a child or young person in an institution mentioned in this guide, it may be a difficult reading experience. Guides may also contain references to previous views, policies and practices that are regrettable and do not reflect the current views, policies or practices of the department or the State of Victoria. If you find this content distressing, please consult with a support person either from the Department of Health and Human Services or another agency.

Please note that the content of this administrative history is provided for general information only and does not purport to be comprehensive. The department does not guarantee the accuracy of this administrative history. For more information on the history of child welfare in Australia, see Find & Connect External Link .

• Victoria Government gazettes.
• Public Record Office Victoria online catalogue.

PLEASE NOTE: Patients could be admitted to a Receiving House for short-term treatment and care, but were not permitted to remain longer than two months. Patients still needing treatment after two months could be sent to a Psychiatric Hospital, in the same institution/complex or another. Hence, there could be more than one set of records for any one person. Please check each location for former patient records.

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• DHHS Kew Asylum - Collection Guide doc 213 KB

Reviewed 16 May 2019

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Return to Antipodean Nights

Australia’s Most Terrifying and Haunted Places: Victoria

Here are some of the more renowned locations for paranormal activity and alleged hauntings. I’ll give you the facts and the rumours, and you can go on to make up your own mind.

Larundel was first imagined in 1938, a way for the state government to replace the outdated Kew Mental Hospital. Two years later, it was under construction when WWII intervened. For the next five years various uses were planned for the buildings, but in 1946 Larundel was given to the Victorian Department of Housing for emergency accommodation. The wards were hastily converted to flats.

It continued as housing until 1949, but over the next four years, Larundel was slowly populated with patients from Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, which experienced fire-damage at the time. In 1953 Larundel was officially declared a hospital for the mentally ill. By that stage, it had 387 patients, a quarter of which were women. Two years later, eight additional wards opened, allowing for another 360 patients (270 of which were female).

It continued to operate through until the 90s when the government moved away from incarcerating such patients and tried to integrate them back into society. The remaining buildings are currently derelict and there is no access to the general public. It sits, the old buildings boarded up, waiting for the government to do something with it.

For the past fifteen or so years, the abandoned buildings have been a playground for those fascinated with thrill-seeking, as well as paranormal investigators. It is said by some that loud banging on the walls can be heard; odd smells and the sound of children crying have also been experienced on occasion.

There is a rumour that a little girl who died on the third floor loved her music box, and to this day, there are claims on the internet that random explorers have heard music playing on some nights, just before or at midnight. There are many accounts of supernatural phenomena occurring at Larundel, and the complex itself is vast and spooky enough to scare the most intrepid explorer, even without phantoms and unexplained occurrences.

Old Geelong Gaol

The gaol was operated as a high security prison until it was decommissioned in July, 1991. Little has changed at Geelong Gaol since its closure. Some exhibits of its past history have been added, in the style of a museum, but the gaol itself is still an imposing and dread-inspiring building.

Prisoners were held in small, unheated cells, with no sewerage facilities at all, for up to fourteen hours each day.

Past inmates have reported hearing female cries at night, especially in the east wing, the site of the Industrial School for Girls for the late 1860s. Tour guides have reported witnessing several occurrences, including swirling mists, general weird feelings and people being struck.

The site has been visited by various paranormal research teams, who have reported strange mists, sounds, EMF disturbances and orbs. Mediums and other ‘sensitive’ people have been employed by some, and they have reported the presence of various spirits in the gaol. The old infirmary, cell 45, the gallows, and the external shower block are reportedly the sites with the most activity.

The gaol is now operated by the Rotary Club of Geelong, who run guided tours on weekends and holidays. Ghost tours run at night every weekend, and it has become a place that many claim is haunted by its own dark past.

Beechworth Lunatic Asylum

Foreboding is the only way anyone could describe the buildings situated at the top of a hill outside Beechworth in northern Victoria.

Beechworth Lunatic Asylum is currently owned by La Trobe University. Nightly Ghost tours are held at the hospital, allowing public access to the most historic buildings in the complex.

There are plenty of stories told about Mayday Hills Asylum: many have spoken of the figure of a man who appears near the cellar, and then completely vanishes within a second. Matron Sharpe, who spent most of her life there, has been spotted on more than one occasion, a grey, hooded figure in period costume. Doors swing open by themselves, and at other times, mysterious screams are heard. Some say that a glance out of the cottage windows around dusk may reveal an old man in a green jacket, maybe an old ground-keeper, wandering around in the gardens. Also, a woman has been, on occasion, photographed standing at the window from which she was reputedly thrown by other inmates. Whether these tales are true or not, the entire place has a certain eeriness about it that sends chills down the spine.

Willsmere (Kew) Mental Asylum

Willsmere was the very first asylum built for that purpose in Victoria, and was the largest to exist in the state. It operated in conjunction with the asylums built in Ararat and Beechworth, but housed the less-dangerous and confronting patients. The asylum’s buildings are typical examples of the French Second Empire style which was popular in Victorian Melbourne. The use of low ha-ha walls and extensively landscaped grounds added to the decadent beauty of the complex. Long considered of cultural and historic significance to Melbourne, Kew Asylum and its complex of buildings were registered on the Register of the National Estate in March 1978.

Not as beautiful on the inside as the outside, the asylum was criticised heavily during the first fifty years of operation for issues including overcrowding, mismanagement, lack of resources, poor sanitation and disease.

Kew continued to operate throughout the 20th century as a psychiatric hospital, treating acute, long-term and geriatric patients until it closed in December 1988. The main building and surrounding grounds were sold by the State Government, and were then redeveloped as residential properties, with the stipulation that all redesign must fall within regulations for preservation of the original façade.

Not somewhere I’d want to live, but each to their own. At this point, there are no reports of residents dying from paranormal phenomena, but time will tell.

Aradale Mental Hospital

Opened in 1867, the complex housed, in its approximately 130 year history, tens of thousands of people described as ‘lunatics’, ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ – some of them described as the worst lunatics in the British Empire. As it was far from the prying eyes of the Melbourne population, the very worst cases were sent to Ararat, where no one cared what became of them.

Completed forty years before Freud, this building saw some of the most controversial psychiatric treatments in Australia. Around 13,000 people died there in its 130 years. As a result, Aradale is considered one of the most haunted locations in Australia.

Over the last year, for the first time in its long history, Aradale’s doors have opened for evening explorations. I recently went on a Ghost Tour of this massive place, and believe me, it’s pretty damn scary.

My immediate thoughts on arrival at the front of the facility were, “wow, that’s massive”. Then I realised that the front is just a minute part of the place. Just as it was getting dark, our guide, dressed in top-hat and tails, brought us in through the front doors and armed us with small, battery-operated lanterns. I had a high-lumen head-torch, so I considered myself lucky. Throughout the tour, we heard many stories about the place; of the torturous ‘treatments’ the patients were subjected to, of the long and sometimes sordid history of the place, and, of course, of the hauntings that have allegedly taken place within the facility.

There are many reports of paranormal activity within the boundaries of Aradale: tales of Nurse Kerry, who allegedly haunts the women’s wing and watches the ghost tour groups from one room in particular; the unexplained pains and sense of being touched by people in the old men’s wing surgery; the unexplained cold winds emanating from the old office of the facility director (we felt that one ourselves); and the back area of the men’s wing isolation cells, where banging can be heard on the walls, even though no one else is in the building. Finally, there are tales of Old Margaret, supposedly one of the many patients who were kicked out in the late 90s, when Aradale closed, who still hangs around the facility because it was her home for her entire life.

The best of the rest

The Old Melbourne Gaol is a museum and former prison located in Russell Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. It consists of a bluestone building and courtyard, and is located next to the old City Police Watch House and City Courts buildings. The three-storey museum displays information and memorabilia of the prisoners and staff, including death masks of the executed criminals. At one time the museum displayed Ned Kelly’s skull, before it was stolen in 1978, as well as the pencil used by wrongly convicted Colin Campbell Ross to protest his innocence in writing, before being executed. Paranormal enthusiasts claim the museum is haunted, with claims of ghostly apparitions and unexplained voices near cells.

