Aradale Asylum and J Ward

Ararat was a gold-rush town, and in 1859 the colony began a bluestone county gaol there on the Pentonville model. It opened on 10 October 1861 with 21 prisoners, and three men were hanged in its yard between 1870 and 1884. Meanwhile, on a rise east of the town, the Public Works Department built the Ararat Lunatic Asylum, the first finished of Victoria’s three great asylums (with Kew and Beechworth). It took its first patients in 1867.

Aradale, as it was later named, was a town within a town: Italianate ward wings for men and women linked by arcaded bridges, airing courts enclosed by ha-ha walls, its own farm, orchards, vineyard and piggery, more than 500 staff at its peak and up to a thousand patients. In December 1886 the old gaol down the hill was proclaimed “J Ward” of the asylum, to hold prisoners judged insane. Meant as a temporary measure, it lasted more than a century. One of its men, Charles Fossard, was admitted in 1903 and died there in 1974; another, Bill Wallace, lived in J Ward from 1926 until his death in 1989 at the age of 107.

J Ward closed in January 1991 and reopened as a museum in 1993, run by the volunteer Friends of J Ward. Aradale was closed as an asylum in 1993 as patients moved into community care, though a forensic unit and later a women’s prison used parts of it for some years; since 2001 a Melbourne Polytechnic campus has used part of the grounds for wine and hospitality training. The rest – dozens of empty buildings – is visited on day tours and, after dark, on ghost tours and paranormal investigations.

Those night tours have made Aradale one of the most-cited “most haunted” places in Australia. Guides and visitors talk of a cook in the old kitchens, a small boy who wanders the wards, a nurse still on her rounds, and visitors being pushed, pinched or scratched. Critics, among them the writer Ellen Muller in Overland – who singled out the “mad-woman” jump scares of the 2015 TV series Haunting Australia – have questioned whether horror-style tours of a psychiatric hospital reinforce stigma against people with mental illness. The day tours concentrate on the patients’ lives and the history of care, and many visitors come because an ancestor lived or died there.

Night-tour guests describe footsteps and voices in empty wards, doors moving, cold spots, sudden nausea, and physical contact – pushes, pinches and scratches. Named presences include a cook, a young boy and a nurse; in J Ward visitors talk of a heavy, watched feeling in the cell blocks.

At Aradale: the long ward wings, the kitchens and the female wards. At J Ward: the bluestone cells and the old gaol yard. Most reports come from the after-dark tours rather than the daytime history tours.

Ararat has built much of its tourism on the two sites, with the Friends of J Ward running day tours of both and separate night ghost tours and investigations at Aradale. The asylum has appeared in paranormal TV, films and countless “most haunted” lists, and in 2018 it featured, with Beechworth, in an Overland essay on the ethics of asylum ghost tourism.