The Spookers Experience

Jack, Anon. & Bronwyn At Spookers (6/11/15)

My birthday treat this year was a visit to Spookers. Spookers, for those of you who don't know, is a kind of creepy amusement part which has been set up in some old buildings at the back of Kingseat, once a dreaded Auckland mental hospital.

"How tasteless, how vulgar!" I hear you say. You don't know the half of it! The whole thing is in supremely bad taste, and is - perhaps as a result? - a huge amount of hokey fun.



The approaches

We'd hardly got out of the car before we were accosted by a particularly belligerent member of the walking dead, waving a cleaver, and from there things only got stranger. There was a kind of do-it-yourself enthusiasm about the staff: mad nurses, vampires, zombies, ghosts and all. They seemed determined to demonstrate their acting chops, and for all our fine talk beforehand, it wasn't long before we too were running and squealing like girls.



Closer up

The rather posed studio photo at the top of the page is optional, but I think you'll agree that it would be a shame to leave without such a memento of one's stay. And - all the gallons of fake blood, dusty hospital rooms, and chainsaws aside - there's no denying that Kingseat itself is genuinely creepy.

There were moments as we drove along the long deserted road from the motorway, penetrating further and further into the hinterland, when I began to feel like one of the cast of The Locals, my all-time favourite New Zealand rural paranoia film.



They're Dying to Meet You

I suppose, as a serious student of the paranormal, I should feel ashamed of going to such places. Guess what? I'm not. It was very entertaining, and there was clearly something about me that particularly riled the ghosts (the fact that I was thirty or so years older than virtually everyone else there might have helped). Not even the Guinness t-shirt Bronwyn persuaded me to wear could persuade them that I wasn't some kind of patronising intellectual looking for something to slag off.

Anyway, I survived (though I haven't yet heard the last of that moment in the forest when I inadvertently lost track of Bronwyn behind for a moment whilst fleeing from an axe-wielding fiend. "Hey, you left your lady behind," I could hear them shouting after me. Her own remarks on the subject were rather more succinct - which I think was a little rich, given the number of times she'd already thrust me in the way of ghouls of zombies to facilitate her own escape ...)

I highly recommend it - but probably with something resembling the proviso Dylan Thomas added to his praise of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds: "Just the kind of book to give your sister - if she's a loud, dirty, boozy kind of girl." That shouldn't present too many challenges for most of my readers, surely?



The Original Version