"There's always an empty chair in a room"

Urban Exploration

A look inside 9 of Australia's creepiest abandoned places

All over Australia, buildings of all shapes and sizes have been left to rot (or be reclaimed by nature). Most of those buildings are very creepy. Here are 9 of the creepiest.

By Tom Bright

4 min readPublished on 01/19/2017 · 11:13 AM UTC

What is it about abandoned places that makes them so fascinating? After all, they’re just places where nobody is. There are loads of places where nobody is. Nobody is at home when you’re at work, but your home isn’t fascinating. It’s just your home.

Perhaps it’s not just the lack of people that makes these places interesting. Perhaps it’s more to do with what’s been left behind. Paperwork, bits of art, musical instruments, scrap metal, tools, chairs, typewriters, shoes – items that were once used every day, now discarded. Perhaps it’s these discarded items, the spaces they inhabit, and the stories – real and mythical – that set our imaginations racing.

Urban Exploration (Urbex) is pretty popular in Australia. It’s a movement based on the idea of exploring places we might walk past every day, and digging deeper into our immediate surroundings.

Luckily, Urbexers have something of a "photos or it didn't happen" mentality, which means there are plenty of albums available on the internet for us to get spooked out over.

1. Red Hill Skate Rink, Brisbane

Built in the 1920s and destroyed by fire in 2002, Brisbane's Red Hill Skate Rink has been left abandoned ever since. There have long been plans to breathe new life into the building – as well as plans to bowl it over and turn it into apartments – but nothing seemed to take hold, and for a long time it looked as though the rink was destined to decay forever. But in 2017, two cinema-owning brothers declared that they’d restore the place to a cinema (it was a cinema before it was an ice rink, between the ‘40s and ‘60s). Watch this (abandoned) space.

2. South Fremantle Power Station, Perth

Abandoned powerstation, Perth
© Nate Robert

Opened in 1954 and closed in 1985, the South Fremantle Power Station enjoyed only a brief life. Now a kind of architectural graveyard, the station is the prime location for a bit of that urban exploring malarkey – although earlier this year, the local government announced their desire to clean it up, make it safe and turn it into an events space for the public.

3. Moyra's House, Brisbane

Probably the eeriest location on this list, nobody's really sure of the story behind this abandoned Brisbane home. There are many artefacts left – party invitations, awards, medicine, sheet music – suggesting that whatever led the occupant to leave the property, it all happened quite fast.

4. Rozelle Tram Depot, Sydney

Established in 1904 and abandoned in 1958, the Rozelle Tram Depot was like Sydney's unofficial transport museum, a monument to another time (a time when Sydney had trams). But in 2016, the sheds were rejuvenated into a fancy-pants indoor food venue, the aptly-named Tramsheds, and has since been enjoying a new lease of life.

5. Tooth & Co. Brewery, Sydney

Remarkably well preserved in places, crumbling and ruinous in others, the Tooth & Co.-owned brewery, located an hour south of Sydney, stands today as a monument to another time. Known as the Mittagong Maltings, the brewery was one of NSW’s major brewers from the 1930s up until the building was abandoned in 1981.

6. Queensland College of Arts, Brisbane

Abandoned arts college, Brisbane
© Darkday

A popular site for students of Urbex and graffiti (and vandalism), there's no shortage of awesome photos of this abandoned college on the online Urbex forums. Left to crumble since 2001, these buildings were one of Brisbane’s most popular abandoned spots until they were bulldozed in 2015.

7. Tarban Creek Asylum, Sydney

‘Abandoned asylum’ – two words with the power to send chills up and down your spine like not much else. Even spookier? There are allegedly 1000 unclaimed bodies buried underneath the building, which is formerly known as the Gladesville Hospital. We're not the superstitious types, but if there's one place on this list that's most likely to be haunted, this is it.

8. Textile factory, Brisbane

Abandoned textile factory, Queensland
© Darkday

As if everyone just up and left this place halfway through a shift, the machines in this factory are still full of cloth and fabric.

9. St John's Orphanage, Goulburn (NSW)

Once home to around 2500 boys at a time, this abandoned orphanage in Goulburn, New South Wales, is now only home to vandalism, dust and cobwebs. The orphanage shut up shop in 1978 and was taken over by a Christian mission, before closing again in the late ‘90s. A fire ripped through the building, which is said to be haunted by the ghosts of unhappy kids, in 2016.

Urban Exploration

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