St. Annes Apartments

Milly33

Does anyone here live in any of them? I have never meet someone who does and would like to know since there are always people saying tis haunted do they have any tales of the place..

love going up for a wonder there would like to see them inside

who_me

Don't live there, but did look at buying there before I bought my current home. The apartments themselves are nice enough, from memory they aren't huge but with high ceilings aren't so bad. The windows though are very narrow (but tall!) so I found them a little claustrophobic, which maybe added a little to the spookiness. Not sure why (I'm not especially superstitious) but I'd be a bit wary of living in a converted asylum, something very creepy about the place.

Milly33

Ive tried to google them but not a lot shows. We were thinking that with the ceilings they must be very high.. I have heard a lot of people saying you get vibes from places like this but I ponder then were they just a bit scared.. but there must be a certain air to the area...

murphym7

I always imagined the place to be a bit like living in the apartments in that TV show Bedlam. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1822448/

Flesh Gorden

Even though one of my great gran-mothers died in one of the asylums, It wouldn't bother me to live in one.

The supernatural would be the last thing on my mind compared to:

- Chances of the unfinished half being vandalized and being set alight
- The cost of keeping the place warm considering the age and design of the place

Faith

Flesh Gorden wrote: »

Even though one of my great gran-mothers died in one of the asylums, It wouldn't bother me to live in one.

The supernatural would be the last thing on my mind compared to:

- Chances of the unfinished half being vandalized and being set alight
- The cost of keeping the place warm considering the age and design of the place

We looked into renting there and they were also our concerns. I'm pretty sure the unfinished bit is inhabited by all sorts of undesirable types, so I was also a bit afraid of that.

Milly33

Ah I was hoping to hear some spook stories

angeline

Would love to have gotten a chance to go in to St Kevin's before they closed it off. Did drive around there once though, well creepy...www.abandonedireland.com gives a very good insight in to how sinister it seems.

Milly33

I know, we have tried a few times now to get in for a wonder but the best we got was the old church!! It stank of pigeon poo... Shame they do not do something with the place, i know it was very harsh for people who knew friends and family in there but there seems to be a keen interest from people to visit the building.. I remember my dad doing work up there years ago as a builder and he told me something about the padded rooms they had

rovoagho

Jesus, do people still believe in ghosts in this day and age?

Milly33

Yep yep yep I do I do!! Or I just want the bayjaysus scared out of me .. I kinda belive more in the presences rather than ghost which sure you could go on for ages, but in short yeah

angeline

I don't believe in ghosts but I most certainly believe that there would be an intensely sinister and sad atmosphere in St Kevin's. Consider the huge amount of people who were wrongly incarcerated there and eventually died in that building after a traumatic and distressing existence with no way out. Read the reports of Inspectors who visited the place in the 1930s. It says enough.

celica00

where is that report?

Faith

celica00 wrote: »

where is that report?

Copied from here: http://abandonedireland.com/skv_more.html

Extracts from reports of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals:-
(recorded under discussion at Seanad Eireann)

1934
The Inspector of Mental Hospitals visited that hospital in February of this year. St. Kevin's 5, a female ward with 28 patients, there was one toilet off the dormitory and five toilets off the dayroom which were dirty. St. Kevin's 6, a male ward with 18 patients. Some renovation work was going on in this ward. The dormitory was locked off during the day. Each patient had a wardrobe. There was no soap and no towels were available. The toilet area off the dormitory was dirty and there were no curtains on the windows. We are not talking about prisons or shelters for the homeless; we are talking about a hospital. St. Kevin's 8, female with 21 patients ó a washing machine to wash the clothes of the patients was bought from patients' money. The toilet had no seat and there were no curtains.

1935
St. Patrick's 1, male, with 22 patients; all windows in the toilet were broken and had been covered by sheets of plywood; it was dirty. One dormitory had 13 beds and had no curtains. Another dormitory had eight beds with no curtains. There was no ward programme and the whole ward lacked any visual stimulation. St. Ita's 1, female with 20 patients; the enclosed courtyard attached to the ward was littered with old clothing, toilet rolls and plastic bottles which had accumulated over several months. The dormitory with seven beds had no curtains. Many patients were in bed for the night at the time of our visit ó 5.15 p.m. Another dormitory housed ten patients and was also without curtains. Five beds were placed along one wall while on the opposite wall a structure had been erected in which five patients were separately incarcerated. Each unit was roofed in the manner of a stall and each door was closed by three farmyard bolts. Mattresses were generally on the floor. These units did not have external windows or fresh air. There was a padded cell with a mattress on the floor of this ward. Toilets had no seats and there was no soap available to patients.