Fortuna Villa is a mansion near Bendigo in Victoria, Australia. It was first built in 1855, during the gold rush, and went from being a large but modest house to the mansion that is seen today. In WWII, the house was used by the Australian Army as a mapping survey centre, and after this it was declared the property of the Victorian Parliament and became a listed Commonwealth Heritage site. There are many reported ghosts of Fortuna Villa: the ghost of George Lansell, one of owners and a founder of Bendigo, appears as a bearded figure; the ghost of a teenage girl reportedly appears as a spectre asking people to leave; footsteps can sometimes be heard at night, as well as the tapping of a cane, and in some rooms cold spots can be felt. In 1986, a witness saw a dark shape, a head and torso without legs, passing through the bannister of the main staircase, and finally, some claim to have heard the voice of a woman, supposed to be Bedilia, Lansell’s first wife, who died in uncertain circumstances. Some military personnel, stationed in the mapping survey centre, have reported that previously locked doors are found open, and a boy in a sailor suit appeared to a female soldier, disappearing when she called out for help. Tellingly, members of the Australian Army wrote a letter to their superiors asking for relocation out of the property due to ongoing hauntings. It was, of course, denied.

As you can see, the number of haunted locations in Australia seems to far outweigh our population and relative age, and this article barely touches the tip of the iceberg in that regard. Welcome to Terror Australis.

GEOFF BROWN

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Permanent link to this article: https://www.thisishorror.co.uk/columns/antipodean-nights/australias-most-terrifying-and-haunted-places-victoria/

137 comments

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• chris on November 14, 2013 at 11:48 am

i would like to know how many asylums there were in australia and how many they held as i am trying to discover just who was in them and there storys forgoten history

• Elizabeth on August 10, 2018 at 10:37 am

I am wondering how many sexually abused men, women and children were deemed “masturbators”, “idiots”, “lunatics” to silence them. I am also wondering about the prison like surgery where experiments of torture were carried out perhaps for under the radar “research”. Imagine the playing field for predators as medical staff or paying clients.

• GD on February 27, 2019 at 1:33 am

If your wondering about children who were abused and then marked as idiots, look into some of the old school’s in Australia. Box Hill Primary School, City of Whitehorse, Victoria Australia. Which was torn down in the late 80’s or 90’s. This school was a horror story for many of us that went there, especially if we had one male teacher in particular. Mr Macintosh, he was evil

• Karl on September 21, 2023 at 5:13 am

If you were abused at school, or any other institution (like a hospital, church, orphange, etc) you can get compensation through a Australian Government Program called the National Redress Scheme – look it up, there is compensation and counselling, and most of all: an apology. It’s about getting recognition and help for those who were abused in institutions.

• leah shanaughan on December 22, 2013 at 9:39 am

Cant wait to visit some of these places!! Do you know if the old prison in merchison was ever haunted? I know about the history but has anyone ever been in to research the paranormal? Pretty sure it was called Dhurringile prison (prisoners of war were kept there after the place was a homestead)

• Jodi on August 17, 2014 at 11:08 pm

I live near there and the prison is still in use but no stories around our local area about hauntings However in shepparton where we live there are haunting reports about a couple of old original homesteads in the area being haunted. Hope this helps.

• Dee on January 2, 2015 at 3:20 pm

There is an old prisoners of war camp out there. I have not been there myself but have been told it definatly carries a different feel to the place. Pretty sure the Dhurringile prison was the old boys home but not sure. The Rhue cemetery is active with paranormal activity so I’m told 🙂 if that helps

• Charles Hammer CRN 216 on November 11, 2015 at 12:31 am

Dhurringile prison ( still a Low security prison )..The mansion ..many stories abide there. The most telling was when a number of prisoners left their unit ( built behind mansion) saw a man in a German naval officers uniform just standing and looking at the ground. It is said that the mansion housed the officers who sank the HMAS Sydney. Some were placed into the solitary cell under the mansion ( the old meat / cold storage room ) cell door still there. Anyway it is said they started a tunnel under the mansion toward freedom – just off to the left there is a major dip in the land.( where the tunnel supposedly fell in on the diggers. prison officials have been restoring mansion. Land has been getting filled on said spot but the dip remains and no grass seams to grow there to the disappointment of grounds staff…the prison was also a boys home with some nasty stories. But this writer can not tell of them. I only know of the story of the German officer. I was one of the prisoners to see him. There is a museum in a local town that has a big thing on the prisoner of war camp.

• jo geale on December 24, 2013 at 10:40 am

i would like to know if you can visit these places and how haunted they are.

• $ick dude on February 9, 2016 at 10:06 pm

#yoloswag jo in da house prett haunted

• Diane Catanach on May 15, 2017 at 12:26 pm

You can’t as it houses prisoners. Wroo cemetery out of Rushworh, plus old mine shafts in that area lots of bodies thrown down there in the gold mining times

• Ross Vertigan on January 22, 2014 at 8:46 am

With our past, I’m not surprised

• Jaster Mereel on February 11, 2014 at 5:09 am

Larundel is not haunted, i live near it and have studied it, i have heard the supposed music box myself, its only the tune of a local ice cream truck.

• Ben Baini on February 18, 2014 at 3:38 am

I don’t think it’s haunted either. it was fun exploring the grounds and had a few sounds startle us but really it’s just a run down building victimised by the gangs with spray paint. it’s not safe with all the junkie squatters

• amy scott on March 1, 2014 at 5:41 pm

• ebony on May 20, 2015 at 7:15 pm

I believe in ghost its real

• frank on February 15, 2019 at 2:53 am

yes ghost is real i saw one

• frank on February 15, 2019 at 2:59 am

yes ghost are real

• ember langford on March 22, 2014 at 7:59 am

I went to larundel last night and took alot of photos, i counted over 30 orbs in 5 shots. I heard the music box too and a loud bang from the where we came in. Its deffinantly cold and eerie and its deffinantly haunted

• The good captain. on March 25, 2014 at 11:48 pm

An ice cream truck at midnight?

• vpi! on April 16, 2014 at 6:27 am

i run a paranormal team , and it is haunted! as for the music box, do ya think the ice cream man comes at midnight ay ???? lol ! i have plenty of evidence it is!

• vpi! on April 16, 2014 at 6:29 am

oh n im also a medium ! so that helps alot also 🙂

• Samantha on July 2, 2014 at 11:47 pm

I would love to know more about your team.. I am fansinated by all paranormal stuff 🙂

• Matt on October 11, 2016 at 7:54 pm

I know some stories I have seen and felt them I would love to talk

• ER on July 21, 2014 at 1:23 am

Hi can you share some of what you say you have found, i am very interested and will hope you reply.

• Mish on December 8, 2014 at 12:16 am

We do paranormal tours too and I can definitely tell you that Larundel IS haunted. We’ve heard noises, footsteps etc (and no it’s not the young teenagers). We’ve even had strange things turn up in photos such as human figures, eyes, orbs AND 3 of us even saw a ghost of a young woman and we actually spoke to her and this was actually OUTSIDE. It’s a detailed story but if anyone is interested, I’ll tell you all about it. Cheers Mish

• gillian on December 18, 2014 at 2:15 am

I’m really interested in hearing your story. My friend and I are planning on going tomorrow night. I’m terrified haha

• lisa on March 5, 2016 at 2:46 pm

Can u email me would love to go vist laurandel as i live only 10mins away but ther are alot of satories Iive also heard about trhat place. My email iis [email protected]

• Matt. on June 3, 2016 at 12:26 am

Hi Lisa, Larundel is currently under development and not accessible. Google ‘Polaris 3083’ to see the new estate being constructed within and around the old remaining hospital buildings. Workers are there on a daily basis starting on the next two buildings to be renovated (one has already been restored and is currently a community centre). the main hospital building and one other smaller one are yet to be started on as yet but neither are in anyway accessible (I don’t live anywhere near the area but I do pass by once a week and looked for access as recently has Monday just gone to no avail).

• Brendan on May 15, 2016 at 7:29 am

I can tell you with precise accuracy that the music box is the ring tone of the security guards who work at the site to keep the squatters and vandalisers out of the building.

