Surely the Shitbox Apartments Built Inside Australia’s Most Notorious Prison Are Haunted

The colonial project of Australia has produced a modern climate of everyday horror. Sacred Indigenous sites are bulldozed to make way for highway upgrades, public housing is torn down to build developers’ wet dreams, and hideous off-the-plan housing estates offer aspiring first-home-owners the Australian dream via $600k identical shitboxes in desolate suburban sprawls deprived of green spaces, transport connectivity and hope. 

In Melbourne’s north, development is rampant and, over the past decade, the tram routes have become apartment complex corridors. 

In 2013 Coburg’s Pentridge Prison, Melbourne’s former 150-year-old psychological torture dome that once housed Ned Kelly and Chopper Reid and boasted not one but two panopticons, was purchased for redevelopment. From what developers described as a “derelict” prison, the site became Pentridge Village, a high-rise residential and shopping precinct complete with supermarkets, fancy wine bar, cinema, hotel and bespoke, private wine cellars. It’s faux-chirpy, shittily-made apartments in the desirable heart of the northside. 

When I was in university in 2016, Pentridge Village was under construction. Large development mock-ups bedecking the temp chain link fences around the site declared, horribly, “ESCAPE TO PENTRIDGE”. Enticing. Whether the gritty irony was intentional or not, the outcome would be the same. This country needed more nouveaux-bland inner-city housing for economically mobile yuppies. 

At the time, I interviewed former inmate and convicted rapist Ray Mooney, one of the many Pentridge graduates who’d turned a successful dime from their story. 

Mooney was pissed. He was pissed about “ESCAPE TO PENTRIDGE”, about the government’s greed to allow the land be sold, developed and rebuilt, about the destruction of history, the paving over of this state’s dark past with air space cafes and bars with $23 natural wines. 

“People don’t wanna live there if it’s associated with a terrible reputation of its historical past,” he said. 

“The sad story of the way it’s been developed is that it was initially presented to Heritage Victoria, that part of it needed to be kept as it was, so that future generations would have access to see it how it was. Part of the conditions were that they would need to turn it into a museum and that H. Division would need to be preserved.

“They haven’t built a museum. H Division was destroyed entirely. In two to three years’ time, that will all be gone. It will be paved alleyways, and we’ll know very little of our genuine history.”

In the years following our interview, parts of H Division were restored, including the labor yards, and a museum has been erected.

Occupying 37,000 square metres, Pentridge is ground zero for the absurd, haunting dissonance at the heart of modern Australia. Victoria’s biggest jail hosted the state’s hardest criminals and, for over a century, the bluestone walls shrouded its legacy of pain, grief and brutality. 

You’d think those ghosts remain today. 

“It's messed up. Torture-camp-vibe place – it’s awful,” Andreas, a stonemason who worked on restoring a huge stone wall at the site in 2021, told VICE. 

“You are very aware of the pain that this place has caused so many people. There's the rock-crushing area where people used to just have to stand for 12 hours a day crushing rock. And if they didn't crush enough rock, the guards would come in and just beat the shit out of them. It’s grim. It's mediaeval.”

He said that, even as a construction worker, the site had a weird energy.

“You would go have your lunch break in the shopping area or whatever. And there’d be kids running around having fun. It just feels wrong. So much bad shit went on there.”

Before accepting the job, Andreas didn’t give much thought to it. It was just a job. 

But early on, there were reports of spooky occurrences from other parts of the work site, including in D Division. Those cells are now a wine cellar. 

At Pentridge Cellars, “serious fine wine collectors” have the opportunity to store their collections in former prison cells, starting at the economical entry price of $100,000.

“We could see right away how uniquely suited [the prison] was to wine storage it was and how, given some carefully considered upgrades, we could create a boutique storage solution for any serious collector of fine wine,” the owners are quoted saying on the Pentridge Cellars website.

“Your private cellar should be as individual as you are. Each cellar was once a prison cell with its own unique number which is still present today, giving you the chance to own a piece of history and a truly personalised space.”

