Seacliff—The Haunted Hospital
This was a grand project by anyone’s standards, and when this building opened in 1884, it was New Zealand’s largest building.
Robert Lawson’s design was considered extremely ambitious, and it proved to be just that with the structure being too heavy for the unstable land that it was built on.
Seacliff held up to 500 patients and fifty staff and was considered the leading hospital for psychiatric disorders. Electric shock treatment was used extensively at Seacliff and would later be viewed as torture rather than cure.
Another tragedy occurred in 1942 in the women’s wing of the hospital. A two-storied wooden building mysteriously caught alight and claimed the lives of thirty-seven of the thirty-nine female occupants. The cause of the fire was never discovered and remains a mystery. There were no fireplaces as the rooms were steam heated; the doors were locked, and grates over the windows made it impossible to escape.
Visiting this small settlement makes me feel uneasy, and I have certainly been asked a lot of questions about Seacliff over the years. I grew up with stories about the hospital. My grandfather worked there after the war as a psychiatric nurse, and by all accounts saw his fair share.
In 2005, the owner of the Seacliff property asked me if I was willing to conduct organised tours of the old hospital grounds. He was getting fed up with people snooping around in search of the supernatural. He thought that if something were arranged, it would satisfy people’s curiosities and mean fewer people would feel inclined to break in.
So in the spring of 2005 Hair Raiser Lunatic Tours was born. The interest was high, and we were heading out to Seacliff regularly. My outfit for this tour was a white doctor’s coat with a patient clipboard. Sometimes you just get a feeling that all is not well, and that’s Seacliff for me. The wander through the trees to the old morgue was spine tingling to say the least, and often I’d have a feeling I was being followed.
A Formalin tin from the morgue.
The remaining buildings had a strange eeriness about them, and some people claimed that they saw faces looking back at them from the windows above while on tour. Also, in the main building that remained was an extensive collection of 1950s cars covered in dust and in various states of disrepair. This in itself was a freaky stop; you were never quite sure what you would see when you shone your torch through the old car windows.
There is no doubt that this tour was controversial. I did receive some complaints about the fact that I was taking people here, and of course the word ‘lunatic’ was also a factor. I received many calls from people informing me that they had family members at Seacliff and that they were definitely not lunatics. Even local mental health groups were outraged that I was touring Seacliff. Typically, criticism comes from those who have not attended a Hair Raiser Tour. They are not aware that my tours are aimed to provide historical awareness, and in this case, of how mental health was dealt with at one moment in time. Anyway, the talk that circulated regarding the tour meant that I had never been busier. We even combined our tour with a train trip on The Seasider with passengers jumping off at the Seacliff station. The Americans from the cruise ships loved it.
The Seacliff Station.
I must admit I grew tired of the criticism regarding the lunatic tour, so I decided to stop. I never felt that good after visiting Seacliff, and it seems to me to be a permanently tortured and haunted place. I still, however, get requests to go there. The owner eventually got fed up with the property and sold it not long ago.
It is now permanently closed to the public which I’m guessing just adds to the intrigue and mystery surrounding the place. For me, Seacliff has the most haunted vibe of any location around Dunedin.
Dunedin is a Ghost Town-{1999-2019}