The Haunted hostel

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On our road trip we stopped at a University town called Dunedin. We found a hostel just out of the town centre and booked into it.

The guy working there gave us the grand tour of the place. It was an old building nice solid looking place with big spacious rooms, big hallway with a wide old style staircase that doglegs round up to the first floor.

He showed us the room he had for us, it was nice and big had two wash basins in it which was unusual but handy we thought because the shower rooms are separate and down the hall as usual. There was a window on the rear wall but it had been bricked up and there were another couple of doors in the room one of which had been boarded up at some point to separate it from what would have once been a through way and the other was still a door but locked by a padlock.

The room had three beds and when James enquired as to why?, the guy replied "one for each of you and one for the ghost". We responded to this with one of those fake laughs that you give out of politeness to a rubbish joke from someone you've only just met and we thought no more of it.

We said we'd take the room and went back to reception to pay there was a skeleton hand severed from the wrist on the reception desk and I also noticed a collection of surgical tools and an old fashioned ceramic hospital bed pan. I thought these were an odd collection of things to have in a hostel reception but again didn't give it any more thought than that at the time.

It wasn't till we'd checked in that I was walking around and noticed that there were ghosts hanging up like Halloween decorations from the ceilings in the hallways all around the hostel. I thought back to the guys comments about the third bed being for 'the ghost' and realised that maybe it wasn't just a rubbish joke there must be more to this.

The whole place was very quiet and we seemed to be the only guests staying here. I was walking around downstairs and it was empty then I found this woman. She seemed to work there so I asked "what's with all the ghosts hanging up everywhere' she proceeded to explain that the building used to be a hospital years ago and that it is thought to be haunted. She said that over the years travellers from different parts of the world have reported seeing the same things like an old man wandering around in the hallways.

It was only later that night as I was standing brushing my teeth at one of the two wash basins that I thought to myself they had unusual tap fittings, more like a shower head. I then thought, it's a strange design to have two sinks that have two windows in front of them looking into the part of the room where our beds were. At about this point everything fell into place and I realised that we were sleeping in what would have been the operating theatre.

I did actually see a lot of spirits that night....but they were all at the bottom of my glass we had a pretty good night out in Dunedin. A couple of other lads did actually turn up at the hostel and they are from Brakley so we all went out together. Went to a club in an old church and finished up the night in a Drum and Base joint.

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Photos

The twin basins
...which I latter realised were the scrub up sinks looking through to our room/what was the operating theatre