But Andreas said while the cellars were being constructed there were rumours multiple people had been injured falling down the stairs. They’d felt they’d been pushed, but there had been no one there. 

I wonder what could have triggered the ghosts?

Andreas also worked there in the middle of Melbourne’s lockdowns.

“To be thrown into the darkest and grimmest place in Melbourne was… fun,” he said.

And he said he experienced things out of the ordinary.

“After working at Pentridge for maybe six weeks I was in the smokers’ shed with my boss. We were the only ones in there, it was early in the morning before we started, maybe 6:50 am.

“We were making a little coffee, having a little chat, and I used the milk, then put it down and screwed the lid on the bottle, then I looked at my boss. And then the milk lid popped off with a loud noise. It popped up about 20 centimetres in the air, with more force than what could be considered normal. 

“We both looked at each other and said, ‘That’s weird’.”

He didn’t think anything of it at the time, he just assumed he’d put the milk lid on “funny”. But then, as he went about his day, he kept seeing a person in his periphery.

“And I’d turn around, and there’d be no one there,” he said.

He still didn’t think that much of it.

But when he went home that night, he began to feel haunted. Every night, Andreas would have the same dream of this old guy, melting his face and then melting other people's faces off in a waiting room. For six weeks, this continued. It wasn’t just at Pentridge, either. 

“It was everywhere. Everywhere I’d go, I’d feel like there was someone behind me,” he said. 

He wasn’t a believer in the paranormal, ghosts or hauntings. But the dreams wore on and the person was still in his periphery. He considered he could be losing his mind, so when the opportunity arose to meet with his housemate’s mum, a “witch”, who cleanses people’s houses of bad spirits, he took it.

“I explained to her and immediately she was like, oh, that’s a spirit.”

Pentridge was shuttered in 1997, and sold by the Victorian Government to developers Luciano Crema and Harry Barbon in partnership with Peter and Leigh Chiavaroli in 1999. 

The Shayher Group, a Taiwanese-backed Australian private company, acquired Pentridge in 2007. The acquisition purportedly would preserve the historic site as its land increased in value, the new Pentridge, Westfield-ified as it has been, presents an even more disturbing reality than if they’d just tore it down. The Pentridge Stockade was razed to make apartments, now you can take a shortcut through dappled roundabouts down Stockade Avenue. As they restored the disrepaired buildings, they built new ones, too. What’s left is a disturbing mishmash of tacky modernity with horrible history. 

But, speaking with people who have lived, worked or shopped at Pentridge Village, the overwhelming estimation is that, while the concept is odd, it’s actually kind of nice there.

“I thought it was fucked up and weird, but then I went there and I was like, oh, I get it,” one Brunswick resident told VICE. 

“It kinda feels like Europe, this big fancy shopping centre inside historic architecture. Like a castle… Except it’s a prison.”

“Did my groceries there. Felt scary,” came another report from someone who lives locally. 

One person who currently works in the hotel told VICE it was all “quite surreal”.

“I do think certain parts of Pentridge are haunted but I’m more grossed out by the fact people see it as a fun ‘destination’ and spend soooooo much money there,” they said.

“The level of how boujie the hotel is, in comparison to what it formerly was, is ridiculous.”

Another current resident said: “The apartments are nice, I’m not going to lie.”

“But when I’m in a paranoid mood the light has to be on when I sleep because it is for sure haunted.”

“But,” they said, “My theory is that the ghosts would fuck with me living and smoking cones in the old prison.”

Ultimately, as icky, bizarre and laughably grim Pentridge Village is, it has succeeded in turning what was once a desolate, disturbing corner of the north into a destination. Following the settler-colonial modus operandi, uncomfortable history is painted over for the promise of building a better future for the generations to follow. Eight years later, Mooney’s fears became true – Pentridge is now all paved walkways. But hopefully we won’t forget our history. The ghosts probably won’t let us, anyway.

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