Larundel Asylum: Melbourne's Abandoned Psychiatric Hospital

For decades, in the Melbourne suburb of Bundoora, a cluster of grim institutional buildings stood empty and decaying, drawing urban explorers, ghost hunters, and the simply curious into their crumbling corridors. This was Larundel, a former psychiatric hospital whose years of abandonment turned it into one of the most infamous haunted sites in Melbourne. Though much of the land has now been redeveloped, the legend of Larundel, and especially of the humming girl in Room 16, still echoes through Australian ghost lore.

Larundel's story is bound up with the troubled history of 20th-century psychiatric care, and with the eerie afterlife that abandoned institutions so often take on once the patients and staff are gone and only the empty rooms remain.

A Hospital of Its Era

Larundel opened in the mid-20th century as a psychiatric hospital, treating patients with the methods available at the time. Like many institutions of its generation, its history includes treatments and conditions that, by modern standards, were harsh, part of an era when mental illness was often poorly understood and institutional care could be bleak. Patients spent long periods inside, and the hospital became a self-contained world of wards and routines.

As approaches to mental health changed and large institutions fell out of favor, Larundel eventually closed. The buildings were left empty, and that is when the site began its second life, not as a hospital, but as a decaying monument that seemed to attract stories of the uncanny almost immediately.

The Girl in Room 16

Of all the stories that gathered around abandoned Larundel, one rose above the rest: the legend of Room 16. According to the tale, a young female patient died in that room, and her presence never left it. Urban explorers who crept through the empty wards reported hearing a soft humming, or the delicate tune of a music box, drifting from Room 16. Some claimed to see the figure of a girl standing at the window, looking out, or to feel a presence watching them as they approached.

The image is a haunting one: an empty, graffiti-covered room in a dead hospital, and the quiet sound of a girl humming to herself by the window, as though the building's long years of confinement had crystallized into a single, lingering child. The humming girl of Room 16 became the signature ghost of Larundel, repeated in countless explorer accounts and local legends.

A Magnet for Explorers

During its abandonment, Larundel became one of Melbourne's premier urban exploration sites. People drawn by the ghost stories and the eerie beauty of decay slipped into the buildings to photograph the peeling wards, the scattered debris, and the long dark corridors. Beyond Room 16, they reported the usual vocabulary of the haunted asylum: cold spots, disembodied voices, footsteps, slamming doors, and a pervasive sense of being watched.

This activity was often illegal and genuinely dangerous, the buildings were derelict, unstable, and unlit, but the pull of Larundel's reputation was strong. For a generation of Melbourne ghost hunters, a night inside Larundel was a rite of passage, and the stories they brought back kept the legend growing even as the structures crumbled.

Larundel Today

The Larundel that made such a name for itself is largely gone. Much of the site in Bundoora has been redeveloped into housing, and the derelict buildings that once drew explorers have been demolished or repurposed. Where empty wards once echoed with reported humming, people now live ordinary suburban lives. It is a common fate for famous abandoned places, reclaimed by the living, their ghosts paved over.

Yet the legend outlives the buildings. Larundel endures in memory and in the countless accounts of those who explored it, a symbol of the eerie power that abandoned asylums hold over the imagination, and of the way a single story, a girl humming in Room 16, can outlast the very walls that contained it. The hospital is nearly gone, but the humming, in the retelling, has never quite stopped.