On Sunday, February 5, I went on a tour of the Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum, located in Beechworth, Victoria.
Before I go any further, let me note that it was MY IDEA to do this. My boyfriend simply tagged along, happy in the knowledge that he couldn’t be blamed in any way for the forthcoming scariness.
So, let’s commence the photo tour with the corny-but-necessary photos of us looking scared, whilst standing next to a very non-scary sign:
After we got the tourist-y shots out of the way, we went about the business of taking a few photos in the fading daylight. The tours start on nightfall, which meant at this time of year that they commenced at 8:30pm. We arrived at 8:00pm, and spent 20 minutes or so wandering around the grounds, and pointing our camera at various creepy buildings:
(Also, I have no idea why there’s a sign there saying ‘Toy Store’. I know that part of the grounds house a small, private school, so maybe it’s their doing?)
For those of you who are wondering, here’s some basic history behind Mayday Hills:
“Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, originally known as Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum is a decommissioned psychiatric hospital located in Beechworth, a town of Victoria, Australia. Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum was the four such Hospital to be built in Victoria, being one of the three largest. Mayday Hills Hospital closed in 1995 after 128 years of operation.
To be admitted, only two signatures were required. To be discharged, eight signatures were required, thus it was a lot harder to get out than to get in.”
(Photo and info courtesy of Wikipedia - where else?)
We found these doves nesting outside of one of the abandoned buildings. They were pure white, and seemed quite content to just perch up in the awnings. I asked our tour guide about them later, and she said that there were anywhere between two and five nesting there at any one time. Odd!
Once we’d had our fill of sightseeing (and given ourselves the creeps!) we wandered back around to the tour’s “starting spot”, where we met our guides Bronwyn and Hayley.
Our first stop was the front door of the asylum, where we heard about deaths that had occurred in that exact spot. The first woman was drowned in a fountain outside the front door (the fountain no longer exists), and the second woman was pushed from a third floor window. Here’s a photo of how the asylum used to appear from the front (fountain included!), in case you’re interested:
After we’d heard about the first two deaths, we moved on inside, where I had my first “spooky” encounter. As we walked in the front door, and paused in the entry way, I heard that classic ‘ghost’ noise. You know, the “woooooooooooooooo” that sounds like wind, even though all the windows are shut? It sounded like it was coming from a long way above me, which could have been correct, seeing as this part of the asylum has three levels. And who knows, it could have just been wind flowing through a gap in a window – but it definitely spooked me a little.
From here, we veered through several offices, and heard stories about autopsies, how to gain admittance to the asylum (pro tip: you could be admitted if you were suspected of being a prostitute!), and then we ventured upstairs to the female wing of the hospital.
This wing was one of my ‘least-favourite’ parts of the hospital. It gave me the heeby-jeebies, knowing that hundreds of women had lived and died in these rooms and corridors. I didn’t take any photos of this wing, because I was too busy looking over my shoulder.
Once we’d exited the female wing, we moved on to the ‘Recreation Room’ – what is now known as the Bijou Theatre. Here’s when I actually bothered to pull out my camera again, and took a photo of the abandoned hall:
It’s at this point I should probably note that I’ve run a few of these photos through Photoshop – but ONLY to up the contrast on them, as they were quite dark. You’ll see in some of the following photos that they’re quite grainy, which is simply because I’ve boosted the contrast so I actually had a photo of something besides blackness.
Just to reiterate, I haven’t Photoshopped in a photo of Casper the ghost – OR anything else – into these photos!
Now, let’s move on with the tour. Once we’d exited the theatre, we proceeded on down to a large yard next to a two storey building, nicknamed the ‘Bull Pit’. And yes, it’s as creepy as the name suggest. The large yard was nicknamed the Bull Pit because, according to our guide, the young men were housed in the building next door. And they were let out into the Bull Pit during the day to fight each other. Additionally, they were also fed laxatives at the start of the day, to make them easier to handle at night – and there were no toilets nearby. Hence, the yard was both a fighting yard, and also a large toilet. Charming.
Here are some photos of the yard, and the building that housed the young men:
Next, we moved on to one of the most feared sections of the asylum – Grevillia. As explained by this website:
“As medication wasn’t introduced until the 1950s, restraints such as straightjackets and even shackles were used as well as electro-shock treatment in this part of the hospital…. shock treatment was used freely in its early days and there are stories of mass treatments in which almost the entire patient population was shocked in one session. Self-harming patients had leather mittens locked on their hands so they could not use them, if they tried to gnaw the gloves off they would have a tooth pulled, if they repeated this action twice they would loose their top two teeth, and once more would result in all remaining teeth being pulled.”
The guide also noted that this section hospital was one of two sections where visitors most commonly have sightings, or have strange reactions – such as suddenly feeling cold, feeling as though you’re being watched, or having a simple case of the ‘heeby jeebies’.
I have to say, the building was creepy. But whether that was because of the hype, or because it was nighttime in an abandoned building, or because there actually were ghosts, I couldn’t say. Grevillia has a variety of rooms – a big bathroom with two tubs, a room with toilets (similar to what you’d see at a public pool or gym), a ‘sun room’, and a ‘treatment’ room, where people were given mass electro-shock therapies.
Here are some more photos I took:
As a side note on the second image – the guide told us that a person had actually written that in the bath tub a few weeks back. Would have be fantastic if it had just appeared, though!
And another side note on the first image – I didn’t notice it at the time, but can you see the wooden horse underneath the bed on the right? I’m sure I would have noticed it on the night, but apparently not! Also, directly to the right of the window on the far wall, there are some strange lines that have appeared in the air. I thought they might have been from the window, but thy don’t quite match up. What are your thoughts here?
Anyway, after we’d toured Grevillia, we moved on to other section where visitors most often get the creeps – wonderful! We went to one of the admin buildings where the original cellar was housed. After giving us a speech on all the eery going-ons that have occurred in the cellar underneath us, the guide finally took us downstairs:
Although the cellar was primarily used for food storage, it also had a number of cells located there. Why? Because the people that originally built the asylum were prisoners from the nearby Beechworth Prison, and they didn’t always make it back to the prison by nightfall. So to save time, the prisoners were simply locked up in the cells at the asylum.
The guide had us sit in one of the cells, and switch off our lantern. Needless to say, it was quite unnerving to be sitting in a haunted cellar, at night time, without any light. It was also at this point that my boyfriend grabbed my hand, and sat a bit closer to me on the bed. I didn’t get why at the time, but he explained to me later on. He said that he’d gotten quite a bad case of the creeps when coming down the cellar stairs, and that it didn’t let up until he was out of the cellar again. I once had a similar experience, and the only way I can explain it is that it feels like someone is watching you, or standing really close to you. The hairs on your neck stand up. Whenever I even try to talk about it, my eyes water, and I get a bit shaky and weird – and the boyfriend was the same when he was trying to tell me about it later on.
Anyway, once we’d escaped the cellar, and emerged into fresh air, we had reached the end of our tour! I was pleased to have made it through without any major creep-outs, and the tour itself was fascinating. The last photo I took was of one of the admin buildings next to the cellar:
And that concluded our tour! Needless to say, we drove back home sufficiently spooked, and trading ghost tours. I’ve done some further research on Victorian asylums, and would love to have a tour of Kew Asylum (if there even is one? I’m not sure) as I live nearby.
In case you’re interested, we did a ghost tour with Beechworth Ghost Tours. The price was reasonably cheap ($25 for adults, $23 for concession) and definitely a fun way to learn a bit about the history of a place – and potentially spot a ghost!
