Haunted Hospitals and Cruel Fates: The Asylum Escape Room

Have you tried the hardest escape room at Krakit yet? That’d be the Asylum room—where you find yourself sentenced to life in a psychiatric institution, with only 45 minutes before you’ll be put into a permanently sedated state. Unless, of course, you can crack the room and escape.

Insane asylums have long spooked us—and for good reason. They were places where some truly terrible medical cruelties took place and where people were locked away for their entire lives, often with no real medical reason by today’s standards. Though a relic of an earlier age, the psychiatric hospital still haunts our cultural psyche, appearing in everything from X-Files to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to American Horror Story.

But these places aren’t just in pop culture—they really existed, and over the last few decades many have been simply abandoned. Unsurprisingly, plenty of these institutions come with tales of tragedy, haunting, and other supernatural phenomena.

Riverview Hospital, Coquitlam, British Columbia

Located right in the backyard of our Vancouver escape room is Riverview Hospital, an abandoned facility in Coquitlam that shut down in 2012, nearly a century after it first opened. It’s often used as a spooky setting for filming, from Supernatural to Watchmen, but it has its own real-life haunting tales. People claim to have heard laughing, snickering, whispering voices on the top floor, when no one else was around.

Liff Hospital, Dundee, Scotland

Westgreen Asylum, 1897 (CC-BY 3.0)

Called the Dundee Lunatic Asylum at the time of its construction in the late 1800s, this hospital saw thousand of patients pass through its halls before its closure in 2013. People have heard footsteps on its staircases—with no one to be found when they sought the cause. Many of the hospital buildings have now been turned into private housing. (No thanks!)

Rolling Hills Asylum, East Bethany, New York

Rolling Hills Exterior (Photo: Paranormal Skeptic CC-BY 3.0)

Established in early 1827, this now-abandoned asylum is known for some extreme paranormal activity, including apparitions involving voices, footsteps, touches, and more. No wonder, since there’s a reported 1,700 bodies buried on the property. It shut down in 1974, and now it’s the scene of ghost tours, horror movie nights, and ghost hunts.

Aradale Mental Hospital, Ararat, Australia

Ararat Mental Asylum, 1880 (CC-BY 3.0)

Definitely one of the most massive mental hospitals ever constructed, Aradale is made up of more than sixty buildings. Constructed in 1867, the hospital had tens of thousands of patients, and more than 13,000 of them died on the premises. The hospital complex, decommissioned in 1998 and turned into a college campus, is said to have several haunting hot spots, from patients who never left—even after death—to inexplicable cold winds blowing through its halls.

Get thrills and chills as you try to escape the Asylum at Krakit Escape Game, on the border of Burnaby and Coquitlam, by booking here: http://bookeo.com/krakit.