Just visiting, thanks! The Aradale Asylum Ghost Tour

Understatement of the year: “this week’s blog excursion elicited some pretty strong reactions from my family.” That’s right, when I ever- so-casually mentioned, between mouthfuls of cake at my sister’s birthday that I was off to stay in Ararat to do a night tour of the old Aradale Asylum, it was a complete needle off the record moment. Silence, and then an eruption from all quarters– “you’re not STAYING IN ARARAT? ARE YOU FREAKING INSANE?”

Nothing foreboding here.

Now, until that moment all I knew of Ararat was a) that they had filmed the last season of the Biggest Loser there because it was the most overweight town in Australia and b) that they have an old asylum where you can do inexpensive ghost tours–and I only knew that courtesy of Scoopon. But as I was about to discover: any Herald Sun reader worth their salt knows Ararat is home to the so called Village of The Damned, a step down facility where prisoners who aren’t ready to be released into normal society are housed. They also frequently escape from said village. (Maybe calling it a village makes it sound too communal and creates a misleading ‘come and go as you please’ vibe?)

Family uproar. Why did it have to be a night tour? Couldn’t I drive up and do a tour during the day and then drive home? (No, the whole point is that it’s a ghostly night tour and I’m not driving home  white knuckled, at 2 in the morning after doing a ghostly night tour). Who was going with me and was there a tough guy in the group in case A Serious Situation arose? I was going with my good friends Lynda and Stu. Now, Stu is over 6ft tall and he rocks a floral shirt like no other man I know. Sadly, being fashion forward is not a quality that necessarily inspires confidence amongst men like my brothers, with their full sleeve tatts.

Regardless, we had booked, we had paid and we were excited about our road trip, so to paraphrase Starship: nothing was gonna stop us now.

Ararat is about two and a half hours from Melbourne, straight down the Western Highway. They have deals for the ghost tours like ours through Scoopon, or if you prefer to pay full price for things, you can book directly: google Aradale Ghost Tours and you’ll find all the information you need.  They also run sleepovers on certain nights if you want to really push the envelope. I would love to hear from anyone who has done one of the sleepovers about your experience!

(And–not that I was about to tell my family, there IS the option of a day tour run by Friends of the J Ward Volunteers–you can get tickets for that at the Ararat Tourist Information Centre)

Our tour didn’t start until 8pm so we had time for cheese, wine, dinner, more wine, then we rugged up in coats and gloves (or in Stu’s case, his warmest floral shirt),  and drove out to the old asylum. The driveway leading up there is long, pitch black, and it was foggy as hell. I think you’ll agree it has the look of a place where doors slam by themselves, and mysterious footsteps and/or unholy moans abound.

Sinister lighting to maximise creepy shadows: check.

Now, naive possums that we are, we’d questioned how many people would actually come to Ararat to do a ghost tour in the middle of winter, and surmised that we might actually be the only ones on the tour. How wrong we were. There were about 25 others milling about the entrance. An oddly high percentage of doughy guys in hoodies and tracksuit pants, who walked without much foot clearance. Slouchy shufflers. Just an irrelevant observation from the physio in me.

We were greeted by our tour leader Jane, resplendent in a Gothic Victorian black number and green tinted sunglasses (that’s right, at night, during winter) and ushered inside. While we waited for the rest of the group to arrive, we had time to look around what would have been the Administration/Admission offices; now home to miscellaneous horrible memorabilia from the Mental Health Dark Ages. Straight jackets, old electric diathermy machines. There were articles about lobotomy that inexplicably ran alongside advertisements for shoes:

Because after toying with people’s neural pathways, I just want to think about some natty footwear…

Ghastly pictures of pre-orbital lobotomies being performed–

Atrocious

and models of the now universally debunked, laughable ‘neuroscience’ known as Phrenology. Oh that it were so easy to ascertain a person’s qualities based on palpation of their skull! You could get everything you needed to know just by running your fingers through their hair. “You love children and family is important, you say?”  I’ll be the judge of that…. *rubs thumbs frantically all over back of lower skull*

It was never going to work. His ‘parental love’ area was just a little TOO big. Mummy issues.

Right. Foresight is the VERY section you bump every time you hit your head on something.

With the rest of the group through the doors, Jane gave us some background on Aradale. It opened as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum in 1867 and was an operational psychiatric hospital until as recently as 1991. At its height it housed over 900 patients and more than 13 000 patients died within the asylum walls.

As we prepared to leave the Administration offices, Jane reminded us of the long driveway we’d all driven up to arrive at the asylum and asked us to put ourselves in the shoes of the patients who were committed here. For a vast number, that journey up the drive was their last experience of the outside world. We really felt the weight of that statement. Well most of us did, anyway. Because at this point, one idiot in the group marked herself as someone who was going to piss me off for the duration and laughed. LAUGHED. (Ironically, lack of empathy is said to be one of the hallmark features of sociopathy, which would have probably had her committed to Aradale back in the good old days…)

Being a night tour, we had about five lanterns that were spread out amongst the group so that people don’t fall/get lost/get separated/become fodder for vengeful ghouls when moving from room to room, but once we arrived in a room it was strictly lights out, and Jane delivered her information holding a torch underneath her chin. Which is obviously very creepy. Let’s be honest, you could hold a torch under your chin and read out your bloody shopping list in a dramatically quavery voice and I would be crapping myself. When you do it and talk about REAL LIFE, unspeakably awful things being done to people and ghostly phenomena–that’s full body shuddering and sleepless nights ahead.

