Erskine College Chapel

Peter Jackson filmed a ghost movie at this building. Then the ghosts apparently stayed.

Erskine College was a Catholic girls' boarding school that operated from nineteen-oh-six until nineteen eighty-five. The four-storey Gothic Revival convent and its Chapel of the Sacred Heart, both designed by John Sydney Swan, sit on a ridge overlooking Island Bay. The chapel, completed in nineteen thirty, is regarded as one of the finest Gothic Revival interiors in New Zealand.

In nineteen ninety-six, Jackson used the college as a filming location for The Frighteners — a horror comedy starring Michael J. Fox about a man who can see ghosts. The crumbling convent, with its long corridors and empty dormitories, was perfect.

The building has persistent ghost stories that predate the film. Apparitions of the old Mother Superior have been reported in the hallways. A bloodstain on the chapel floor allegedly reappears after cleaning. Unexplained sounds echo through the empty rooms. Whether you believe any of this is up to you, but the building has been attracting paranormal investigators for decades.

In twenty-eighteen, the Wellington Company controversially demolished all the college buildings except the chapel to build ninety-six townhouses. The chapel was restored and reopened in twenty-twenty-three at a cost of approximately seven million dollars. So the ghosts lost their convent but kept their chapel.

Island Bay is a decent bus ride from the city centre, but if you're out that way, the chapel is worth seeing. It sits incongruously among new townhouses — a Gothic spire rising above contemporary rooflines, the last piece of a building that Peter Jackson once filled with fictional ghosts, in a place that may have already had real ones.