Ghosts who walk
We New Zealanders are known for being down to earth and no-nonsense, but we have a soft spot for a story with a supernatural element.
We New Zealanders are known for being down to earth and no-nonsense, but we have a soft spot for a spooky yarn.
He wanders the Old Coach Road, between Arthur’s Pass and Cass, a spectral presence beside the old railway tracks, swag on his back. It’s the famed and reputedly friendly Otira Tunnel Ghost, the spirit of a Scotsman killed when the 8.5km tunnel was carved through wet shale and rotten rock a century ago. He’s always glimpsed heading east, trying to get to Lyttelton to catch a ship home.
Welcome to our land of haunts, where fairy creatures lurk in the misty mountains and phantoms hide in the wings of dusty old opera houses.
We can even claim a biological dimension to our spooky stuff. Some argue our native fauna are still profoundly connected to the “ghosts” of long-extinct birds, such as the moa and the haast’s eagle, with its three-metre wingspan.
Māori have long had a healthy respect for the spirit world. One had to be especially careful of the patupaiarehe hiding in mountaintops and forest glades. Light-skinned, with red or fair hair, they played on bone flutes sweet music that made women swoon – and fall into their clutches.
These mythical beings were also known as pakepakehā, and some believe that the word gave rise to the term Pakeha. Scholar Martin Wikaira notes that “to Māori, Europeans resembled the pakepakehā or patupaiarehe, with their fair skin and light-coloured hair”.
The “Ghost Chips” television advertisement for the New Zealand Transport Agency in 2011 updated the look and feel of the great New Zealand apparition, throwing in a pinch of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The advertisement, a poignant response to the high number of deaths of young Māori males on the roads, struck a chord and attracted more than a million views on YouTube within a short time.
BUMPS IN THE NIGHT
Europeans were quick to pinpoint spooky spots: ghosts usually took up residence in older hotels, theatres or hospitals, where groans emanated from dark cupboards, kettles suddenly started whistling and bumps were heard in the night.
The historic Waitomo Caves Hotel, for example, is touted as our most haunted hotel. Guests staying in the 1908 building or the art deco wing built 20 years later claim to have heard the creak of a maid’s trolley in a faraway hall, and there are wild tales of bathtubs dripping blood.
This is grisly territory. A depressed architect is believed to have hanged himself in the century-old Opera House on Manners St in central Wellington. Self-proclaimed experts in the paranormal insist that people have since had nasty accidents there.
Along the road at the iconic St James Theatre, a Russian ballet dancer named Yuri has a more benign reputation.
Former staffers claim this tall, thin, black-suited spectre, who is known for turning the lights on and off, once saved a projectionist from falling from the edge of the stage.
In recent years, frightening the punters has become big business as ghostly locales have cashed in on their spooky reputations. Kingseat Hospital, a former psychiatric institution at Karaka, on Auckland’s southern outskirts, closed in 1999 after a troubled 67-year history, including accounts of psychological and physical abuse.
Now, its old nurses’ hostel is a tourist attraction. Since 2005, the hospital, which claims as many as 100 sightings and a host of unexplained phenomena, has operated successfully as a haunted theme park: a team of actors in full terrifying makeup and costume conspire to frighten the wits out of paying customers.
Visitors learn about the spectral former staff member known as the Grey Nurse, one of the many prowling shadows glimpsed in the linoleum corridors. The chilling entertainment has drawn criticism from former Kingseat patients, but last year, a documentary called Spookers explored what it called “the most
A radar operator said the UFO looked like “Father Christmas doing a practice run with Rudolph in front”.
successful scare park in the Southern Hemisphere, which is run by a close-knit New Zealand family who try to face their own fears in order to make others face theirs”.
ALIEN ARRIVALS
Alleged sightings of visitors from space, cautiously named Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), have their own history here. Our most famous multiple sightings, made near Kaikoura in 1978, are still rated internationally as among the best documented of all time.
A few days before Christmas, nine months after the release of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, crews on board two slow-flying cargo aircraft observed a series of strange lights. A radar operator said it looked like “Father Christmas doing a practice run with Rudolph in front”.
Nine days later, an Australian TV news crew on board a Wellington-to-Christ-church flight witnessed more lights in the sky. Some were said to look like helicopters scouring the ground with searchlights. Journalist Quentin Fogarty said that from the plane, pinpricks of light became giant globes.
Ray Waru’s superb 2012 history of Archives New Zealand, Secrets and Treasures, investigates the official documents held on paranormal phenomena of this kind. He records how “a huge squashed light appeared ahead of the plane [and] objects followed the plane almost until it landed”.
“The dazzled observers said they sensed that the lights were toying with the slow-flying Argosy like dolphins; Fogarty and the crew felt as though they were in a UFO playground.”