• Teagan Parker on July 8, 2014 at 12:42 pm

I wentthere a few weeks ago, it may not be haunted with Negative energy, but with what went on behind the closed doors back then was shocking, my great uncle worked at larundel and my nans late husbands father was admitted into larundel. I have pictures of figures, sprectres and orbs in rooms that show alot of activity

• ben on October 22, 2014 at 4:14 pm

Guys i can definetly say it is haunted i’ve been in there with the Victorian paranormal squad and the stuff we picked up in that place was real! plus i am very attuned to the spirit world and i have spoken to some poor souls who lived in there. For example i spoke to a guy named adam in the smaller hut just outside of the main building which has recently been knocked down and he kept saying how he got to go home on a friday to see his mum and dad and got very excited about it, and from the position where i was standing thats where they walked out from! I’ve also heard the music box for myself at around 4pm on a wednesday and its not the university kids playing pranks!

• Niel Edgley on May 30, 2015 at 11:31 am

Jaster,if you want to be a sceptic, at least be honest, years ago I visited and heard the music, it was inside the building and not from the exterior, I have visited several Haunted buildings also not listed here and have been witnessing paranormal phenomena since 9 yrs old in the UK then during my life in Australia, part of my young teens were spent at Struan Farm School Nr Naracoorte in South Australia, built by a Scottish pioneer the old but pristine massive stone mansion was the scene of some very strange occurrences for a lot of us, including screams from the locked tower where Robinson Hung himself on Valentines night a small no. of years after his wife died after falling from the tower with sealed windows, it was also rumoured that Robinson enslaved aborigines for farm work and kept them chained in a cellar under the northern end of the house,there were still iron rings bolted to the walls in 1963,we used to hear chains jangling along the floor across the lower courtyard in the night.on a visit a few yearsw ago the cleaners of the house from Naracoorte said there was no way they would stay at the house at night.Two Paintings of Robinson and his wife used to adorn either side of the entrance hallway glaring at each other with an area of icy cold inbetween,even during blistering summer.

• shar on November 7, 2015 at 11:30 am

Ash but did you ever work there or walk the halls at night. Bet you didn’t.

• -someone who can see them - on May 23, 2016 at 7:27 am

lol it is haunted.. They (the spirits) are actually stuck there.. They can not leave because he will “punish” them for leaving the building..

I used to live 15 minute walk up from this building as well as Mont Park (also believed to be haunted). I lived in the old refurbished buildings – smack bang between the two..

• amy scott on March 1, 2014 at 5:39 pm

I heard music when I lived in Victoria and investigated with friend s

• marty on March 2, 2014 at 7:04 am

also is Larundel demolished now ??? or is it still standing and if you have the guts you can go in.

• Mikey on March 3, 2014 at 4:47 am

Larundel is demolished now. There is a Liquor store where it once was. A friend of mine told me about a severely haunted house in boxhill on a main road. Does anyone have any info about it? Apparently it has sat vacant since the 80’s.

• Peter on March 18, 2014 at 2:29 pm

This is false, the buildings of Laurendel still stand – my girlfriend and i were there tonight…

• Jdt Phs on May 27, 2014 at 7:29 pm

but they did have others that were at the rear of bundoora park… that were much better… but they got destroyed couple 6 so years back… but the main ones that are shown in the pics are !00% still there…& i its even easier vto get to now… you basically can park your car right next to it.. but of course its fenced off… with some home made entrance.. 🙂

• justin on September 18, 2014 at 10:50 am

Can you just walk in there mate?

• Zoltan on October 25, 2014 at 6:06 am

I have been to laurundal many times it still stands, a couple of the buildings have been converted into housing and what not but apart from that you can just walk in (if you don’t mind jumping a couple of bad fences)

• janet on April 25, 2016 at 9:01 pm

Yep you can…holes in the fences left by teens make it easier…we went to explore at night and during the day…pretty bloody eerie, no ghost sightings but beware of man holes and broken flooring if you go at night just saying, it is falling to pieces….

• Collette Foreman on March 14, 2017 at 9:33 am

Well i guess there’s lots of spirits now!! But they’re all in bottles!!!

• marty on March 8, 2014 at 11:59 pm

i would love to know where this haunted house is in box hill. can you find out where it it is ??

• David on March 23, 2014 at 12:32 pm

Melbourne one of two oldest cities on the continent?? Brisbane is much older than Melbourne, and has WAY more haunted places.

• Jenni on July 29, 2014 at 10:51 am

You’ll usually find that inland country towns, such as Bathurst and Junee are full of haunted histories. ( look up monte christo historic homestead).

• Maya Palden on March 23, 2014 at 4:38 pm

So far I’ve seen a list of Victorian locations as well as a list for South Australia. I’m wondering where the WESTERN Australia list is…??

• GNBraun on March 23, 2014 at 10:26 pm

Maya, I’ve done Vic, NSW, Tassie, and SA so far. I’m getting to the rest.

• Hayley on March 28, 2014 at 4:03 pm

I’ve been on a tour of the Old geelong Goal. At one point I was sitting on a bed in one of the cells and I stuck my fingers through the spring, and I swear to god something pushed them back up, just as this happened my friend kind of fell forward a bit. I asked her about it later that night and she said she felt like something jabbed her back…

• rachel on April 26, 2014 at 4:08 am

Hi im interested in paranormal, i would love to experience paranormal with a team, please if u could msg me, that would be fantastic 🙂 thank you

• Donal Haromunthe (@DonHaromunthe) on November 4, 2015 at 9:26 am

Love to talk about paranormal activity with everybody.

Let’s connect.

Msg me @DonHaromunthe

• Sarah on May 12, 2014 at 2:19 am

Uhh, we just stayed in George Kerferd Hotel in Beechworth, the old rehabilitation house for inmates. We didn’t know until the same afternoon, that we were going to sleep 50 m. from the old Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum. I did NOT have a good nights sleep. I walked around there on my own, in the fog, rain and not a person in sight. If only I had known it was a mental hospital, I would never have dared.

• serahayarah on May 13, 2014 at 3:18 am

Larundel is still standing – partially. There is now a shopping center at the front of it, but there are still buildings out the back. But it is now patrolled by security and you face a hefty fine if you’re caught there now.

Apparently the main building of the sanatorium is to be made into a community center. When I was there last, there was a sign out the front of it, explaining the upcoming transformation.

I’ve personally been there multiple times, but haven’t heard the alleged music box. Rumors went about that the ‘music’ was actually played by near by residents of the university as a type of prank, but none was played while I was ‘exploring’, you might say.

• nsomi on November 14, 2014 at 1:06 pm

Hi have heard music box both times visited and recorded it as well also in court yard music played and little girl was with music box it plays loud and clear but a lovely old tune scary place

• Alice on May 23, 2014 at 4:10 pm

ok this is scary and I am home alone;\

• Matthew on June 15, 2014 at 2:28 pm

Beechworth is a place worth visiting! I live about 20mins away… Although I’ve not been on the Ghost tour, I’ve been on the grounds Walking around the buildings, took some photos, many times! With my own creepy experiences! Lights being on in parts of the building that no longer have electricity connected… Seeing women in some of the windows. And this young lady who kept staring at me with a look like she knew me, then my friend spotted her, and she vanished. But the whole town of beechworth is just amazing! Go during the Easter long weekend, they have a lovely Easter festival.

• Sharon on June 17, 2014 at 3:43 am

Hi All, I live in one of the towers at ‘Willsmere’ in Kew, Australia. It is the most peaceful, gorgeous place to live! After reading several stories about the buildings being ‘the most haunted in Australia’ (AFTER buying the place)! I spent the first few weeks wide awake at night, waiting for ghosties to emerge from shadows, creepy footsteps, icy hand on the shoulder etc….not a sausage, sorry to disappoint the ghost busters amongst you!

• Ronnie on February 21, 2015 at 7:44 am

Hi Sharon, I have just moved to Willsmere too, it’s so lovely! Only a couple of weird happenings so far…..Why are there so many kids here though?! I was hoping for some peace and quiet! Ron.

• Marcus on March 4, 2015 at 1:55 am

I live in Willsmere too. It’s a beautiful place. It’s actually very peaceful and calming, since it was built for that purpose. I’ve also done the Aradale Ghost tour. I loved that, but it’s not too scary when it’s almost the same as walking around your own home (Willsmere) at night time.

• shar on November 7, 2015 at 11:38 am

I know for a fact that when Wills mere was decommissioned they found shackles and the like in the basement that were ordered destroyed by the health department. If any where is haunted it should be. People these days forget about the sadness of those committed to these places and the cruelness many suffered many because they were simply different not.insane

• Silvi on June 17, 2014 at 10:47 am

All I can say is you must protect yourself before entering such places, and ask yourself why you are doing this? Just because you can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there.

