Beechworth Lunatic Asylum, Victoria, Australia

Located in the beautiful town of Beechworth, just a few hours from Melbourne is the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum. One of the most seen ghosts is that of Matron Sharpe, her apparition has been seen in several different parts of the hospital.


The Asylum was later renamed the Mayday Hills Hospital, it is the second oldest asylum in Victoria, dating back to 1867. When the asylum opened it stretched half a kilometer from one end to the other. The Beechworth Lunatic Asylum held a total of 1200 patients when full 600 men and 600 women. Over 3000 patients died within its walls in the 128 years the hospital operated. Its doors closed in 1995, and since then has operated as a campus of La Trobe University, run as a hotel and conference center.

In one of the day rooms, the signature of a J. Kelly is scratched in the glass. J Kelly was Ned Kelly's (the famous outlaw) uncle James Kelly. After burning down his sister in laws house in Greta, in which a young Ned was in at the time, Jim was sentenced to 15 years hard. As part of his sentence he was sent to Mayday Hills to help build the hospital. After serving his time, it's said his mind "was broken" and as such spent the rest of his days housed in the hospital until his death in 1903.

The Ghost Tours run at Beechworth Lunatic Asylum have become the most popular ghost tours on mainland Australia. Only the Ghost Tours offered in Port Arthur, in Tasmania, attract more visitors. Tours are offered every evening; on some evenings, as many as twelve tours are conducted. The Beechworth Asylum is now considered to be one of the most haunted buildings in Australia.

One of the ghosts most often seen at Beechworth is that of Matron Sharpe her apparition has been seen in several different parts of the hospital. Matron Sharpe's ghost has been seen in the former dormitory area, which is now part of Latrobe University's computer rooms. Witnesses have seen her walking down the granite staircase and into one of the classrooms. Matron Sharpe was apparently very compassionate toward the patients, which is uncharacteristic of the era.

One patient whose ghost is thought to haunt Beechworth is Tommy Kennedy. Tommy was well liked at the hospital and was given a job as a kitchen hand. Tommy actually died in the kitchen which is now part of the Bijou theatre, it is here that people have said they have felt the sensation of someone tugging at their clothes or poking their ribs.

The Reaction Hall was an area where patients could sing, play music or perform in plays, on Sundays the hall doubled as the chapel. In 1939 the hall became a cinema, where inmates could come in to watch movies. There are two common sightings in the hall, one is of a young girl, who approaches women and desperately tries to communicate with them. The other ghost has been seen in a window that was once part of the Bell Tower; the apparition of an elderly man facing away from the window is often seen.

The Grevillia wing was the section of the hospital all patients feared, it has been closed for 13 years, and now in a derelict state. As medication wasn't introduced until the 1950s, restraints such as straightjackets and even shackles were commonly used as well as electro-shock treatment. Electro shock treatment was widely used in the hospitals early days and there are stories of mass treatments in which almost the entire patient population was shocked in one session. When the shocks were administered the patient's bodies either splayed out backwards with force or contracted inward into a fetal position, which ever position ligaments would snap, bones were often broken and teeth shattered.

There are two common sightings in Grevillia, one is thought to be that of an unknown male doctor, his apparition has been seen wandering the corridors at night. The other is Matron Sharpe whose ghost was often seen in this area by the nurses who worked at Mayday Hills. They would report seeing the Matron sitting with patients who were due to have electro-shock treatment. Those who say they've witnessed this say the room was icy cold, but her presence was comforting, and seemed to bring a sense of reassurance to the patients.

Workmen at the hospital have reported hearing the sound of children laughing and playing; when they investigate the sound they are unable to trace there source. Several years ago on a ghost tour a parent noticed their 10 year old son talking to himself when asked who he was talking to the boy said he was talking to a boy called James who lived there.

A patient, a woman who was a big chain smoker was thrown out of a window to her death by another patient who wanted her cigarettes. Because the woman was Jewish her body was not allowed to be moved until a Rabbi had seen it, so her body was left lying out the front of the hospital dead for 2 days whilst the Rabbi made the trip up from Melbourne. Her ghost has been seen on the spot where she fell, by several witnesses over the last decade. The photo on the right was taken of the window from which she was thrown, an orb is clearly visable in the photo.

The gardens of Beechworth have long been subdivided into allotments; those who live nearby have seen the ghost of a man, wearing a green woolen jacket. The ghost is thought to be of a gardener named Arthur who worked the gardens for many years earning ten shillings a week. He wore his green jacket in winter and summer and no one could persuade him to remove it. After Arthur died, it was discovered why Arthur had been secretly storing his wages in the seam of his jacket. When the nurses opened it, they found 140 pounds, over four years of his wages, hidden inside.

