Luster Sanatorium

Last summer I was driving. It is late, it is incredibly warm and we are on a summer holiday. My mum was in the passenger seat, my dad was sleeping outstretched in the backseat. Suddenly, I spot something. I pull over. What on earth is that?! I’ve spotted something massive and white on the hillside across the fjord. It appears to be a building of sorts, but I cannot imagine what it would be doing up there. After all, we are in the middle of nowhere in one of the least densely populated areas in Norway... by my estimation at least, and this thing is in the middle of the forest up on a mountain. I grab something from the backseat that turns out to be my dad’s leg and not the 55-250 mm zoom-lens for my camera that I had meant to get. Having awoken him anyway I start to question him about this building he was on about earlier, that I had paid little attention to. Hadn’t he said there was a Tuberculosis sanatorium turned mental institution turned home for refugees in a remote location somewhere around here? Could that be the place I wonder aloud as I carefully mount the more appropriate lens on my camera. He agrees that it probably is. I point my camera in the right direction and zoom in to get a good shot of what looks disturbingly like the Overlook Hotel, straight out of the Shining, and so terribly misplaced that it is in fact wildly fascinating.

For the remainder of the evening and the following day I talk enough about this to inspire my mum to ask the manager of the nearby hotel we stay at if he knows what building it is. He identifies it as Harastølen aka Gamle Luster Sanatorium and I get something to go on, water on my mill if you will.

As soon as we get home and I am reunited with my beloved computer, I start to research this place. I come upon massive amounts of images and quite a bit of information on the history of the place. Almost a year later (in May I think), I still haven’t forgotten about it, and neither has a friend of mine who’s ears are probably still recovering from my talking about it and the surrealness of it. She sends me a link on facebook. It’s a news story about how the sanatorium is going to be demolished. Now we need to get a move on if we want to see it.

By the end of the summer the sanatorium is brought up again, and still not by me. I’m really stressed out after having to be the boss of my lazy brother at work all through the summer, which starts with him actually doing as he is told, goes on to him being rude and obnoxious and me being a total doormat, before culminating with me telling him to fuck off and do as I say and ignoring mean comments on how I handle things. Quite a bit of growing up in other words. This leaves my mum very uneasy and a bit desperate to pull me out of the bad mood that I have settled in. She finally comes up with a solution. We are to go on a road trip of my choice for the holyday that I have been intending to force on her all summer. “Maybe we can go and have a look at that house even?” she suggests while carefully monitoring my gloomy face for any sign of change. “What house?” I ask, genuinely puzzled. “You know, the one we saw last summer. The one you wanted to see!”. As the realization that she is actually talking about the sanatorium start to materialize in my brain, I gradually start to light up a notch.

The next day, I start planning the trip. Someone more capable of rational thinking might think it useful and smart to lay out a plan of each day in equal amounts of detail, but not me apparently. For the second day, the plan was that I had the road memorized from last year and therefore we would go there. For the third day I had sort of memorized a few of the major shifts in direction I could see on the map and my plan was mostly to go on sheer luck and road signs as I had never been in the area before and find the GPS increasingly annoying. I can still hear it going “Sving til venstre. Sving til venstre! ...snu når det er mulig!” and “ta en u-sving!” implying that it is very wrong of me to stop at a gas station. The first day however, was not to go wrong in any way. By the help of various forums, Google Maps and NAF Veibok (the Norwegian Car Association’s Road Book, or something to that effect) I had mapped out the road in my head and calculated the time it would take to get there as accurately as possible. Google Maps gave me the estimated time needed to get to Luster and I could even decide where to leave the main road by help of Google StreetView. Though the little Google-car hadn’t bothered going all the way up, I read somewhere that the road up is about 7 km long and have suffered some serious decay. With a somewhat optimistic assumed average speed of 30 km/h, this should take about 14 minutes. Had I been as good a shrink to myself as I sometimes pride myself on, I might have seen in advance that this trip was basically over after the first day. My assumed average speed was indeed a bit optimistic as the road had an incredible amount of dents in it and our all too low Ford Focus just wasn’t built for this sort of treatment. I managed to keep my cool while my mum was growing slightly panicky in the passenger seat, and couldn’t help but smile a bit at the ridiculous road. It really was almost surreal that this road would go on for 7 km in this awful condition, let alone actually lead somewhere! It was quite entertaining.

