Inside the most haunted building, in the ‘maddest place in the world’: Aradale Lunatic Asylum

This is why I went inside Australia’s most haunted building, in a location once branded “the maddest in the world”.

Aradale Lunatic Asylum is allegedly the most haunted site in Australia – a location renowned for cruelty and misery. In this edited extract from JAMES PHELPS ’ new book Australian Ghost Stories, the author investigates for himself.

Nathaniel Buchanan stood before the group, his lantern casting eerie shadows across the crumbling walls.

‘We are now in the men’s ward,’ he told the group who had joined him for the after-dark tour. ‘This is where they kept the worst of the worst. This was the end of the line.’

Armed with mobile phones and battery-operated lanterns, most of the ghost hunters huddled around Buchanan.

‘This was the end of the line’ … Ararat Asylum, said to be Australia’s most haunted location.

They stood shoulder to shoulder, nice and tight, using each other as shields for the things they could not see – the things that lurked beyond the reach of their lanterns. The dark belonged to the dreadful and the dangerous.

Some of the cell doors were shut. Others were wide open. All of them were empty, long ago abandoned and left for things to dance in the dark.

Buchanan stood in front of a cell.

‘We had just entered the men’s ward,’ Buchanan said. ‘And I was standing before about thirty people, telling them stories per usual.’

Buchanan gave them the spiel: straitjackets, solitary confinement and stark raving madness.

He also told them about the ghosts. And that’s about when he heard a woman scream.

‘I swung around with my lantern, and I saw her getting pulled backwards,’ Buchanan said. ‘She was screaming as she was getting pulled. Her feet were literally being dragged backwards and across the floor.’

And then she disappeared into the dark.

‘I saw her getting pulled backwards’ … tour guide Nathaniel Buchanan at the old hospital for the mentally ill.

‘It pulled her into the cell she had been standing in front of,’ Buchanan said. ‘The door to that cell was open, and we saw her get dragged into the dark.’

Buchanan had gasped before muttering, ‘What the hell?’

He had taken hundreds of people through this wing. Night after night, group after group, but until now, the scariest things here had been his stories.

‘She came running out screaming a second or two later,’ Buchanan said.

But the darkness was not done with her yet.

‘She got to the door and was about to get out of the cell, and suddenly, she went back in,’ Buchanan said. ‘It was as if someone pushed her this time. She bounced right back into that cell like she was shoved hard.’

Surrounded by darkness, too frightened to move, the ghost hunters started freaking out. Their screaming stunned Buchanan into action.

‘I went in and had to get behind her and push her out,’ Buchanan said. ‘I got her out and just stood there in front of her and the group saying, “What the hell was that?”’

The woman was too terrified to do anything other than shake and sob.

‘A ghostly monument to an unsettling past’ … the hospital was in use until 1998. Here, a nurse aids a patient in 1981.

‘She was in absolute hysterics,’ Buchanan said. ‘We ended up taking her out and then offsite.’

The tour was over, but not the tale.

‘She was staying in town and called us up the next morning,’ Buchanan said. ‘When she went to have a shower, she undressed, and she said she had scratch marks up her shoulder where something had grabbed her and pulled her backwards.’

Welcome to the Aradale Lunatic Asylum, Ararat, Victoria, allegedly the most haunted place in Australia.

‘Over ten thousand people died in Aradale, so the place is full of ghosts,’ Buchanan said. ‘The whole building is haunted – not by two or three but by thousands. I have seen customers immediately faint or vomit because what they have seen or felt has made them physically ill. I have felt temperature drops. The amount of K2 spikes we have had is in the tens of thousands.’

•••

The Victorian gold rush began in 1851 after discoveries in Beechworth, Castlemaine, Bendigo and Ballarat. Cue the craziness – both figuratively and literally. Melbourne went from a town of 25,000 to a city of 500,000 in just ten years.

Gold-mad miners came from everywhere, so much so that by the time 1864 rolled around, the Victorian government had to build three brand-new asylums to fit them all in.

The Aradale Lunatic Asylum – originally called the Ararat Lunatic Asylum – was the end of the line, where the most troubled patients were sent.

Now it stands abandoned and decaying, a ghostly monument to an unsettling past. Closed in 1998. Lights off and nobody home.

Except for the ghosts.

‘Aradale is one of the most haunted buildings in the world’ … the abandoned complex in 2017.

‘Aradale is one of the most haunted buildings in the world,’ Buchanan said. ‘It doesn’t matter if anyone believes me or not. I know.’

And that’s why I am visiting.

I won’t go so far as saying a shiver shoots up my spine as I step into the building but I do feel something. Sceptical as I am, I haven’t ruled anything out. I’ve never seen a ghost, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I have never seen a great white shark either and, trust me, I’ve looked. Like, every time I go for a swim.