1936
St. Kevin's, 9, male, 28 patients ó there is no activity in the day room. The patients sat around in armchairs waiting for bed time, which was somewhere between 5.30 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. The washhand basin area was used to store all sorts of rubbish. One window had four broken panes of glass. Again, in that area it is recommended that the 15 beds taken from the acute unit by the cutbacks be restored.

1937
Having catalogued this “chapter of horrors” as The Cork Examiner described it, the inspector went on to make some general comments about Our Lady's. I want to put these on the record of the House. The exterior of Our Lady's Hospital can only be described as filthy. Rubbish, litter, discarded toilet rolls are to be seen in profusion around the bases of the building, behind the grey building, behind St. Kevin's and in internal courtyards. Connecting corridors and walkways are dirty beyond description. Internally, some but not all wards are dirty with windows grimed with opaque matter and walls peeling. Generally wards, particularly male wards, lacked curtains. There was a general feeling of crowdedness and a great single open space in some of the dormitories and in none of them was there any satisfactory attempt at dividing sleeping areas into warm, homely comfortable subdivisions. Lavatories, too, were generally unsatisfactory with lavatory seats missing and in some cases floors dirty and wet.

1938
Then we come to general comments on Cork psychiatric services. This is the comment of the Inspector of Mental Hospitals: “Our impression of the approach to the delivery of mental health care in Cork city and county is that it is seriously deficient from a planning point of view. No clear objectives appear to have been identified, no priorities delineated and their solutions adopted. There appears to be a lack of clear lines of command and proper structured consultation. In addition, there seems to be industrial unrest which has never been adequately dealt with. This has hindered progress in providing adequate services and bringing about change."

The report continues: “Our Lady's costs approximately £10 million to £11 million annually to run. The service provided by the hospital is extremely poor and for the most part appears to provide the worst form of custodial care. The majority of patients are unoccupied and no attempt is made to provide appropriate rehabilitative inputs for them on their wards. It is our view that the board should establish and operate proper management techniques in relation to the whole Cork service. This should involve as primary objectives the prevention of further admissions to Our Lady's, which cannot provide up-to-date psychiatric care of a standard commensurate with proper human dignity, and an intensive rehabilitation programme for existing in-patients.”

1939
"I have never been so outraged as I have been by this report. I have known, and most of Cork has known or suspected that that hospital was a disgrace. That was the position until we got this independent, authoritive written document and incidentally, I did not say it at the beginning, the fact that I have it in my possession renders me in breach of the Official Secrets Act because it is not a public document but I have it and I am very glad to have it. It is among the most appalling, distressing, disturbing, offensive documents that I have ever had the misfortune to read."

1940
"The people in Our Lady's Hospital are guilty of nothing. They are vulnerable, innocent and, in the old Irish phrase, in the area of the country that the Minister comes from and that I have close connections with, they would be described as “harmless”. They do not deserve what is being done to them. They are victims of misfortune; they are victims of illness and indeed, tragically, of abandonment. They deserve our best. They have got our worst. Instead we lock them up in a vermin-infested (not my conclusion, but the inspector's conclusion) unsanitary (not my conclusion but the inspector's conclusion) dirty, dark confinement. It is a disgrace. When you consider that we make them all, old age pensioners, pay for it. We take most of their income, the best part of £40 a week from them. They pay for that confinement, that locking up in dirty unsanitary conditions. We have to and must make very fundamental choices. It is a disgrace that people have been paid large salaries, salaries twice and three times the average industrial wage to manage such an institution of confinement. Those people have failed to discharge their duties. They should resign or be sacked. They are unfit for their job. They are a disgrace to their profession and they should be dispensed with."

celica00

thank you

Milly33

it is horrible to think that it was let go on for so long.. I wonder did the inspectors try to bring a case against them or was it a case of just submit the report to empy people and it gets filed away.. Horrible horrible to think of what people were put through