Inside the gates of HELL
THIS WRITER GREW UP CLOSE TO ST BRIGID’S MENTAL HOSPITAL IN GALWAY AND ALONG WITH A GROUP OF URBAN EXPLORERS FINALLY GOT INSIDE – FINDING LONG FORGOTTEN RELICS AND AN UNSETTLING SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE...
For over ten years, I’ve been researching and writing about the now-infamous St Brigid’s mental hospital in Co Galway. Originally built in 1833 to house 200 dangerous, insane criminals, the Ballinasloe facility had several extensions built over the decades to eventually house over 2,000 patients by 1990. It closed its doors completely in 2013.
The inside of St Brigid’s was first shown on RTÉ in Today Tonight’s damning expose in 1982, in which reporter Hilary Orpen delivered a stinging critique. ‘To enter here is like a descent into hell,’ she assessed. The programme showed footage of slumped bodies, stained walls and sparsely furnished wards.
‘The dark and squalid accommodation reeks of excrement, and the mentally handicapped sit and rack and moan,’ reported Hilary. ‘They are forgotten people, abandoned here for life, incarcerated here, and have committed no crime; they reside in these conditions due to “less than average intelligence”.’
The tone of the report and the ensuing press coverage highlighted how facilities in St Brigid’s were widely regarded as inadequate.
Growing up, I was always attuned to the folklore of the hospital and was captivated by the mystery surrounding it. I wanted to see inside the buildings for myself. Recently, I set about trying to find someone to get me inside. I quickly discover I’m not alone in my quest. I learn the hospital is legendary among a group of people called urban explorers (urbex) and has earned the moniker ‘Asylum X’.
There are many of these individuals and teams around the world who venture inside derelict buildings and record the decay, and their unspoken code sets them apart. True urbex explorers don’t vandalise or disrupt anything within the buildings, but simply record and share photos of the decay that has occurred naturally over the decades of abandonment. I spend days trying to trace some of the first of these explorers to visit St Brigid’s – names like Camera Shy and Disco Kitten come up in my research but are no longer active online and their trails run cold.
I manage to contact a photographer, @TrueBritishMetal, who had visited in 2016. His incredible photos act as a catalogue of a near-pristine, albeit abandoned, hospital, just before vandals and thieves destroyed