Pleasant Creek sold

Further to a previous post - "Abandoned in Pleasant Creek" way back in February 2008, the site was finally been leased.

According to the Stawell Times News Keenan Quinsee from Ballan is the new owner of the old hospital buildings.
He intends to clean up the site and then operate Aradale-style ghost tours.
Keenan also has other potential ideas for utilising some of the buildings (Christmas in July festival next year, a weekend night market, live music events in the summer, a bean bag cinema, wine bar and cafe and a three-dimensional artistic mural), including the very utilitarian looking concrete offices near the highway as retail space.

HELLingly

Hellingly Asylum in Sussex was one of the most advanced asylum designs ever constructed. It opened its doors in 1903 and then closed them permanently in 1994. Most of the psychiatric hospital is to be replaced by new housing.

Patients and staff all lived in red brick buildings of this gigantic asylum. Men and women lived in separate wings. It was also a place where women who had children out of wedlock were incarcerated. There were big windows to let in as much light as possible.

The decadent ballroom and theater, facing the stage, near the front right door, there was a hatch to creepy underground passageways.

For over 20 years, Hellingly has been dying, fading, and peeling, there is a lovely quality that makes you shudder about the ruination. Some explorers have reported hearing unexplained noises up and down the many corridors and the many padded-cell rooms.

Hellingly Asylum had its own morgue and body fridge. Besides having a farm, train, water-tower, clothing shop, boiler-room, chapel, dentist, there was also a Hellingly Hair Salon, which has been heavily vandalised, and there has been substantial fire damage too.

There is something utterly creepy about seeing a child’s wheelchair in the decaying mental hospital. Hellingly had a special building just for “mentally defective” children, back in a time when people were locked away in isolation. Other facility care therapeutics included shock treatments.

State of decay - 26 years of nature reclaiming Hellingly. Paint peeled, ceiling crumbled…


This info came from the WebUrbanist page.

If you want to stay updated with the progress of destruction and demolition, Hellingly Asylum has a Facebook page.

Session 9 & Danvers

I managed to hire a copy of the "Session 9" DVD from the local video store, after being unsuccessful sourcing a new one via my usual supplier, Amazon or Ebay!

It is more a suspenseful thriller, than a splatter horror, and the hospital was the real star with both interior and external shots - from the wide-open spaces of the rooms and passages to the dark, dank recesses of the basement tunnels and cellars. It doesn't resort to the usual practise of filming everything in the dark to create atomsphere, there's atomsphere aplenty in the sheer existence of the hospital!
Definitely concerned about the workers OH&S though and the number of breaks they appear to have, when supposedly working for a quick-finish-bonus.

The gothic style Kirkbride building, is part of the psychiatric facility in Danvers, Massachusetts that closed in the 1990s. This was the original structure built when the hospital was founded in the 1870s.



More than two-thirds of the building (and almost 100% of every other buildings at the former hospital) have been demolished. This irreplaceable example of 19th-century craftsmanship is now reduced to a shell of the central admin section and one wing section on either side. Condos are being built up around the site.

Filming for real

Another post from WebUrbanist - Real-Life Locations Behind Out-of-this-World Films
When filming horror, sci-fi and fantasy movies, set construction is often necessary to achieve a believable effect. But, some real-life locations are a surprisingly perfect fit, from gritty abandoned power stations and mental hospitals to a town so impossibly perfect it played a film set, these locations have played prominent roles in movies.

The Stanley Hotel, ‘The Shining’



The hotel in Estes Park, Colorado hardly seems like it could serve as inspiration for ‘The Overlook Hotel’ in one of Stephen King’s greatest horror novels. It was during a stay there in the 1970s that King conceived of the basic idea for ‘The Shining’. The hotel is purportedly haunted, and King is said to have had some paranormal experiences during his stay. Contrary to popular belief, he did not write the novel while staying at the Stanley, nor was the Kubrick film version shot there – though parts of the 1997 tv series were.

Battersea Power Station, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’


At one time, the Battersea Power Station was a gleaming symbol of human progress. It’s Europe’s largest brick building and boasted a lavish, Art Deco interior that has since deteriorated significantly. It appeared in the Beatles’ movie ‘Help!’ and is also pictured on the front of Pink Floyd’s album ‘Animals’. The station fell into disuse, though it remained one of London’s most iconic landmarks. In addition to ‘Children of Men’, ‘Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life’, ‘MacGuyver’, ‘The Dark Knight’ and an episode of ‘LOST’, and recently an episode of ‘New Tricks’, the Battersea Power Station was used as the external façade of the Victory Mansions in the 1984 film adaptation of George Orwell’s novel, ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’.

Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant, ‘The Abyss’

Many of the scenes in science fiction thriller ‘The Abyss’ were filmed in eerie, claustrophobic underwater chambers at the Cherokee Nuclear Power Plant near Gaffney, South Carolina. Millions of gallons of water were brought in to fill existing unfinished structures on the site, making it the largest underwater movie set in the world. It was abandoned in 1983 after the Three Mile Island accident, but is now under control of Duke Power & Southern Co., who plan to redevelop the site for one of the first new nuclear power plants in over 30 years. The DVD of ‘Abyss’ has an interesting “making of” section showing how they used the Cherokee plant.

