DIARY OF A GHOST HUNTER

Flying is a little like going into labour. Its frightening. Its painful, unless you use drugs. And..once its over your brain blocks it out because you are likely never to do it again  - and you REALLY don't want to remember what it was like the last time you did it. So..after a 14 hour long haul to Dubai and then a 7 hour stretch to Birmingham we landed with a sigh of relief to be finally extricated from the sounds of children wailing, as if they were being scalded in boiling water, and the constant drone of freezing air conditioning in the plane which saw me wrap myself cocoon like in three airline blankets to raise my temperature  back enough to allow for blood flow. The 360 Airbus is huge and I rather not think about how the f**k they get it to stay up in the air. The food was not news worthy. It's worth the 24 hours of being curled up like a centipede, that has had its life threatened, to now be looking out of a window onto a sunny sky and the knowledge that my a...

Today is my birthday. I am 59 years old. I am proud to have reached this milestone with my sanity mostly intact. There where certainly times when I thought I had lost it completely and my own silliness led me down pathways that I regret, in hindsight. But...this path is what it is. It has been filled with ghosts. Mostly of my choosing. Strange, that most haunted people will tell you that they would wish otherwise. They long for their nightmares to just go away. Yet I have spent my life trying to work out who these energies are and why they have been around steadily pushing me in one direction as I mostly screamed and pushed in another. The ghosts I have struggled with most are remnants of the terrors I inherited from my parents. They are the manifestations of fear so deeply ingrained into their psyches through a war they barely survived which then became my nightmares. These creatures, so awful and so dark, plagued my mind as a child, becoming so real that I...

I have just returned from a weekend in Aradale, Victoria. Aradale is about 2 hours drive from Melbourne and about an hour from Ballarat. Its a small township - and very pretty. It has a small main street, an RSL and a McDonalds. But...more importantly, it has one thing that has drawn ghost hunters to the township for many years. ARADALE MENTAL ASYLUM. Aradale Asylum was an Australian psychiatric hospital, located in Ararat, a rural city in Victoria, Australia. Now a ghost "town", Aradale was once known as the Ararat Lunatic Asylum. Aradale and its two sister asylums at Kew and Beechworth were commissioned to accommodate the growing number of "lunatics" in the colony of Victoria. Construction began in 1860 and was opened for patients in 1865. It was closed as an asylum in 1998.  At its height, Aradale had up to 900 patients yearly and is a large complex with up to 70 interesting historic abandoned buildings. https://www.aradale.com.au/aradale.ht...