So because most of the tour is in darkness, and because of its inherent grimness, this obviously isn’t going to be a blog resplendent with pretty pictures. (If that is what you’re after, might I suggest a quick detour to last week’s more upbeat blog about my visit to the aquarium?)

Again, in case you are not yet clear, this post is pretty bleak

We start off in what would have been The Superintendent’s office at the Asylum. I’ve established it’s already winter and therefore cold, but walking into this room I swear the temperature drops at least another five degrees. One of the women on tour insists that it smells funny, which I initially think could be portentous or some sort of sign that she’s sensitive to a presence, but she  proceeds to say this about every other room that we enter on tour, marking herself less as psychic and more as a whinger who just doesn’t like old buildings and was really expecting more scented candles. Having said that, Jane informed us that two Superintendents at Aradale committed suicide in that very office; one by ingesting cyanide… and another two went on to be themselves committed to the facility. Talk about a position that just wore people down.

As we moved through the various wings/buildings, Jane talked to us about the sorts of tenuous reasons people might have been committed back in the early days. Dodgy. It seems women were particularly vulnerable, you could be committed for promiscuity, unfeminine or unladylike behaviour, post natal melancholia… she even reported to cases where husbands would get their wives committed with ease because they had a mistress they wanted to move on to, and gosh darn it but wives were such red tape, mewing on and on about ‘sacred vows’ and ‘for better, for worse’… Chinese miners could be committed because being unable to speak English properly was considered a sign of insanity. People with epilepsy, autism or mutism were regarded insane and also often committed.

The opulence of the mens ward.

So most of us found all this pretty deplorable, but rest assured things took a turn… from deplorable to downright distressing. Because we were about to find out all the grisly details of psychiatric treatment before the advent of psychoactive medications and psychotherapy. Of course, you had your classic Victorian-era go to: blood letting, where they made lots of cuts to drain out the ‘tainted’ or poisonous blood. But there were also insulin comas, where they would withhold food from a patient for days then give them a dose of insulin that would send their blood sugars plummeting and make them slip into a coma, at which point whatever undesirable behaviour they were looking to eliminate would stop. A coma will do that, you see.

Jane informed us that they also did lobotomies there. The pre-orbital kind where they went in through the eye socket without anaesthetic. The tour takes you to the surgical room where they were performed and the pre-op/recovery rooms just adjacent. Where the patient waiting would hear what was about to happen to him/her next. Psychically sensitive people on the tours have had some pretty intense experiences in there according to Jane, with the spirits of ex-patients telling them their names, and telling them in no uncertain terms that they really don’t want people in there. Lynda actually felt quite nauseous the moment she walked into the room, before we were even told what had happened there. According to Jane, that’s not uncommon, some people–before she’s even given any of information about the room, will actually rush out and throw up. Naturally ‘it smells funny’ lady was bleating about that (and being ignored by everybody), and laughing girl’s dolt of a boyfriend decided at this point to unleash some of his mad comedy skills and drop his lantern, creating a massive bang that made the whole group leap out of their skins. More giggling from the pair of them. He did this another three of four times at various points, possibly ?? to lighten the mood.

I don’t want to come over as all pious, and rationally, I know that different people have different ways of coping with information that’s upsetting. I just feel that we were hearing stories about a really marginalised population that were basically out of sight and out of mind, hundreds of kilometres from Melbourne and horrible things happened to them. And it’s healthy to feel sad and angry about that. Playing it for spooky chuckles on the other hand, cheapens and minimises it.

Climbing down from soapbox to continue…

One of the next stops was the enormous ECT room, which would have accommodated over 20 beds. Back when it was first performed, ECT was done without anaesthetic, with the patient strapped to the bed. The current was delivered at much higher doses than it is today, (so much so that many patients would break their limbs from thrashing against the resistance of the straps), and it was done more frequently that it is today on patients. As an added kick in the teeth, the patients were in a room with a stunning view of the town and surrounding landscape which they obviously couldn’t access.

The lights of Ararat sparkling in the distance.

The tour also visits the morgue and the autopsy room, housed in a separate building some distance away. They got someone to actually climb up onto the autopsy table and lay on their back whilst they describe what would have happened, and the girl’s partner snapped photos. Again, perhaps I’m being oversensitive, but it’s an autopsy table. Is that really a photo op???? There isn’t an Instagram filter in the world that will render that tasteful. It just struck me as a step too far; surely we’re all perfectly capable of visualising someone lying down. Right?

Occupied by roughly four people per week

Anyway, you’re probably wanting to know–did we actually encounter any evidence of haunting, or ghosts? We didn’t hear any unexplained footsteps/voices/banging and didn’t feel anything touching us or tugging at our clothing. (All things that have reportedly happened on other tours). But there were marked fluctuations in temperature from room to room. There were also some spots where the air quality was almost more viscous and thick (hard to describe) and all of us agreed that there was definitely a distinct, palpable negative energy about the place.

So (with apologies for this week’s shift in tone) I will throw the question over to you, Jarrod, and any other readers. The Aradale Asylum Ghost Tour: Jarrod, would you go there?

Final glance back