There's one final and grizzly tale of a patient who disappeared, despite efforts by staff to locate him. Several weeks later his location was discovered when the resident dog Max, was found chewing a leg near the gate house at the grounds entry. A second search found the body up in a tree; the body had decomposed so badly that his leg had come off. The ghost of the patient has been seen near the entrance to the Asylum, the sightings have often been in the early hours of the morning.

Bermuda Triangle: Where Facts Disappear

Also sinisterly known as the Devil's Triangle, the Bermuda Triangle consists of a region in the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, and is defined by points in Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico. It stretches across less than a thousand miles on any one side.

The Bermuda Triangle (also known as the Devil's Triangle) is an area bounded by points in Bermuda, Florida and Puerto Rico where ships and planes are said to mysteriously vanish into thin air — or deep water.

Recently, some people have wondered if there is a Bermuda Triangle connection in the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, even though the jet went missing halfway around the world.

The term "Bermuda Triangle" was coined in 1964 by writer Vincent Gaddis in the men's pulp magazine Argosy. Though Gaddis first came up with the phrase, a much more famous name propelled it into international popularity a decade later. Charles Berlitz, whose family created the popular series of language instruction courses, also had a strong interest in the paranormal. He believed not only that Atlantis was real, but also that it was connected to the triangle in some way, a theory he proposed in his bestselling 1974 book "The Bermuda Triangle." The mystery has since been promoted in thousands of books, magazines, television shows, and websites.

Still others believe that the explanation lies in some sort of extremely rare and little–known — yet perfectly natural — geological or hydrological explanation. For example, perhaps ships and planes are destroyed by pockets of flammable methane gas known to exist in large quantities under the sea — maybe lightning or an electrical spark ignited a huge bubble of methane that came to the surface right next to a ship or plane, causing them to sink without a trace. There are a few obvious logical problems with this theory, including that methane exists naturally around the world and such an incident has never been known to happen. 

Others suggest sudden rogue tidal waves. Or maybe some mysterious geomagnetic anomaly that creates navigational problems confusing pilots and somehow causing them to plunge into the ocean; then again, pilots are trained to fly even with a loss of electronic navigation, and that theory doesn't explain ship disappearances. In fact, the Navy has a web page debunking this idea: "It has been inaccurately claimed that the Bermuda Triangle is one of the two places on earth at which a magnetic compass points towards true north. Normally a compass will point toward magnetic north. The difference between the two is known as compass variation. ... Although in the past this compass variation did affect the Bermuda Triangle region, due to fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field this has apparently not been the case since the nineteenth century."

Mystery of the disappearing facts

A journalist named Larry Kusche asked exactly that question, and came to a surprising answer: there is no mystery about strange disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. Kusche exhaustively re-examined the "mysterious disappearances" and found that the story was basically created by mistakes, mystery mongering, and in some cases outright fabrication — all being passed along as fact-checked truth.

In his definitive book "The Bermuda Triangle Mystery — Solved," Kusche notes that few writers on the topic bothered to do any real investigation — they mostly collected and repeated other, earlier writers who did the same. Unfortunately, Charles Berlitz's facility with language did not carry over into credible research or scholarship. His books on the paranormal — and on the Bermuda Triangle, specifically — were riddled with errors, mistakes, and unscientific crank theories. In a way, the Bermuda Triangle is largely a creation of Charles Berlitz's mistakes. Kusche would later note that Berlitz's research was so sloppy that "If Berlitz were to report that a boat were red, the chance of it being some other color is almost a certainty."

In some cases there's no record of the ships and planes claimed to have been lost in the aquatic triangular graveyard; they never existed outside of a writer's imagination. In other cases, the ships and planes were real enough — but Berlitz and others neglected to mention that they "mysteriously disappeared" during bad storms. Other times the vessels sank far outside the Bermuda Triangle.

It's also important to note that the area within the Bermuda Triangle is heavily traveled with cruise and cargo ships; logically, just by random chance, more ships will sink there than in less-traveled areas such as the South Pacific.

Despite the fact that the Bermuda Triangle has been definitively debunked for decades, it still appears as an "unsolved mystery" in new books — mostly by authors more interested in a sensational story than the facts. In the end, there's no need to invoke time portals, Atlantis, submerged UFO bases, geomagnetic anomalies, tidal waves, or anything else. The Bermuda Triangle mystery has a much simpler explanation: sloppy research and sensational, mystery-mongering books.


Benjamin Radford is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and author of six books, including "Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained Mysteries."