Spine-chilling shots show inside the soon-to-be-demolished abandoned halls of a Victorian mortuary littered with death certificates.
Ben James, 32, from Cambridge, England captured eery images at the abandoned mortuary of St Luke’s Hospital in Bradford.
Ben decided to venture into the dark halls of the mortuary building after he had read of the plans to have it demolished, due to it posing serious health and safety risks and taking up well-needed space in the inner-city hospital in Bradford.
Images show how death certificates and mortuary cards were left to rot after the mortuary closed in 2010.
Another spooky shot showed the real lockers that held the bodies after they had died.
In the 1870’s today's St. Luke’s Hospital opened as the new Bradford Union Workhouse, housing 350 paupers and a spacious infirmary equipped with every medical convenience of the day.
Then in 1898 the site reopened as a mental institution called the Cleveland Asylum, the modern-day St. Luke’s Hospital was only a fraction of the size, with only a central administration block that attached the male and female wards.
There was a separate mortuary for those who died in the mental institution, alongside a chapel and isolated buildings for contagious patients.
From 1915, the St. Luke’s Hospital came under the control of the War Office, and at the end of World War I, St. Luke’s had 1,700 beds, but would need more as the dawning of World War II came when the hospital joined the Emergency Medical Service in 1939.
192 seriously wounded servicemen were brought to the hospital directly from the beaches of Dunkirk, seeping the hospital grounds even deeper in British history.
Although the medical site is steeped in history, attempts to list the building in 1995 and 2009 failed, forcing it to lay abandoned and decaying from 2010.
The council have therefore planned to demolish the site after they had received numerous complaints of theft, vandalism and even arson at the residence for years from the public.
This didn’t deter Ben however, as once inside the building he discovered a multitude of death certificates from as early as the 1970s, and mortuary cards.
When looking at the images taken and the raw footage of Ben roaming through the abandoned halls, it’s not hard to feel uneasy seeing the medical equipment and death certificates that have been abandoned since 2010, but Ben feels more of a morbid curiosity rather than fear.
“These places don’t feel creepy, just eerily quiet - people assume all these places are haunted but what they forget is, the people who came here were already dead when they arrived,” he said.
“I read a local report that this was getting demolished so I figured I would go take a look.
“The mortuary has been in use since the 1970s and closed around 2010 so it’s quite a special feeling to see somewhere that’s literally been closed off from the world for so long, like a locked up museum of death.
“I liked seeing the biopsy reports from the 1970s and the death certificates and mortuary cards - finding some records of souls who passed through these places is always special.
“I travel all over the world photographing death related places such as mortuaries and funeral homes so I’m always on the lookout.”