• Donna on June 18, 2014 at 11:52 pm

Such beautiful old building they are , um .. I’m wondering if we needed hospitals ( Asylums ) of this size to house … oops I mean detain , so many thousands of people ( lunatics ) when these places closed down , where did all the strange people go ? ….now that’s a creepy thought

• ER on July 21, 2014 at 1:26 am

Lol, there are still mentally ill and they are placed in very modern facilities like Monash medical center….

• shar on November 7, 2015 at 11:44 am

The creepy people are walking down the street or sitting next to you or maybe even the reflection in your mirror. You ignorance sickens me. Mental illness is just an illness like diabetes or any other except it affects the mind like so many accepted illnesses. We still need institutions not to protect the community from those with mental illness nut to protect them from the likes of you.

• Niel Edgley on June 26, 2016 at 10:20 am

You’ve hit the nail on the head Shar

• Lachlan on July 2, 2014 at 11:59 am

I have witnessed myself through the paranormal investigation at Aradale a scratch and a push. I shat myself

• Mish on December 8, 2014 at 1:42 am

Hey Lachlan, yes me too! Aradale is the BEST place to go if you want paranormal activity. We had loads and loads of stuff going on when our paranormal team went there. I was wearing night vision goggles all night and twice, this massive orb about the size of a grapefruit would come flying REALLY fast up the corridor and would come to a halt right in front of my goggles and then would shoot upwards and then just disappear, it didn’t scare me but startled me big time and I nearly fell backwards. We then went into the forensic dept and I could see this mist coming up through the concrete floor, so I said to one of the guys “what do you make of this” and gave him my night vision goggles, and he said ” yer it does look like mist” and right at that point he says “WHOA” and nearly fell backwards and I said “What??” and he said “oh my god, this massive orb just came flying at me and stopped right in front of the goggles and took off”, I said YES that’s whats been happening to me all night! Anyway, we go into a small room where one of the nurses resided, there were 8 of us and it was a little bit crowded, so my husband had to stand in the doorway and I was right in the corner at the back of the room (still wearing my night vision, which meant I could see everyone and EVERYTHING), we were communicating with a nurse through the voice box, I think she said her name was Rosemary, next thing it felt like someone or something ran their finger or fingernail or something really hard and deep, right across the top of my right thigh, so I looked down at my thigh and all around but there was nothing there! and then straight after, my husband who was standing in the doorway, said “oh shit, something just grabbed me on the shoulder”, so i quickly looked up with my night vision but there was nothing there! One of the girls was wearing the sound recording equipment and had a headset on, she went into some room (which was pitch black) by herself and shut the door, she was only in there for a couple of minutes when she came bursting out saying (excitedly not scared) OMG!! Michelle you’ve got to come in here, I want to see if it happens to you too! I said What? and she said she was trying to communicate through the sound equipment when something went bang bang bang on the right side of her head set, so we swapped our equipment, I now had the headset on and she had the night vision goggles. To begin with all I could hear was static coming through the headset, then all of a sudden something tapped 3 times really hard on the right side of the headset (my friend was standing over on my left), I shat myself and we went bolting out of the room!! Other weird stuff was happening that night as well, such as seeing a light go on in a window (looking from outside the building, we got an awesome clear photo of a male ghost that looked like he was disappearing into the bricks (and this was taken outside the building), we heard doors opening and closing, footsteps down the corridors (mind you, we were the only people there)! Oh yer, we even got (though the voice box, a very angry) Fuck off! Get out!! apparently (when he was alive) he was an absolute crazy, nasty piece of work inmate, who hated women)! So me and my girlfriend went into his room to stir him up a bit and told him to touch one of us on the arse (which he didn’t) but then really clearly on the voice box Fuck off!!! Get out!! so we did, as fast as we could LOL. If you are really into the paranormal, I highly recommend Aradale! We just did J Ward (where the criminally insane were kept, which is just up the road from Aradale) on Friday night 5th Dec, it was an alnighter and we slept there. There’s definitely a presence there but we didn’t really capture much, My mate just got touched on the head and we just communicated with a little girl and a male spirit through the ghost meter. We took loads of pics but nothing showed up, just a moving orb. We even used the Ouija board but got nothing. We’ve even done Larundel, and I can tell you now, that place IS haunted but that’s another long story. Cheers for now Mish

• AEgamez on May 4, 2016 at 9:01 am

well yes, i live in the same town as aradale i once went on a ghost tour there and i honestly kept feeling like something was behind me whenever i drive past that old place i just feel cold

• Kasey on July 16, 2014 at 10:36 am

you need the old Mooroopna Hospital its been burnt down but still stand it is Haunted bye many ghost a nurse grey nurse seen lots and dead patients also been seen not to long ago by the towns people. and you can feel them at the hospital and former hospital museum. should cheek it out look for. very spooky at night even in day time http://WWW.whattimeforgot

• Doc on August 13, 2014 at 10:54 am

Many years ago l worked in the Botanic gardens near the old observatory Melbourne at the rear of Government house there was a large building where we stored things, this building had about 20 cells of various types was very old some were padded with heavy horse hair type walls and heavy doors. There were offices kitchens etc it was single story with a central passage. It wasn’t used as anything at the time l was working there only storage but must have housed some patients or prisoners at some time l have not been able to find any reference to it, and l can tell you it definitely was there….I’m trying to find out what it was and who they kept there…

• Shaun on August 17, 2014 at 6:48 am

I’m interested to find out if there are any books on the history of aradale n beechworth n also the J Wardin Ararat

• Jason C on September 2, 2014 at 8:04 am

I really want to visit some haunted houses and these sound good so I shal visit them 🙂

• Katie on September 6, 2014 at 12:07 am

I am an aged care worker who looks after a man who was housed in Larundel for many years. He has told me stories of the very harsh treatments and what he was subject to. Many of the patients, including himself were forced to trial LSD and they were pretty much off their faces for the entire duration of their stay. I can’t go into it too much due to privacy policies, but he told me the leader of a very famous Victorian cult had ALOT to do with Larundel and the LSD trials. I know this because the man I look after has told me he was a part of this cult, and when he tried to leave she had him placed in there. He claims the doctors who were treating patients were also members of this cult and did anything the leader told them to do. He told me the place is most definitely haunted by the souls that were tourtured there. He has many accounts of paranormal activity that he has witnessed. He is still haunted today from what he went through at Larundel and he is a very messed up old man who lost his entire family and friendship network due to being admitted there. What a sad place it must of been.

• shar on November 7, 2015 at 11:55 am

There was no cult but yes there were numerous drug trials and yes it wad a terribly sad place full of often forgotten people who were stigmatised by an ignorant society. This stigmatisation is being carried on by the insensitive motions who post on here that have no compassion for what these involuntary patients had to live through

• rowie on April 14, 2016 at 1:38 pm

AMEN to that!!!

• Penny on November 5, 2014 at 9:14 pm

Just a couple more suggestions. J Ward in Ararat is worth a look, as well the old hotels and buildings in Williamstown and there’s a homestead in Point Cook. All run ghost tours and are a lot of fun

• nsomi on November 14, 2014 at 1:02 pm

My daughter and son went to lurundel each time they heard music box playing daughter said it was like following them around then at 12 and before 12 both times music heard in court yard and the loud sounds that’s expected my daughter seen a face with white mask but up on roof that scared her they left

• Gen on November 18, 2014 at 8:11 am

Can you get in there, or is it illegal? (are there guards and whatnot)