When we finally caught sight of the large white building I was ecstatic... and was a little bit out of it after having to work so hard on keeping the underside of the car off the ground. It turns out we are not alone though. A car is parked by the building and there is a group of 4-5 people around my age that seem to have just arrived. They look as if they’ve been caught red handed and watch us verily as we pull in. I figure they are out in the same errand as us and put up an effort to act disarming and quickly get out my camera, hoping to calm them down since I’m of a very sensitive nature and their nervousness is almost painful to see and effectively wearing off on me. We all soon calm down and start to venture along the impressive length of the building. It soon becomes clear that the sanatorium had grown to massive proportions in my head and was slightly less massive in reality. I actually, quite unfounded, felt that it was a bit small, though it obviously wasn’t. Another thing that had grown out of proportion was the scare factor. When we neared the end of the main building we spot a man coming out of it. This turns of to be the owner of the building that informs us that there is no chance of having a look around inside today but we are welcome to have a look around the outside so long as we stay clear of falling tiles and bricks in order to keep ourselves from being beheaded. While my mum stays around to chat with the owner, I take off in search of something. I search around the front and later around the back for the fear that felt so tangible and real while I was anticipating it at home in front of the computer screen. It has been a year since I first lay eyes on this thing from afar and ever since I’ve been imagining how scared I would be just being in the presence of such a vast abnormality. Maybe my homemade therapy consisting of taking long walks alone in the dark on a daily basis has paid off? I don’t think that is it. As I pass by my mum and the owner again on my way to the back (this is one of the few buildings I have seen that actually has a distinguish front and back) I am told that there is no ghosts and that this place is as calm and serene as anything. No way! How can this be? But clearly the guy is right. He should know. Deep inside I know I wouldn’t be walking around on my own like this if I were as entrance by the scariness of this building as I had almost planned to be. Even the fact that the second floor lights are on is explained as easy and logically as the flick of a switch by a fully human hand. What a bummer. Despite the raw beauty of such a massive structure falling apart bit by bit, I feel strangely cheated by my lack of fear. This leads me to feel very unhappy that I would not be able to see the inside of it. This place was as serene a cemetery in the afternoon. A cemetery is only scary with darkness to go with it and properly seasoned by an imagination that blows new life into the ground and gives every movement as natural as can be a taste of messages from the beyond. Believe me, I should know about cemeteries working the summer job that I do. I even accidentally locked a woman in a church once, and she wasn’t even scared.

I still don’t think my great fearlessness is responsible for this experience that was at first almost annoying. Just a week earlier I had been getting very jumpy just nearing an old decaying lighthouse that I keep feeling compelled to come back to for some abnormal reason despite feeling so strongly repelled by it when I actually get there that it feels almost like a physical wall in front of me should I dare to venture just a few meters away from the others (I’ve found that going there alone is futile) and I am in the very annoying habit of almost immediately starting to inquire about whether we are going to leave soon.

I could only be annoyed for so long though. Now I gleefully enjoy the fact that it wasn’t scary. Especially on a day like today when everything is so great I’m almost jumping up and down. The whole experience was weird and interesting and fresh and unexplained and unexpected, like I’ve found a little glitch or a bug in the universe that no one has thought to sort out. What could be better? Just look at me writing this text! I started just past midnight and was going to write for half an hour tops. The next thing I know it’s 4 am! I feel like I could write a book about this place!

Here are some pictures that I almost forgot to add between thinking to myself what a great day this:

I very strongly felt the need to add something that might have been scary had it been real or at least remotely realistic looking:

It still almost made me jump out of my chair when I accidentally opened it on my computer and then made me laugh at my own stupidity. Those eyes are murdering me! :P