Sometime in in early 2012, while I was staying with my parents, I found a place not far from that old house that I never knew existed. I was driving, and began following a narrow, overgrown road up a steep and densely bush-covered hill just outside a small South Island town. It was only the fact that this scanty country road was asphalt- not gravel- that caught my eye, and suggested that it may have more to it than one of the thousands of other nondescript little roads this country has. Halfway up the hill- on a criminally tight double-back, I passed an old fashioned iron lamp post- small, hunched and ornate- with a large opaque bulb behind a rusted cage. It was clearly very old, and completely out of place, given the surrounding green tangle. Up ahead the road suddenly opened out onto a wide, level plateau- only slightly less bushy- with a scattering of old faded timber buildings- obscured by resurgent undergrowth and the limbs of a few ancient trees.
This was a village- or had once been- and was now slowing slipping out of reality. A few sun-baked asphalt lanes, choked with weed and lichen, spread left and right, but all was slowly being reclaimed by a green swell. Bush crowded peeling timber buildings, creepers climbed bowing walls and sagging roofs, and moss buried the low cracked kerbs and spread across the road. I drove along slowly- stunned- turning my head back and forth as the car crept through the still silence- its thick tires cracking brittle stones.
I was awed by my find- having strayed suddenly from the familiar, living world to a place outside- lost and forgotten. It was unnerving- the silence, the emptiness and the obvious age- a cross-section revealing the vast and terrible reality of time. I was 200 meters from a rural highway and I had stumbled upon a hidden town- vanished from sight and memory. What was this place? Where had the people gone?
But there were people there. I rode along- surveying my discovery, and only faintly feeling intrusive, and suddenly, there they were- still and unseen at first, with furtive, shadowed faces hanging in open-doorways and behind glass- small children sitting silent on dusty doorsteps under hot verandas- and all quiet, all watching. They lived in the houses I had taken to be ruins- houses baked and beaten bare by hammering rain and piercing sun, covered in moss and mold and overgrown with countless years of neglect and indifference- buildings that rightly should have been abandoned, but were not.
I don’t know who those people were- the last desperate inheritors of old timber, or vagrant settlers, happy to claim what had been abandoned. Here was a ghost town, and these people where its ghosts- pale and stony-eyed in the bright daylight.
There may have been 25 buildings, but it was hard to tell without following every trailing, green-clad road to its extent. Amongst these was a 40 meter high concrete water tower, a small warehouse building with a long smokestack, a blue-edged swimming pool with green water and some kind of pump-station, housing derelict engines. All ruined- all with broken doors and smashed windows and mud-caked floors.
But deeper into the plateau I found the largest and strangest derelicts- sprawling single-storied, gable-roofed timber buildings, like old school-houses or small hospitals- classically arranged, with a large central box as the entrance, and long symmetrical wings branching left and right with frail timber-mullioned windows. There were four- distributed separately and in isolation around the plateau, with different orientations and varying landscaping- all overgrown- but all with the same identical footprint.
I left in a state of exhilaration, but it wasn’t long before I was back, as once away, I immediately discovered that those structures I had taken to be strangely large and frequent school-houses or clinics were in fact the abandoned remains of an old hospital; the scattered wards of what was once ‘Seaview Mental Asylum’.
See entire photostream here 'Seaview Hill'
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