The Young and the Restless — ghost tours

I’d been following Beechworth Asylum’s social pages for a little while, reading tales of strange occurrences and looking at pictures submitted by visitors and sometimes staff.

With a cynical mind and a background in photography, I still wasn’t convinced the stories and images weren’t just a matter of over-active imaginations and exposure trickeries.

When my eldest son chose a ghost tour for his birthday activity, however, I was prepared to be convinced of their existence, or non-existence, once and for all, as the two of us embarked on the experience (because nobody else in the family wanted a bar of it).

These tours are fantastic, ghost sightings or no ghost sightings.

Our guide was in full costume and full character, offering morbid deadpan “jokes” and gory history lessons while returning our wide-eyed attention with his own unsettling stare, which he often broke with an equally chilling cackle.

Even if none of the stories of the supernatural were anything more than tales from people past who desperately wanted to believe, the sick and twisted true stories of what actually went on in the asylum’s fairly recent history are disturbing enough on their own to make this experience captivating, unique and worthwhile.

My son and I spent a good chunk of the tour nervously giggling at each other. I had to forge a brave facade to keep his nerves calm, while my own peaked in a darkness that was only mildly illuminated by one feeble handheld lamp between the two of us. (Of course, birthday boy had control of ours.)

As we entered each cold, musty and unwelcoming room, I consciously tried to position us where we wouldn’t end up being the last ones to leave it. I didn’t want us to be left (dragged) behind and locked in with what may or may not have remained in there with us.

While others in our group were convinced they could make out ghostly figures in the dark, I was questioning whether the lenses in my glasses might have needed an upgrade. Because try as I might, I sure as hell couldn’t see what they were seeing.

Nonetheless, their “sightings” kept us suitably on edge.

Just when I thought I’d made up my sceptical mind that this was all just a load of hocus pocus, we entered the room where medical experiments had taken place and I immediately started to shiver, my skin feeling like the temperature against it had just dropped 10 degrees between doorways.

Our entertainingly animated guide warned us to keep a firm grip on our lanterns as many visitors had experienced forces trying to extract them from their hands in that particular ward.

For some reason, my son got tired of holding our lantern at that exact moment and swiftly passed it on to me. Honestly, I don’t blame him. I kind of wanted to throw it to the next person like a hot potato, too.

While the whole tour was creepy, I just could not wait to get out of that specific building. By the time we left it I was muscle-achingly cold and felt nauseous, symptoms that faded within mere minutes of exiting the ward.

It’s interesting, you know, like so many things in life that we like to chalk up to Murphy’s Law: before the tour I had myself convinced I didn’t really want to see a ghost because I was worried that if I did, I might actually run for the hills, leaving my child to fend for himself.

But, by the end of the tour when I hadn’t seen a ghost, I was disappointed to have not been proven wrong about their existence.

Yet.

So maybe next time we’ll graduate from a ghost tour to a paranormal investigation and go and hunt those damned spectres ourselves instead of waiting for them to come to us and relieve us of our lanterns.

And maybe, just maybe, now my boys are all a little bit older and filled with a little bit more testosterone-fuelled bravado, they might ALL come along for the scare.