How a horror movie starts
Yesterday I had an odd adventure. In Kingseat, which is a suburb in the outer south of Auckland, there's an old mental hospital that got shut down a bunch of years back for, from what I understand, being a bit of a hell-hole. It was built in the thirties and is this massive sprawling complex. Spookers runs out of the old nurses' quarters but that's only the tiniest fraction of the place. We've always wistfully discussed getting access to some of the place for running larps but no one has every really made progress on that front. Until raphael_harker emailed me a few weeks back saying he got a meeting with the owner who was interested in letting us hire parts of it and invited us to come look around at what was there. So four of us made the excursion to Kingseat yesterday morning. It was the first time I had seen it in daylight and it was a great deal less spooky. With the people going around mowing the lawns, the sun shining and the general "Saturday morning" atmosphere around us, it wasn't nearly as creepy as I remembered. I was also too busy checking out the fantastic old buildings, and enjoying the history to contemplate ghosts and such. The only building we got into was the main admin building. There was such a sense of age in that place - nothing had been done up so everything was still original 1930s, with a great air of delapidation. It transpired, as we sort of looked at the notices in the office, that the guy owned the place was renting the old ward buildings out as houses to people! People were living in bits of the old mental hospital!
We never did get to look around more than that, because one of the other guys who was with us took a photo of one of the buildings, the owner went ballistic and even though we apologised and put the camera away, within minutes we were chased off the property being threatened with trespass notices. Yikes. We're not quite sure what happened, and the only conclusion we came to was that he's up to something dodgy there that we didn't actually see, and he thought we might be there to try and bust him.
Either way, somehow the anecdote "I went to an abandoned mental hospital for a meeting with its reclusive owner who reacted strangely and chased us off the property for no apparent reason" sounds like the beginning of a horror movie.
We never did get to look around more than that, because one of the other guys who was with us took a photo of one of the buildings, the owner went ballistic and even though we apologised and put the camera away, within minutes we were chased off the property being threatened with trespass notices. Yikes. We're not quite sure what happened, and the only conclusion we came to was that he's up to something dodgy there that we didn't actually see, and he thought we might be there to try and bust him.
Either way, somehow the anecdote "I went to an abandoned mental hospital for a meeting with its reclusive owner who reacted strangely and chased us off the property for no apparent reason" sounds like the beginning of a horror movie.