• Mandy on January 2, 2015 at 8:10 pm

You can take a wander, my son does regularly and he is extremely obsessed with the place. Be careful of squatters and it’s overrun with graffiti – it’s such a shame that some of the general public have no respect for Australian history. I am also extremely interested and consumed with these types of places, my main interest is Ned Kelly, so I headed to Beechworth…. I did some research and came across “Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum”. I booked the ghost tour – 30th December 2014. Reports are that it’s haunted and the historical information is amazing. The stories were horrific and intriguing at the same time. Near the end – I think it was the cellar, I dont remember much but I remember going down stairs into a room with a bed a half window with bars its all very vauge, except for… in this room the guide was talking but I didn’t hear it. I had a terrible feeling my head started to spin and I just had to sit down before I dropped down. I don’t remember anything exvept a fellow tourist asking me if I was ok, she asked me 3-5 times and she was right in my face (curious and eagerly was her tone), like she wanted to know something, as if she knew something. I don’t remember anything elee until we got back to the reception area for a chat before the tour finished. I was looking for that lady to give her my appreciation for caring – I couldn’t find her, couldn’t see her, no one had left as the guide was only starting to wrap up. Im going to call the tour, as they are passionate about this building and it’s history, I need to know. This was the greatest tour I’ve been on and that’s thanks to the guide and the history of Mayday Hills. Please share any stories/experience from any of our old prisons, institutions, gold rush era, places where people docked and lived after arriving in Australia. Even paranormal groups share info and everyone check out Beechworth’s history its awesome

• helen on December 2, 2014 at 4:41 am

The only time I have seen a ghost was in the middle of lunch hour at The old Whitehorse Plaza Boxhill outside a health food sandwich bar. As I watched the thronging crowd move towards and past me, one person, a very tall thin man stood out. He was wearing clothes that were not of this era and at first I thought he was an actor but his eyes stared fixedly ahead and he had another world feel to him. Two young men also noticed him and nudged each other. It was such an unexpected and breath taking sight and to this day I strongly suspect had I reached out to touch his clothes I would have felt air even though he appeared solid. This happened in the early 1990’s before they renovated the northern side shopping centre.

• nat on December 6, 2014 at 9:51 am

I would liKe to know what happened to the mental asylum in toorak which is now being knocked down

• Rodger on January 16, 2015 at 11:12 pm

I grew up near Aradale and I’ve been through long before the showmanship events of the ‘Ghost Tours’ it’s a creepy place but more so out of knowing what went on there. Truly the scariest thing about Aradale isn’t even the cliche and rather out of place costume of the tour guide, it’s not even the ‘ghost’ stories, it’s the athspestos risk lead paint risk and spiders. I’ve heard 100s of stories about Jward but none about Aradale. Having seen both first hand Jward is without a doubt the only site I’ve visited that feels constantly ‘haunted’

This said I’ve heard the tour operators at Aradale do a great tour, just don’t go there and come home disappointed that you never saw a ghost

• AEgamez on May 4, 2016 at 8:58 am

i can agree, i live in the same town as Aradale and its one creepy place when i went for the tour the tour guide just gave me the creeps i went with a huge group but still something felt strange about it i would keep looking behind me because i constantly felt like something was behind me i never saw any type of ghost but that place still does give me the creeps whenever i drive passed it it just seems something odd about it

• redtearsblackwings on February 9, 2015 at 10:44 am

I’m affected by mental illness and in one of my hospital admissions someone suggested that all the various closed asylums should be restored so that they can use them again because beds in mental hospitals are hard to come by. I didn’t know if I should laugh at the suggestion or be afraid that someone might decide it’s a good idea. Could you imagine emotionally sensitive and/or damaged people force to stay in a haunted hospital? Mental hospitals can be creepy enough at night because people wake up screaming for nightmares (PTSD sufferers) and many people with schizophrenia seemed to be more affected at night. Add in that most haunted places can cause an emotionally healthy person to feel paranoid and unsafe and you have a recipe for further damaging already fragile people. Plus who would believe “crazy” people have seen ghosts? I’ve been on ghost tours around Melbourne CBD and while we saw two sight which where haunted by nice ghosts most of the spots we visited had awful atmospheres. In one site several people heard a woman scream, I felt like someone had jumped from a window near the entrance onto me (I’m assuming the man comitted suicide). One particular sight was the worst, it was the place where a mother and baby had been killed by a man who was investigated as a possible suspect for Jack the Ripper (it was later decided his MO was too different). Most men on the tour felt threatened and I felt someone watching me, I believe it was the mother who was both angry and deeply depressed. I think she identified with me because I’d been in an abusive relationship. The sight is near a pub and apparent there’s been men who’ve stumbled out of the pub, had a wee behind the bins and have been hit. The suspicious absence of graffiti was really strange given the large majority of ally ways in Melbourne CBD do have some. The last place we visited was a ceremonial burial ground for Indigenous Australians, before we got there and before we were told what was there I had already known it was a special place.

• mortislegion on April 6, 2015 at 10:20 am

I’ve heard the music box at larundel. At around 9 pm and again at 10 pm. Someone claimed they were an ice cream truck in the area, but at 10 pm on a winter’s night, I doubt it. I first put it down to a clock in the area, as it was just on the hour when I have heard it, but then when there at other times did not hear it, so a clock chiming sometimes and not others doesn’t really fit, and a clock big enough for its chime that sounds like a music box is creepier than the story of it being a ghost, lol. Residual energy from a time bygone? I have no idea.

• FatherJon on April 24, 2015 at 6:42 am

I worked at Kew for a year in 1963 until I was sacked for ‘insubordination’ which amounted to me telling one of the psychiatrists that she was wasting her time trying to get the gerries (geriatrics) interested in gardening. There were many funny things happened there, all of which tended to lighten the moment for the staff who were a jolly bunch of multi-ethnics from all over Europe and the Middle East. Good working hours too, 12 hour days, two at a time, with all meals served, pay was good especially if we young guys swapped for weekends with the family men thus gaining the extra penalty rates. Still, not the sort of place that you’d want to make a career out of. I gather it was burned down due to patients smoking in bed. That was never a good idea to allow smoking in bed, I knew that at the time but the psychiatrist wouldn’t have listened to me anyway!

• Niel Edgley on May 30, 2015 at 12:13 pm

Buildings dont have to be haunted,my ex wife and myself, my brother Frank and his ex wife Glenys shared a 12 yr old house in North Plympton Adelaide SA, we used to hear foosteps in the roof as if it was a timber floor, we sprinkled plaster powder on the upper surface to find after the foosteps there were large boot type footprints,the two lge bat wing doors between the Kitchen and lounge room would swing open suddenly even after we applied the latch which could not just unlatch itself. I lived in a haunted bldng in Kiama NSW,then a Haunted house in Balgownie NSW, and now in Fairy Meadow NSW where we and friends have often briefly seen an old man and get this, a medium sized raggy looking dog, he does us no harm and we are comfortable with it although sometimes his sudden but usually brief appearance can be startling. Our Beagle dog appears to know when they are around as he stares at nothingness. .

• Nicole on April 2, 2016 at 8:49 am

What street is this house on in Balgownir? Because we went to an open house today in Balgownie and I was so creeped out I just wanted to leave.

• Niel Edgley on June 26, 2016 at 10:45 am

The House was no.3 John St, it had a miners cottage in between the front and rear of the house(as the centre of the house)it was demolished and redeveloped into Townhouses in 2003, apparently someone has heard the little girl there.

• lukas on June 3, 2015 at 3:01 am

I have visited Larundel, yes its freaky and yes both my friend and myself experienced the music box sounds…… we experienced other paranormal encounters too……..

• Jessica on June 26, 2015 at 5:34 am

when did you go? can I still go now?

• Col on June 24, 2015 at 10:50 am

Great post, enjoyed reading the comments. We live close to Larundel and keen to attend a tour. Keen on hearing about any experiences from Kapunda in SA also the the Adelaide Mall makes for an interesting visit. Been to the ghost tour in Launceston Tasmania worth the time when visiting.

• Morag on July 27, 2015 at 8:13 am

Melbourne is not one of the oldest cities in Australia it is one of the youngest. It was settled via Launceston. Hobart the second oldest city in Australia. Many towns are older than Melbourne.

