Queen’s College, Parkville

This college, founded by the University of Melbourne in 1887, was too tree-lined for me to get a proper view on Street View (I had to pull up a winter photo). I imagine it’s so passers-by and people who drive past it don’t get into accidents while trying to make sense of its complex energy. There is no fucking way a building as old as this, looking the way it does, and FACING A CEMETERY (Melbourne General Cemetery) isn’t haunted in some way. For the low price of around $30,000 a year while studying at Unimelb, you can live (and probably die) in Queen’s College.

Watswool Woo(l) Brokers, West Footscray

The string of industrial buildings along Sunshine Road in West Footscray are all pretty derelict, which lends the street as a whole to feeling pretty cursed. But there’s a difference between cursed and haunted, the latter of which this building definitely is. As a kid, my mum would drive into the city to pick up my dad from work (he doesn’t drive), and this would be one of the buildings we’d pass. Passing this building, it isn’t that difficult to imagine hearing the wool auctions taking place, to see people loading massive crates of the stuff into pickup trucks or vans. It doesn’t seem at all maintained; the fencing placed around it has been broken into, the grass patchy and wild, the lettered signage falling off slowly, one by one, and the grotesques of a sheep’s head on each end of the street-facing side, their piercing gaze staring into your soul. Compelling you to take off that woollen jumper (or it could just be summer. You decide).

McDonald’s, Clifton Hill

You know how buildings owned by fast-food companies often have a certain ‘look’ to them? Most McDonald’s stores look fairly similar. Their buildings are normally more modern in architecture, incorporating the brand colours, and offering an inoffensive, soul-crushing aesthetic. The building itself is one of many things that tie down to the experience, everything about said experience screaming ‘McDonald’s’.

That isn’t the case at all for this store. Imagine being drunk or stoned with your friends, and suggesting a Macca’s run. While traipsing and winding through the streets of North Fitzroy and Clifton Hill, you come across this two-storey art deco building, one of the most intact examples of its kind in the city. Situated on Queens Parade, this heritage-listed store is often called ‘the most beautiful McDonald’s in the world’. If that sentence alone doesn’t haunt you, I don’t know what will.

Queen Victoria Market, CBD

I could make a cheap joke here about this place’s status as a tourist trap being the source of its haunted-ness. And that’s a good part of it (trying to walk through the market is a fucking nightmare). But there’s more to it than that. In a part of Melbourne where most things are open until fairly late, there’s something pretty cursed about an area as large as the Queen Vic being completely shut down by 3pm (5pm on a good day). I also recall an exchange student from California telling me, a couple of months ago, about how the car park was originally the site of Melbourne’s first cemetery. I was staying the night at his apartment, which looked over the market. I didn’t get much sleep last night. Was it because I found him cute? Actually, yeah, partly.

Amcor Paper Mill, Alphington

Funnily enough, this was the building that inspired me to write this piece. I can recall times I’ve driven past it with friends before, but not intentionally. Literally the only times we’ve driven past it are when accidentally finding our way onto the Eastern Freeway. After doing some research, there is literally nothing about this building that isn’t haunting. The company the building belonged to was fined in 2008 for dumping oil into the Yarra River, adding to an already pretty extensive history of pollution and corruption.

Now? They’ve sold the building off to developers, who are turning the land into soul-less ‘smart’ housing that boring people will move themselves and their matched Ikea furniture into, living their boring lives. Travelling to their boring, 9-5, Monday to Friday jobs in their boring smart cars to go home, watch boring prime time commercial TV and eat boring food for dinner before going to bed at half past boring in the evening. Doomed, from beginning to end, and even after the building is gone. It makes my blood boil.