The feeling I get as I walk through the door is similar to the one I get whenever I am in water past waist height. I am pretty sure that I am not going to see a ghost, but my eyes are open and I’m ready to get out should I see anything that resembles one.

•••

The tour begins on the first floor. Lights out and lanterns on, the asylum beckons – dark, foreboding and full of secrets waiting to be uncovered. Still in the administration building, our gang of ghost hunters walk past an ornate stained-glass window and into the governor’s office.

‘This office used to belong to Dr Bill,’ the guide says. ‘He has a very unfortunate tale, and he is one of the ghosts we see quite often. He was a governor here, and he killed himself by ingesting cyanide, and we have actually had a lot of people come into this room and end up throwing up after getting a strong burning sensation in their throat.’

Both statements are true.

William Lowell Mullen was appointed superintendent of the Ararat Hospital for the Insane in December 1911. He was found dead in his bed eighteen months later after committing suicide by ingesting a lethal dose of hydrocyanic acid that he had obtained from the hospital.

‘We move deeper into the heart of Aradale’ … Nathaniel Buchanan guides groups through the interior.

And while I don’t see the governor’s ghost or feel a burning sensation in my throat, I have read enough first-hand accounts and watched enough YouTube videos to accept that others have experienced something inexplicable in this room, whether by way of suggestion or the supernatural.

As we move deeper into the heart of Aradale to the women’s wing, our footsteps reverberate through the empty halls. The walls, once pristine, are now testament to years of neglect.

The tour guide’s voice drops to a whisper. ‘Now, I must warn you, ‘there’s a very nasty spirit in here. It’s been known to scratch people.’

The guide reveals the spirit’s notorious identity: the Creeper. ‘This ghost has been seen by several people over the years, always in the same place. It’s a shadow-like figure, low to the ground, more creature than human. Once a woman felt a sudden, sharp scratch on the back of her leg. We all saw the marks it left.’

Some familiar with Aradale’s paranormal history have suggested that the Creeper was likely a tormented spirit, deformed in life.

‘I believe the Creeper was once a person who used a wheelchair,’ one expert later explained to me. ‘This person was unable to cross over and remains in pain. She – I’m only guessing it’s a she, because this entity only appears in the women’s ward – spends her time crawling across the floor, reaching out for help.’

We are led into one of the cells. Cramped and oppressive, it is hard to imagine it filled with patients and furnished.

‘That’s why I am visiting’ … James Phelps has researched hauntings across the country for Australian Ghost Stories.

‘The more difficult patients were placed in cells like this,’ our guide explains, ‘both as punishment and to protect the staff and other patients. They could be locked in here for up to twenty-three hours a day. Imagine how dreadful it would have been, especially in winter.’

The women’s wing is indeed a horrible place.

I can only imagine what this wing would have been like in 1883 when Matilda Cutler became the first person to claim the asylum was a house of horrors. When she was discharged from the institution at age forty, Cutler made a series of bombshell claims during an interview published by The Ballarat Star on 3 June 1886.

‘Mrs Cutler alleges that the patients are ill-used daily from getting up in the morning until they retire to bed at night,’ the report said. ‘If the inmates do not arise punctually at the appointed hour, she avers that they have been dragged out of their beds onto the floor by the hair or ears. The bath would appear to be where much cruelty is exercised. Mrs Cutler alleges that the attendants have frequently used the towel racks and the bunches of keys they carry to punish their charges. To use our informant’s own words, “They have drawn rivers of blood from me, and my body is covered with bruises caused by the blows from these weapons. Every morning, the screams and yells of patients were fearful to hear after the bell rang and when the patients began to move. I have told the attendants when they were ill treating me thus, that when I once got out of the Asylum, they had not seen the last of me. The brutality is something dreadful”. ’

She went on to state that patients were frequently given large doses of salt to weaken them and render them less troublesome to manage. If a patient refused to take food, she alleged that attendants would force the food down their throat – sometimes killing them in the process.

‘The maddest place in the world’ ... tour guides Annie Sienesi and Nathaniel Buchanan pose for the camera at Aradale Asylum. What some of their guests experience is less amusing.

A royal commission into asylums, which began the following year, would sensationally declare Victoria was ‘the maddest place in the world’.

According to the Royal Commission on Asylums for the Insane and Inebriate, 3228 people were incarcerated in asylums across Victoria in 1886 out of a total population of 830,000. Reasons cited for this included the warm climate, loneliness, isolation, despair, the unfamiliar and disturbing experience of the land, and the reverse seasons compared to England.

No wonder the wing is haunted, I think, as the tour continues. Next stop, the men’s ward.

Australian Ghost Stories by James Phelps is out now, published by HarperCollins.

Originally published as Inside the most haunted building, in the ‘maddest place in the world’: Aradale Lunatic Asylum