• Niall Horan on August 13, 2015 at 4:04 am

WOW!!!! But not the creepiest thing I’ve read but can’t wait to see my fans

• ray on September 6, 2015 at 7:28 pm

A I was the security officer who worked there for 3yrs an 6months sunbury mental hospital, otherwise known as kaloola pines training centre,the jail there was turned into a recital hall at a cost of a few million dollars but was eventually close down only after 12 moths, due to unexplain occurrences also one building use to house orderly’s has been known to have a cold spot on the second floor. half way down the passage,An the Cemetery that was Part of the old grounds was seen with a light flashing amongst the headstones . which was investigated by security. an police from sunbury.found no one around this went on for about a week ,. there was a fire in unit 4 which some Patients were burnt to death ,caused by a patient smoking ,

• FatherJon on September 9, 2015 at 10:32 pm

On a slightly different tangent I worked as an orderly at the old Kew Mental Asylum years ago when patients were freely allowed to smoke. One of the annexes was burned down, as I understand from a burning cigarette dropped in bedclothes. My wife awoke after an operation at Sydney’s Prince Alfred Hospital back in the 70s in a fug of ciggy smoke from a patient in the next bed. Despite complaints the patient was still allowed to smoke. We moved my wife out of the hospital immediately. Thankfully nobody’s allowed to smoke in hospitals anymore.

• William Baker Tyzack and descendants in Australia on May 15, 2018 at 12:19 am

Hi I read in your second comment you worked there in 1962. My aunt, Adele (Del) Tyzack worked there at the time of the fire – do you remember her? If so, I would love to talk with you about her. Cheers, Helen Tyzack [email protected]

• barbara on May 29, 2016 at 3:06 am

Why do you all think hauntings only go on in mental institutions etc.? As a spiritualist I have had many uinbelievable experiences. Such an example was when researching I went to births deaths and marriages and words in a foreign language appeared. When relating to my daughter I laughingly said I couldn’t read a word of it. When I tried again the message came in English telling me I would be wise to leave the site – I did! This is only one example of the fact the spirits know exactly what we are doing.

• nina on September 18, 2015 at 1:09 am

I would like to know about the one in liberty Missouri? Location?7

• Marie scarth on September 24, 2015 at 12:50 am

I’m amazed at the number of Asylums in Victoria,such a young country ,why i wonder?Makes me think about it’s society as a whole?Inbreeding?Violence in the home?Pedophilia?

• Marie scarth on September 24, 2015 at 12:52 am

It amazes why there are so many asylums in Victoria,begs the question why in such a new vibrant land why?Life must of been hard back then ,not so glamorous as history has us believe!

• josh on October 5, 2015 at 7:06 am

um i explore “haunted places” and asylums etc and i was wondering are there any near werribee

• Rosie on June 27, 2016 at 1:10 pm

Werribee Mansion would be my first thought.

• michele j edwards on November 10, 2015 at 2:15 pm

Lunatic asylums mostly housed the misfits in society…..Including disabilities….The only ghosts that live within these walls are the Silent Cries of untold Stories…RIP…Roy…’Beechworth Lunatic Asylum’…

• SarahC on November 23, 2015 at 11:11 am

Just booked second holiday to Beechworth Lunatic Asylum (Mayday Hills) couldn’t visit just once. I am once again staying in the Linaker Nurses Quarters on site. Very creepy, and eerily silent at night (in the hotel and grounds) apart from footsteps we heard down the corridors of the empty hotel, the sliding doors at the entrance had a mind of their own and on more than one occasion we awoke to find our door open. Went on the ghost tour and plan to do it again, the guide had all the modern ghost hunting equipment and took us to the most haunted locations, lots of EMF activity. During the day we just wandered the grounds and took lots of photos. Best ghost holiday ever!

• Dave on December 24, 2015 at 6:04 am

The worst thing about these places is that they’ve been bought by fucks who want to make money from people. They’re not open for anyone to go in whenever they want which is disgusting

• Bryn on February 25, 2016 at 11:47 pm

Are there any asylums in the Gippsland area

• Bec wilson on March 19, 2016 at 10:57 am

I want hamilton Victoria 3300 hunted places

• rowie on April 14, 2016 at 1:54 pm

What worries me about Larundel is the ignorance that most have about the place and ok, there is some truth to some of the folklaw surrounding the place it’s all based on hearsay now not actual events . The kids that roam the halls at night for a thrill these days or go in to destroy the place have no idea what the place was really like back in the 50’s and even as late as the 70’s back before they sealed up the tunnels that used to connect Larundel to Mont Park, both were mental hospitals, both were pretty spooky but the Mont Park original buildings (laundry, “Shower” rooms, Immersion rooms ect ) really took the cake when it came to scaring the pants of a young bloke! I doubt that anyone knew that there was actually a graveyard on the hill too, it’s under some of the big new houses now but its there and the bones were never moved 🙂

• barbara on May 29, 2016 at 3:11 am

regarding Mont Park. My father worked there and had the unenviable job of selecting patients to be taken for the then experimental process of electric shocks to the brain. The patients knew what happened and pleaded with him not to ;pick them. This upset him greatly and he was a hard man having been to Gallipoli.

• Niel Edgley on June 26, 2016 at 10:54 am

If he wasnt a psychiatrist, what the hell was he doing selecting the patients FFS

• Shar on November 6, 2016 at 12:38 am

Such a stupid comment. My grandfather, wounded at Gallipoli, also worked at Mount Park and was the kindest most gentle man you could ever meet. The fact that he chose to pick out those that underwent ECT says more about him than the fact that he was an ANZAC. Having worked at both Larundel and Mont Park and stayed at the Nurses quarters I honestly have to say that what should be haunting you is that people like your father willingly took part in the practices that took place instead of speaking up for these disenfranchised people. My grandfather would collect one every Sunday and bring them home for a Sunday roast. What kindness did your father show to these sad forgotten souls.

• Chook on April 26, 2016 at 12:09 pm

I worked at Larundel, lived at the nurses home near Mont Park. I never saw any paranormal activity, but had a bad feeling about some large conifer trees in the adjacent paddock to Larundel. There were crows circling too. Then they found the body of one of the patients there, suicide. Kids found it. It was tragic he was a lovely young man , I went to the funeral. There were suicides sometimes, if a patient went missing, the male staff went looking, they expected to see a body anywhere. so sad. these were real human beings like you and i, and deserve our respect, as do their grieving families. Use of pot was common among patients in the grounds, at the time we thought the mental illness caused the habit, now studies show pot can cause psychosis. There was s@x in the bushes between patients too.

As for the nurses home at Mont Park, I remember hearing gun shots in Burundoora Park sometimes at night. It’s a large native park. No paranormal activity.

I have felt or seen ghosts in a couple of places, I’m sure I would have known if Larundel was haunted. As for crows, there do seem to be deaths in the streets where I sight them…

• AEgamez on May 4, 2016 at 8:45 am

im surprised hearing all these haunted places honestly is creepy knowing i live in Victoria

• AEgamez on May 4, 2016 at 8:52 am

i live in the same town as Aradale knowing it was put on here gives me the creeps

• csd246 on June 9, 2016 at 12:19 pm

any1 holding tours of Arundel? I’m keen!

• Anne on June 10, 2016 at 10:21 am

We did Ghost tour of Aradale here in Victoria it is huge place and is very creepy well worth a tour of since we did I’d they have opened other parts of it for you to see

• Rosie on June 27, 2016 at 1:06 pm

I work in the hospital across from the Geelong Gaol. Just walking past it to get home is creepy as hell, you know that feeling you get when someone is watching you , times that by 100. I’ve been to the Beechworth asylum as well , quite scary and the history is both horrifying as it is sad.

I think the main place that was missed in this list is Junee in NSW. The most terrifying place I’ve personally ever been. Being in the upstairs of the house actually makes you feel like vomiting. Google Junee mansion if you’re interested. Worth a look!

• Rosie on June 27, 2016 at 1:15 pm

Maybe if I had read the title of the article I would know why Junee isn’t on the list! Still worth a loo though

• Kiri on July 23, 2016 at 2:33 pm

I was at an extended family members house a quiet a few years ago “my in laws” and my brother in laws wife had her parents over from America. When I arrived at the house I was overwhelmed when I saw her father who I noticed had an Ora around his body, I was also surprised that all the kids in the house were climbing all over him swinging off him and running around him as if he was the jungle gym at the local park. I pointed at him and I asked my brother in law ‘what’s with him?’ And he just shrugged it off and said the kids must think he’s Santa Clause or something, probably because he looked like Santa without the beard. I was so gob smacked at the glow around his body especially when I noticed that nobody else could see what I could see so I kept it to myself. I had only spoken to the guy a few times in the short time I knew him but each time I did I felt some kind of an emotional connection that I couldn’t explain like a anxious sad kind of feeling. I felt he was a very humble sweet man. Not long after this incident happened after he had returned to America he took his own life. I was so sad and devistaded when I found out but I instantly felt that it was his time to leave this earth and whatever glow surrounded him that day was something very special waiting to take him to a beautiful special place. I have told my husband and kids about my experience that day but it’s something you can only really believe if you experience it yourself I guess, not that they didn’t believe me but I know they never really understood the impact it had on me. My daughter has had a few unexplained experiences herself, some when she was to young to remember but started again after she turned 18. As I’ve got older I have learned to trust my gut so to speak, my instincts. I can tell if someone’s a good person or a bad person most of the time and know when to put my guards up and when to keep them down, but I have never experienced anything else like the sweet man with the special Ora.

