Each issue, we investigate the most ghostly buildings in Britain. Here, we take a look at Newsham Park Hospital in Liverpool
The rusting beds, trolleys and wheelchairs still littering the wards of derelict Newsham Park Hospital aren’t the only throwbacks to the place’s past. That’s because long-dead patients are among the ghosts rumoured to haunt the creepy abandoned buildings on the vast hospital site.
Sanatorium of SCARES!
Opened in September 1874, the building was originally an orphanage for the children of sailors lost at sea.
Conditions were grim, with siblings split up and harsh punishments inflicted for rule-breaking.
In 1954, the site became a hospital with a large psychiatric unit, and was then used as an asylum from 1992 until its closure in 1997.
Numerous hospital and asylum staff reported eerie encounters there.
In May 2017, John Gray, who worked on the hospital’s reception and switchboard for 13 years until 1986, told The Liverpool Echo he still had nightmares after being left traumatised by his time there. John said: ‘You could feel the evil when you walked in. It was in the atmosphere. When I was made redundant, I could not have got out of there quick enough.
‘So many people saw things. Staff were terrified to go to parts of the hospital because of the paranormal activity.’
John described several chilling encounters in the hospital.
He claimed on one terrifying occasion, he was in the basement when he saw a headless phantom wearing a white coat walk through a wall.
John said he also spotted the ghost of a woman in Victorian dress, whom he believed was the spirit of an orphanage matron, standing on the stone staircase in the reception area. It’s reported that hospital patients often saw and talked to the spirits of children still haunting the site from its days as an orphanage.
And in one particularly blood-curdling account, a nurse who claimed to have seen a ghostly apparition was found dead in the hospital’s main corridor just a short time later.
Today, the Grade II-listed hospital is widely regarded as one of the most haunted places in the UK, and is a firm favourite with ghost hunters.
Paranormal investigators experience intense supernatural activity in many parts of the vast site, including the nurses’ accommodation, orphanage school house and chapel.
In the mortuary, complete with fridges whose doors hang open to reveal drawers where bodies were stored, dragging noises are
