Aradale Mental Hospital

Aradale Mental Hospital

 

Aradale is Australia’s largest abandoned lunatic asylum. Comprised of over sixty buildings and placed in over hundred acres on the top of a hill near Ararat, Victoria, Aradale (formerly known as Ararat Lunatic Asylum) is a most-impressive facility.

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.

http://www.thisishorror.co.uk/columns/antipodean-nights/australias-most-terrifying-and-haunted-places-victoria/