Kingseat Hospital

Kingseat Hospital
Spookers
The site of the former Kingseat Hospital in 2008, nine years after closure.
Geography
Location	Karaka, Auckland Region, New Zealand
Organisation
Hospital type	Psychiatric
History
Founded	February 1932
Closed	July 1999
Links
Lists	Hospitals in New Zealand

Kingseat Hospital is a former psychiatric hospital that is considered to be one of New Zealand's notorious haunted locations with over one hundred claims of apparitions being reported, as of 2011. It is located in Karaka, New Zealand, south of Auckland and since 2005 has been used as a site for Spookers; and since 2013 a site for Asylum Paintball and Laser Combat; three New Zealand attractions. Spookers is believed to be Australasia's only haunted attraction scream park as of 2011, and "the number 1 Haunted Attraction in the Southern Hemisphere". According to stuff.co.nz, Kingseat Hospital is the number one haunted spot in New Zealand.

The construction of Kingseat Hospital began in 1929 when twenty patients from a nearby mental institution came to the site along with twelve wheelbarrows and ten shovels. Dr. Henry Bennett was originally the former owner of Kingseat hospital in the 1950s. Kingseat Hospital was named after a hospital in Aberdeenshire, Scotland following Dr. Gray (the Director-General of the Mental Health Division of the Health Department at the time) returning from an overseas trip, who felt it appropriate to have a sister hospital with the same name in New Zealand. Flower gardens, shrubs and trees were grown in the grounds of Kingseat Hospital such as surplus plants from the Ellerslie Racecourse and Norfolk Island pines originally seeds from Sir George Grey's garden on Kawau Island.

Kingseat Hospital was in operation from 1932. In 1939, the Public Works Department and Fletcher Construction Company, Ltd. agreed on the construction of a two-storey nurses home at Kingseat Hospital, with the government to provide the steel for the building. The hospital grew throughout the mid-late 1930s and 1940s to such an extent that by the beginning of 1947, there were over eight hundred patients. During the 1950s, Dr. Henry Bennett (the man whom the mental health wing at Waikato Hospital is named after) was a senior medical officer of health at Kingseat Hospital. From 1964, nursing staff at Kingseat were given name tags to wear on their uniforms. In 1968, certain nurses at Kingseat Hospital went on strike, which forced the administration to invite unemployed people and volunteers to assist within the hospital grounds with domestic chores. In 1973, a therapeutic pool was opened by the then-Mayoress of Auckland, Mrs. Barbara Goodman, four years before the main swimming pool was added to the hospital in 1977. The site celebrated its 50th anniversary jubilee in 1982. During the 1970s and 1980s, there were many places attached to psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand where alcoholics were treated for their drinking addictions and Villas 4 and 11 at Kingseat Hospital served this purpose. In later years, the hospital accepted voluntary patients. In 1996, South Auckland Health sold Kingseat Hospital after government decisions to replace ongoing hospitalisation of mentally ill patients with community care and rehabilitation units. This led to the eventual closure of Kingseat Hospital in July 1999, when the final patients were re-located off the complex to a mental health unit in Otara.