• Jay on August 21, 2016 at 12:14 pm

I would highly recommend a day tour of Aradale. Not quite as horror filled and haunted as the ghost tour, but much more factual. Aradale has an amazing history.

• Ellisha Derhun on September 14, 2016 at 11:50 am

My grandma was a patient at larundel in the 1970s Can anyone point me in the right direction to contacr old staff or patients?

• Liz Darcy on November 3, 2016 at 8:03 pm

I worked inside Fortuna in the 90s for 5 years and I am far from a believer but I saw things and I heard things that are hard for me to justify in my head other than ghosts. And it says soldiers were not posted out. I saw two soldiers posted out. One an officer after his duty and that man was as pale as a ghost himself for what he had seen. Doors that are closed would open and then the door on the other side of the room that was closed would open and shut. I saw a figure in a window once leaning on a cane and ran out there and there was nothing. Wasn’t until months later I saw photos and the guy with the cane in it. So it was interesting in this article that people heard a cane tapping as I had not heard that from anyone else before.

• Hayden on November 27, 2016 at 4:59 am

what are the best abandoned places to visit in Brisbane?

• Janelle on April 25, 2017 at 1:23 pm

Pentridge prison is another one that’s definitely haunted

• Ralph Morrighan on January 31, 2018 at 6:25 pm

My guess is Fortuna in Bendigo is haunted, but to what level I’m unsure. George Lansell was obsessed with money and Fortuna so good chance of that haunting. One of the son’s hanged himself inside the house using a heavy roof beam.

• wayne jessup on December 22, 2018 at 1:40 am

Previously I remarked on unexplained happenings regarding myself. It has been noted that others claim to experience an unseen presence or feel that the atmosphere in their immediate vicinity turns cold when a “paranormal event” takes place. Every event that happened to myself is the total truth. At no time did I notice an unseen presence or a sudden drop in temperature around me. At this time I have no explanation for past happenings. Maybe at a future time the unexplained will become the explained?

• deborah knight on February 8, 2019 at 5:53 am

l’m wondering if anyone can help me l’m turning 60 this year and l want to celebrate with my friends my way l’m trying to find a genuine haunted house in the melbourne area to spend the night iv always been interested in the other side of things l am a scorpio we are curious beings . l need to rent a place overnight to celebrate well and do some evps and ouija board 2 of my loves in life can someone suggest somewhere with contact details thanks xo

• frank on February 15, 2019 at 3:06 am

deborah knight the other side is real umust now what u are doing with a ouija board it can work it do not have to be night i saw a ghost and i shot a photo and got it

• Matt on February 15, 2019 at 1:11 pm

That sounds good Frank iv got some stories you can ring me if you like 042581107

• frank on February 15, 2019 at 2:56 am

deborah i saw a ghost

• wayne jessup on February 16, 2019 at 2:38 am

I have never seen a ghost in physical form ever. I have experienced many strange events to which I have no answer at this time. These events started occurring after a friend died in 2007. There has never been another person present to witness the actual happenings taking place. If possible I would like someone to share what I have seen and experienced. Sadly I can’t see this taking place any time soon. Some who I have shared my experiences with claim that either I need to see a psychic or a psychiatrist. My answer can only be what happened did happen, a fact is a fact and you can’t beat a fact

• moonbase1 on February 18, 2019 at 10:20 pm

hi any ghost photo u got

• moonbase1 on February 18, 2019 at 10:22 pm

hi can u hear me anyone

• wayne jessup on March 1, 2019 at 10:56 pm

Over the years I have experienced many unexplained happenings. Since the beginning of this time I’ve been trying to find a logical answer to each event, with very little success. This next event, I hope, may have a logical explanation, Can any one tell me If they check the calendar on their computer does a message appear saying “HAPPY BIRTHDAY” on the actual date of their birthday. This is printed in the colour red.At this stage I have no idea how it came to be on the calendar of my PC. Maybe computers are more capable of moving information around internally then some of us can imagine. Then again, maybe not???

• Jane on June 4, 2023 at 5:29 am

I worked in the Geelong Goal buildings in the 1990s after it was de-commissioned. Some of the buildings there were used by an organisation running services artists with a disability. Myself and other staff often experienced strange phenomena from noises, doors, sightings. It was not fun being the last to leave at night having to lock up several layers of ancient doors & gates behind me in the dark! Worst night was when I found myself, one night accidentally (?!) locked in behind all of those layers of ancient, heavy doors, gates & locks!

My most recent experience of ghosts was at The Shrine of Remembrance on Anzac Day evening 2023. I was sitting with my family at the top of the stairs looking out towards the city of Melbourne when appeared in the forecourt before me, a depleted platoon of dark figures standing quiet and still, soldier like in the dark. I can only find record of one other ghost being regularly sighted at the Shrine. Does anyone know of any other sightings or have they experienced them, themselves?

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Victorian psychiatric patients’ grim fate in hellish 1800s hospitals

SOME were violent, others were alcoholics and many had little reason to be admitted at all. Patients of Victoria’s hellish psychiatric hospitals of the 19th Century tell their stories through old records.

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SOME had a history of drinking, others were violent and abusive, and many had little reason to be admitted at all.

Patients in Victoria’s hellish psychiatric institutions of the 1800s were submitted to gruelling treatment including restraint bags, strapped chairs and soul-destroying isolation cages.

Hand-written case files, made available to the Herald Sun Department of Internet through Public Records Office Victoria, give a fresh insight into patients’ state of mind in a system that often saw people condemned for simply being different.

The Sunbury Lunatic Asylum was among several institutions, including Ararat, Beechworth, Yarra Bend and Kew, to house thousands of patients during and after the gold rush.

MORE: MELBOURNE’S CREEPIEST GHOST STORIES

TRUTH OR MYTH? MELBOURNE’S URBAN LEGENDS PUT TO THE TEST

It took just two signatures to have a person condemned to a psychiatric ward in a time when understanding of mental illness was desperately wanting.

In their own words, male patients at the Sunbury hospital describe how they came to be in the institution’s care.

The patients’ stories were taken down verbatim by a ward doctor, described by one patient as Dr O’Brien, who made notes over time about their progress and prospects for work and recovery.

None of the five men who gave the accounts below survived the asylum.

‘I met the devil’

Daniel Dooley, 59

I was brought by a policeman because I was silly, and I was in the habit of saying my prayers. I stayed a night out looking for a quartz reef. I value it at 100 pounds. I’ve been at Dunolly on an unemployment pass. I brought a tent. I saw a lot of larrikins there, and they burned my tent. When I came back I could not find the place. I met five men dressed like navvies (Irish workers). I spoke to them and they did not answer. I met more and I spoke and they said they were ghosts. I wanted to go into a house, but they said it was haunted. I then saw the Devil — like a steam engine. I then saw the B.V.M. (Blessed Virgin Mary) and I spoke to her and shook hands with her. She took a tree up to make shelter for me and sent J. C. (Jesus Christ) to obtain another for me. She lifted up the tree as easy as I can this chair. And there was music and ejaculations of the Hail Mary. I asked for money and she had a bird in her hand and placed it on a perch, and one of the men had a purse with him but that money I’ve not got yet. I told a priest and he told me to be off.

‘Someone’s coming to kill me’

Timothy Shannon, 35

My name is Tim Shannon. I was born in County Clare. I have friends out here — two in Melbourne. Pat Shannon lives in Dryden St South Melbourne and the other is Tom Shannon, a caster — in Carlton. I forget the name of the street. I suppose it is 3 or 4 years since I went there. You are Dr O’Brien — at least I’ve heard them call you so. I got frightened of the people outside going to kill me. I took it in my mind like that. I’ve got these ideas in my mind now. I think they try to injure me but I did not see them. I would like to get out. But I think he could not support me if I did not work. I used to take 4 or 5 pints of beer — I don’t sleep at night. I’m frightened at somebody coming to kill me. I am not strong enough to work.

