Beechworth Lunatic Asylum (Mayday Hills)

Beechworth was born in the Ovens gold rush of 1852 – the township was first called Mayday Hills – and by the early 1860s it was one of the richest towns in Victoria, with a courthouse, a gaol and a hospital to match. Between 1864 and 1867 the colony’s Public Works Department added a lunatic asylum on a hill above the town, one of a trio with Kew and Ararat modelled on Colney Hatch in England. Its long, E-shaped Italianate block, corner towers and separate mortuary (1868) still dominate the skyline.

Patients lived inside a walled compound edged with a ha-ha, a sunken wall that looked low from outside but rose sheer from within. Work was treated as therapy: men laboured on the asylum’s farm, piggery and gardens, and women in the laundries. The hospital grew through the 1870s and 1880s, was renamed Mayday Hills in the 20th century and absorbed each new wave of psychiatric treatment before closing in 1995, after 128 years. Tour guides often repeat a rule from its history: two signatures could commit a person, but it took eight to let them out.

La Trobe University ran a campus on the site from 1996 until 2011, and the complex was then sold to private owners, who lease buildings to tourism and arts businesses. The grounds are on the Victorian Heritage Register as a state-significant asylum landscape.

The ghost stories grew up alongside the night tours that now run in the empty wards. Guides speak of Matron Sharpe, remembered as a gentle nurse whose presence is said to calm rather than frighten; of a former groundsman called Arthur in a green woollen jacket; and of a woman said to have fallen from a third-storey window. None of these figures has been tied to a named person in the published record. In 2018 the writer Ellen Muller, reviewing the tour for Overland, argued that ghost-hunting at asylums risks treating patients’ suffering as entertainment – a question the site’s own history tours try to answer by telling patients’ stories as people’s lives.

Visitors on the night tours describe footsteps and doors in empty corridors, children’s voices in the old recreation hall, cold spots, a smell of decay, and figures watching from a room above the stage. Matron Sharpe is described as a reassuring presence felt in the ward where electroconvulsive therapy was once given.

Tours begin in the foyer of the Bijou Theatre, the asylum’s recreation hall, and move through the women’s wards, the treatment rooms and the grounds. The viewing room above the stage and the upper floors of the main block are the most-mentioned spots.

Beechworth’s asylum hosts Asylumfest, a horror film and writing festival held around the end of October, along with writers’ retreats, horror screenings and overnight stays. It is often paired with Aradale and J Ward in Ararat as the core of Victoria’s “asylum tourism”, and the town’s gold-rush streets and Ned Kelly connections bring visitors year-round.