My Two Nights Behind Bars!

In Napier Backpackers Prison!

We'd heard along our travels of people staying in a hostel that used to be a prison, we'd also heard that it was suppose to be haunted but thought it'd be cool to stay in a prison cell all the same!

When we got there, the realisation hit us...this used to be a prison! You entered a big wooden solid door to get in the place being shown to our cell (cell 18) on the south wing, where the door that was bolted from the outside. Inside the cell itself was quite confortable! All around the place were clues it used to house criminals...a room called Death Row, messages and names carved into the walls, out the back there was the Hanging Yard and graveyard where those executed were buried standing up!

I wasn't that freaked out on my first night but then we did the Prison tour the next morning and learnt that the prison used to be a lunatic asylum before it was a prison. I suddenly got the shivers...if I had learnt anything from films, it's that ex-lunatic asylums spell trouble! I started watching where the hostel's cat's eyes lingered in the hanging yard (on a bird's nest as it turned out) and that night after dinner while watching Black Adder, a fellow traveller told of how people have heard voices and seen a ghostly woman walking through the corridors. It was not so easy to get to sleep that night, especially as I was straining my ears to hear something!

The rest of Napier town was rebuilt in the 1930's after the big 1931 erathquake so all the bulidings are Art-deco...very pretty!