‘I don’t know this place’

Will Robinson, 54

My official name is Will Robinson — my correct name is Charles Hutton. I was born in 1833, I’m 54 years of age. I don’t know this place. I came from several places. I cannot tell where I came from last. I left Beechworth in 1854, 1855, this year is 1887. I was never in an asylum in my life. I’m not married. I have relations. I can hardly tell you where they are. I cannot tell you where one is. I see well.

‘I knocked her about a bit’

Patrick Malone, 43

Paddy Malone is my name. I’m about 20 years of age. I do not know the year. I never kept count. I was sent to Kew owing to my mother’s fault. I was a bit wild. I was young. I might have been at fault. I was a bit wild, having a change like. My mother could tell you better. I was into drinking. I had a few words with my mother and sister like. It was 12 months ago. I cannot remember the words. I never saw spirits or heard voices — I was never bad like. It was only a row with my mother and sister. I was lying down and she wanted me to go outside and I would not. She got her hair off and I knocked her about a bit. It is a long time ago. I did not do much — if I did anything at all. I did practise “self abuse” but it’s a long time ago. I don’t do it now. I would be dead in a few days if I did any work.

Nathaniel Buchanan, researcher for Aradale Ghost Tours which covers the Ararat institution and the disused Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum at Beechworth, said treatment in the mid to late 1800s was well behind modern practices.

“Treatment was mostly restraint,” he said.

“There were none of the modern medicines, that mostly came in the 1950s.

“Restraint would start with a straight jacket, if that wasn’t suitable the ‘lunatic’ could be placed in an isolation box until they settled down.

“There was no distinction between epilepsy and schizophrenia. In that time, there were four classifications for lunacy — mania, melancholia, dementia and paranoia.

“There number of conditions has increased from four to about 2000 since then.”

Mr Buchanan said conditions that are now understood were made to fit under one of the broad categories and treatments were often poorly applied.

“Many of the women in the institutions in the late 1800s were likely to have been suffering from post-natal depression, but that was just classified as melancholia,” he said.

“Also it took just two signatures for somebody to be taken in. If a man wanted his wife gone, and his friends knew about it, he could get them to say his wife was mad, and she’d be taken.

“At one stage it also took two signatures to be discharged, but that was later increased to eight signatures, meaning it was a lot harder to get out.”

Inmates at Aradale and Sunbury were given work in an 1800s movement towards “moral treatment” — teaching patients proper morals by giving them trades and responsibilities.

Women were tasked with sewing and washing while men made shoes and tended farms.

Acres of land surrounding the Ararat institution were dedicated to crops and the hospital was self sufficient.

But that didn’t make the institutions nice places to be.

Mr Buchanan estimates up to a third of patients who entered the hospitals never came out.

“You’d never want to end up in a place like this,” he said.

Twitter: @MitchellToy

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Was bizarre shooting suicide pact or murder?

Two men walked into a Melbourne photography studio one afternoon in 1872 to pose with their pistols in a bizarre series of pictures. Hours later a gunshot rang out in nearby Treasury Gardens and their true intentions became clear.

Why Curtis Stone wants to come home

Curtis Stone is the Keilor East boy turned celebrity chef who now lives in a multimillion-dollar house in one of Los Angeles’ coolest suburbs. So how does he show his young kids how to be everyday Aussies?

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• The cricketers of Kew Asylum

Author: Tara Oldfield

Senior Communications Advisor

Among the asylum records newly digitised by Ancestry and available on their website , you will find the case files of Paddy McShane, Harry Trott and Billy Midwinter. These men were all cricketers, and all spent time in Victoria’s Kew Asylum. While researching his book Game for Anything , Gideon Haigh did extensive research on all three men.  

“I have abiding interests in cricket and in mental health, and their overlap has always intrigued me. In the era in question, sports careers were brutish and short, and regimes of care for the psychologically afflicted were spartan, which add to the stories’ pathos,” Gideon says.  

Here you will find just a summary snapshot of what he found...

Paddy McShane

In the 1880s Paddy McShane was often described as ‘the best all-round athlete in Victoria’, playing both elite football and cricket. He played for Essendon Football Club and helped found Fitzroy Football Club before playing Test matches in cricket and embarking on a track and field career. In 1887 he married Jeannie Brown and together they had six children.

With his sporting career over, to provide for this ever-growing family he worked as a salesman and eventually as curator for the St Kilda Cricket Club. He struggled financially and suffered, according to notes of his committal to Kew Asylum in 1901, from bouts of what the doctors then called ‘mania’. He suffered hallucinations, his only moments of lucidity came when watching cricket. 

He died in Kew of influenza in 1903. 

Harry Trott

At 31 years-of-age, Harry Trott captained Australia, leading them to their first win in a five-test Ashes series in 1898. However later that same year, Harry Trott’s health took a turn. He collapsed while visiting his mother in Doncaster and ‘fell into a fit’. More seizures followed and he lapsed in and out of consciousness over the next four weeks. His health continued to decline despite recuperation time spent in the country. He suffered insomnia and memory loss and at a public appearance at the MCG in October of that year, spectators were shocked by his sickly appearance. By 1899 Joe Darling was made captain of the Australian team while poor Harry entered Kew Asylum. According to Kew case books:

Harry “refuses to converse not appearing to be able to follow what is said to him.” He “answers questions in monosyllables. Does not rouse up when subjects are spoken of that formerly he was keenly interested in – has a vacant dull expression.” 

The asylum was equipped with all manner of sporting grounds and activities. Sent to the cricket green, Harry at first showed none of his former love or even interest in the game. He also displayed no interest when shown newspaper clippings of cricket news from abroad. He was diagnosed with ‘dementia’ with the cause ‘alcoholic’.   

However, in February 1900 the Asylum hosted a cricket match of which Harry played, and played well! He continued to play the game against visiting teams up until April of that year when he was discharged. His file marked as ‘Recovered’ at 33 years of age. He continued to play cricket in Bendigo and South Melbourne, leading batting and bowling averages. He passed away in November 1917.     

Billy Midwinter

Billy Midwinter was the first bowler to take five wickets in an innings in a Test match and the only cricketer to represent Australia against England and England against Australia. 

In 1883 he married Lizzie McLaughlan and they had three children together. Sadly in 1888 Lizzie and two of the children died and the youngest son, William Jnr, began to suffer from a crippling hip problem. Billy went to stay with his sister in California Gully where he started showing signs of mental health problems, becoming increasingly violent. He was sent to Kew Asylum where he was diagnosed ‘lunatic’.     

He died in December 1890 aged 39. His inquest put his death down to disease of the brain. Gideon says that during his research on Billy, he spoke to a gynaecologist who believed that Billy’s symptoms, as well as the deaths of his family members, pointed to syphilis.

Interestingly, according to the newspapers of the time , his symptoms seemed to ease somewhat when ex-cricket mate Harry Boyle came to visit.     

Gideon says it’s hard to tell if cricket helped their mental health in anyway, but the game was certainly a fixture at the Kew Asylum. 

“There was a strong cricket culture at Kew, including a ground, traces of which still exist. The son of the Superintendent in the late 19th century (William Trumble) fathered a Test cricketer (Hugh) too.”

Accessing asylum records

You can now view the scanned asylum patient records on Ancestry . The original records are also available to order in hard copy for viewing in our North Melbourne reading room at the Victorian Archives Centre.

Further information about researching asylum records be found on the Mental Health page of our website .   

Further reading

Read more life stories about past and present players of cricket in Game for Anything: Writings on Cricket by Gideon Haigh. 

Gideon is launching his new book, Scandal in Bohemia , at the Victorian Archives Centre in April. Book now to come along.   

Material in the Public Record Office Victoria archival collection contains words and descriptions that reflect attitudes and government policies at different times which may be insensitive and upsetting

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples should be aware the collection and website may contain images, voices and names of deceased persons.

PROV provides advice to researchers wishing to access, publish or re-use records about Aboriginal Peoples

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