The ghosts haunting AUT’s past

NEWS | WAIRUATANGA / SPIRITUALITY

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Associate Editor

Have you ever felt a chill at the back of your neck while walking through campus late at night? Felt like you were being watched, but knew nobody was there? Heard a whisper and a giggle far too shrill for a uni-aged student? What you’re experiencing is probably the wind, but there’s no fun in that. Every stonemason who laid the first bricks of our tertiary education buildings in Tāmaki Makaurau has since carked it, leaving behind centuries of history between our city streets and, according to some, sticking around to cause some mischief. With the learning quarter of Tāmaki Makaurau holding some of the city's oldest heritage buildings, it’s no wonder students lurking in the shadows of the night tell tales of paranormal activity between their lectures. With spirits abound and a fair need to break up any religious trauma divulged in this issue, let’s take a look at the supernatural stories that might make you look twice over your shoulder next time you’re studying late. 

Carrington Hospital

The former psychiatric facility and eventual home for Unitec’s architecture and design school is possibly the most iconic supernatural location in Auckland, behind Kingseat Hospital, which spun its haunted history for profits in 2005 with the opening of Spookers. The Carrington Hospital leers over spaghetti junction in Point Chevalier, initially built in the 1860s as the Auckland Lunatic Asylum, roughly twenty years after the Lunatics Act was passed in 1846, forcing those deemed insane into state confinement across the old Queen Street Gaol and a new facility on Grafton Hospital grounds, which quickly became overcrowded. Immediately, the building was marred with difficulties that continued to haunt the asylum's operation until its closure, having been gutted by a deadly fire in 1877 and, in 1922, seeing various inmates perish in a localised Mt Albert typhoid epidemic due to unclean drinking water and poor sanitation. We’ll never know how many patients passed away due to suicide, neglect, or various other abuses inflicted upon them by wardens and other inmates - all we know for sure is that the spirits have a good reason to be pissed off. 

Carrington Hospital changed with the times, taking on a more community-focused approach as the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric care across Aotearoa saw asylums, sometimes haphazardly, decommissioned and vacated. With an iconic neoclassical look and unignorable location, the building became a satellite campus of our very own Auckland Technical Institute before breaking off into its own new institution, Carrington Polytechnic - later rebranding permanently to Unitec Institute of Technology in 1994. Unsuspecting architecture and design students have reported feeling the presence of the building's history throughout its Unitec ownership - particularly in the main hub of Building One, and the holder of the asylum's most dangerous patients, Building 76.  With the polytech having sold the building to the government in 2018 for urban housing developments, the fate of Carrington Hospital has been hanging in the balance throughout the pandemic and changes in leadership. While wings of the building have already been partially demolished to make way for roads, locals hope what remains can be used as a community space that brings out the best in the hospital's rocky 150 years of history. When asked about the proposed development, the ghosts of the asylum decided not to comment. 

Te Ara Poutama

The oldest building of AUT’s City Campus has been partially vacated this year, as the Student Counselling and Health services, City Gym, Rainbow Room, and more have moved to their shiny new facilities at WQ on Wakefield Street. However, what is now the WB building, sandwiched between Hikuwai Plaza, Ngā Wai o Horotiu, and Wellesley Street East, was first built as the day school of Auckland Technical College, later becoming Seddon Memorial Technical College, and then Auckland Technical Institute, and then Auckland Institute of Technology, and then Auckland University of Technology. While the names changed, the building didn’t, with the school expanding outwards and the building standing as the sole survivor of the institute AUT was. According to some AUT staff, the building isn’t the only thing that stuck around. 

Elim Ahlers is the Rainbow Student Inclusion Manager at AUT, and recently joined the move of student services from WB to WQ. Some might see it as a sad move, vacating the last bastion of AIT/ATI/SMTC/ATC for yet another glass tower - but for Elim, it’s goodbye and good riddance. He spoke to Debate of “Things in our locked office would frequently be moved overnight. Not stolen or anything, but things in drawers might be in different drawers or on the table, etc. We'd often hear weird noises, particularly early in the morning, or in those first couple weeks of Jan when most staff aren't back from leave.” 

It wasn’t just noises and chills explainable by wind; “We would also get people coming into the space randomly for air flow testing. They'd set up mysterious devices and sometimes needed to get into the ceiling at short notice, or at strange hours. I'd often ask what they meant or what they were testing for, and they'd just look at me funny.”

It’s hard to say whether or not anything truly unbecoming took place in the halls of the oldest technical college, but it’s unlikely the ghosts will vacate sooner than the humans. “I'm old enough to have taken classes in WB, and remember it being creepy back then, too. This has me wondering... it did have a rather last-century in-patient ward feeling to it, don't you think?” 

Have you seen anything out of the ordinary in the halls of AUT? Let us know at debate@autsa.org.nz, and we might share your stories alongside an investigation into the decrepit buildings across the road.