And finally, I haven’t seen this movie, but the utilisation of perhaps the most famous abandoned place in America - Danvers State Hospital as the bleak, creepy setting for the 2001 horror movie ‘Session 9′ makes me want to see it. In an unusual twist, Danvers didn’t just stand in for a fictional asylum, but actually appeared as itself. The hospital was closed in 1992 but stood abandoned until its demolition in 2005. It was reportedly the inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft’s Arkham Sanitarium, which in turn inspired Arkham Asylum in the Batman comic book series.


Danvers seems so Essex Mountain Sanatorium (posted in May 2008).

Abandoned asylum

Mayday Hills Hospital (Beechworth Lunatic Asylum) was established in 1867. The total cost of the Beechworth Asylum was almost 108,000 pounds. The plan of the Asylum, which was in the form of a giant E, matched that adopted at Ararat and at the new Metropolitan Asylum at Kew. It operated for almost 130 years until its closure in 1995. During this time it grew to incorporate nearly 53 buildings spread across an 11 hectare site, at its peak accommodating over 1,000 patients. Today, its gardens (planted as a botanical garden of exotic trees and shrubs in the late 19th century) and most of the infrastructure remains, part is now a campus of La Trobe University, accommodation and a restaurant run by the catering course of the uni, a Child Care Centre, and the base for Ghost Tours of the dilapidated sections. Coincidentally, Mayday Hill was named by the then Lieutenant Governor, Charles Joseph La Trobe, after whom the La Trobe University is named, when he visited the area in 1852. You can compare this Gatehouse to the derelict one at Ararat in the previous post. While the design of the two institutions are remarkably similar, one major difference is the frontage, at Beechworth, a fountain was erected in 1887 with a large part of the labour being done by Asylum staff, it has since been removed due to drainage problems, while Aradale still has the remains of the fountain, its pond (currently dry) and balustrade. Finally this photo taken at Ararat is what I'm calling my Narnia shot. It is so reminiscent of the lamp-post from "The lion, the witch and the wardrobe", and it can snow in Ararat!

Mentally abandoned

Previously I’ve mentioned the similarities between Ararat and Beechworth, they both had jails built to the same designs, well they also had mental hospitals built to the same general designs – Aradale in Ararat and Mayday Hills in Beechworth.

Aradale Mental Hospital (Lunatic Asylum) comprises a large main building and associated structures erected largely between 1864-67. The main buildings are constructed in brick, the structures are cement rendered brick Italianate with slate roofs. An engaged colonnade faces the top storey of the central block, which is linked by double storey bridges to long side wings with towers.

John James Clark is credited with designing the complex.
The main approach is from the south via a serpentine drive starting at the Italianate style Gate Lodge, which dates from 1866. The part single, part double storey dwelling was constructed of stuccoed brickwork with slate roofs. Features of the design include the gabled entrance porch, round headed and other window hoods, combination of roof forms, plinth and eaves detailing.



The Ararat Asylum was one of three (the others were Kew and Beechworth) built to replace the controversial Yarra Bend Lunatic Asylum in Melbourne. The asylum was built as a town within a town with its own market gardens, piggery and other stock kept on the grounds. It is surrounded by large grounds planted out as formal garden, farm and parkland.


The earliest buildings include the vast main building with its towers, a kitchen and dining room block, a billiard room, a library, school, a large multipurpose hall and 2,100ft of verandahs where patients could enjoy fresh air sheltered from winds and extensive remnants of the encircling ha-ha wall.
Later nineteenth and early twentieth century additions include the farm buildings, convalescent cottages, sun-shades and fever tent. At its height in the 1950s, it had about 900 patients and over 500 staff. The site has also many later buildings and structures, including smaller houses built for attendants after World War Two.

Today the complex is made up of 63 buildings ranging in age from the original wings built in 1860 to the modern forensic unit which was built in 1991. It was closed as an asylum in December 1993 (The Forensics Unit continued till September 1997).
In 2001 with a State Government grant of $7.4m, it granted places to 50 students and became the Aradale campus of Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (NMIT) part of the Australian College of Wine, though they are only using a portion of the site and the rest is deteriorating.

It isn’t surprising that people say the building is reputedly haunted, it has all the ingredients – large sprawling 19th century buildings with extensive corridors, 1,000 odd deaths, the institutionalised insane.
For a short history of Aradale and its hauntings see http://www.aghs.com.au/aradaleasylum.html
A post on the Beechworth Asylum next.

Abandoned at Pleasant Creek

The Pleasant Creek Centre was the site of the first local hospital in Stawell, which was opened in 1850 (the only hospital in western Victoria between the South Australian border, Ballarat and the Murray River). Local landowners and miners subscribed to its construction. It was reserved in 1861 and again in 1883. Part of the building remains on the site, there were more elaborate alterations in 1881, it featured a Benevolent Ward for elderly miners. The area has a long history of community use, initially as a health service and subsequently as the Pleasant Creek Training Centre, an area where people with intellectual disabilities were accommodated and educated and participated in day programs.

For many years a school was located on the site as well as accommodation for children, teenagers and latterly disabled adults. Following changes to the way the intellectual disabled were housed, the Department of Human Services transferred the clients from the Pleasant Creek Centre into community housing.

Many ideas for the land by the council include a retirement village; a backpackers facility; hospitality facilities; restaurants; corporate offices; a transit facility for use by V/Line and other coach lines; a fast food outlet; a commercial laundry; a museum; and even a brewery.
Now parliamentary legislation has removed the final reservation on the land and the 13 hectares of land has been identified as having no further public purpose and has been made available for public sale.