A night in the Lunatic Asylum

Last night me and a few friends decided to go up to the old Porirua Lunatic Asylum, most of the hospital is now closed, has been for a few years now. The closure was the governments idea to reintroduce long-stay patients back into the wider community, I know some patients who had lived in the hospital for most of their adult lives, it was their home and they were more or less evicted from their home. Most of the buildings have been reutilized but some buildings are derelict and run down.

We hadn't planned on going there, we were just driving around looking to have some fun and happened to drive past it. A few drinks were had I must admit and I don't think we actually knew we were parked up outside the abandoned buildings, we just hopped out of the car and started walking, it was about 4:30am at this point. We walked into some thick bush and as we came to the other side we saw the two buildings, we weren't expecting that, freaked us all out.

PHOTO: What we first saw.

Flickr album, some very nice photos of the buildings.

As we were about to enter the first building one of my friends said screw this and took off back to the car, the rest of us carried on. We entered by the main entrance I think and the first thing we all saw has a big sturdy wooden chair with a box base in the middle of a hall way, we went in for a closer look and saw that it had a hole in seat of it, it was an old style toilet, we had a few laughs and headed up stairs.

We checked out most of the rooms but the scariest ones were the bathrooms, most of the doors were closed and we scared ourselves silly opening them up, who knows what could have been behind them, we found out nothing was behind them. There were also some rooms with big heavy doors with small porthole like windows in them, I'm thinking they were padded cells. Most of the rooms were pretty much all the same, broken glass all over the place, graffiti on the walls, old furniture placed into living room type arrangements, it looked as if a lot of squatters used the place from time to time.

We got lost for awhile trying to find the stairs but we eventually found them. On the first floor there was a garage that was pretty cool it had three old vehicles in it, scared ourselves daring each other to hop in them and close the doors, none of us did.

When we finished with the first building we went and checked out the other one but that was pretty much the same. We didn't see anything unexplainable which was a shame but I'm gonna head back up there at some point with my camera and check it out when I'm sober.