Waru notes that in 2009, the Defence Force released its massive cache of UFO files, including an analysis of the Kaikoura “visitation”. Bureaucrats agreed that the phenomenon was unusual and suggested explanations ranging from a bending of light rays from a fleet of squid boats to a huge flock of muttonbirds and a rain of giant hailstones.
The official version was that it was the light from Venus rising. Fogarty’s title for his book on the Kaikoura lights – Let’s Hope They’re Friendly
– probably sums it up.
TERRIFYING NIGHTS
No local ghost history is complete without the tale of Cedric the Ghost. In the rugged Tararua Ranges outside Wellington, hunter Cedric Wilson vanished in the misty hills in 1945. Later parties swore they sensed his presence, with several groups experiencing terrifying nights in iconic Powell Hut.
Old tramping hands couldn’t, however, resist using the story to frighten young Scouts, as Chris Maclean relates in his 1994 book Tararua: The Story of a Mountain Range.
“[Tramper] Don Millward, dressed in [a] sleeping-bag liner, hid beside the track … and waited for the Scouts to return. When they loomed out of the mist he drifted across the track and disappeared, and quickly returned to the hut by another route.
“Soon after, the shaken Scouts arrived and told Millward and his friends the story of Cedric the Ghost.” person. Details are not visible on the image, and its shadowy outline can be distorted by the movement of the water droplets. A rainbow is nearly always seen around the spectre. When the reflected object moves, the spectre moves with it.
If the canoe image was simply a Brocken spectre, this would allow the image of the canoe to be of a greater size than the object being projected (the whaleboat) and would permit it to alter its configuration, move parallel with the whaleboat, stop when it stopped and turn when it turned. When approaching the mist, the “canoe” could look small, as the whaleboat would be being projected head on, then as the whaleboat turned, the image would appear to grow longer.
This explanation poses some difficulties. George Sise’s account said the canoe appeared to the north of their boat. This would rule out a Brocken spectre, as a northerly sighting would require the sun to rise in the south. Guide Sophia’s accounts said the tree from beneath which the canoe appeared was on the western side of the lake, which would be congruent with an eastern sunrise. But in either case, as meteorologist Erick Brenstrum points out, the angles of the three objects needing to be aligned would be wrong – the sun would be too high (even an early morning winter sun, because of the hills it had to rise above) and the two craft would be on the same level, instead of the spectre being lower than the article projected.
Even if the projection of a Brocken spectre were possible, what would it have been projected onto? George Sise and Sophia both stress how clear the morning was, without the slightest impediment to a clear view, yet in a later account, Louise Sise mentions the canoe appearing from mist, as did some subsequent reports probably based on hers. But if the canoe accompanied the tourist boat for two miles (Louise’s account), that would require two continuous miles of mist sitting on the lake edge – and this would be on the eastern side, as the whaleboat headed south along the lake. Nor does anyone mention having seen a rainbow halo, which nearly always accompanies a Brocken spectre. A Brocken spectre canoe would look like a dark, distant shadow, and the sight of the flashing of paddles would be impossible.
One type of mirage that can and does deliver images of a boat above a stretch of water is the sort traditionally known as a Fata Morgana. Although the term is often used
imprecisely, in this type of thermal inversion mirage, the images may be stacked two or three above each other, with alternate layers being reversed – that is, the first boat may be the right way up, the second upside down, and so on. However, they may also consist of a single image of a boat the right way up. Such images have been reported from Arctic and Antarctic waters, from coastal Queensland and California and irregularly from some of the Great Lakes in America.
But although Fata Morgana mirages shimmer constantly, they do not move horizontally with the viewer and they seem confined to expanses of water (or desert) with a horizon line. Lake Tarawera is too small and surrounded by hills for the sort of Fata Morgana mirages experienced on ocean horizons or the Great Lakes.
THE VOYAGE OF THE DEAD
So if the travellers saw a real canoe, what might it have been? In recent years, Tuhourangi had taken to using the European cemetery in Te Wairoa, but before that had followed traditional customs. When chiefs died, their bodies were taken to a sacred area high on the mountain; other tribal members were given an air burial in a sacred site nearer the village. For many years, Tuhourangi had stowed their dead in a canoe in one of several burial sites in the bush around the lake shore. American missionary William Snow, who lived at Te Wairoa from 1880 to 1882, described one of two such locations he visited around Lake Tarawera, this one on the northern shore.
“At the base of an overshadowing ledge of rocks, rendered intensely sombre, and concealed from view by the shade of a dense rata tree, is a canoe raised several feet above the ground with its ends resting in gaping crevices of the ledge. This canoe is one of the present receptacles of the dead … corpses of every size and age … packed in the canoe like corded wood, from one to six or seven tiers deep and resting against the ledge to prevent their toppling … packed in flaxen kits and wrapped in Maori mats …”
The appearance of the canoe from under the landmark tree, which all observers noted, was a major factor in the alarm of Sophia and the Māori boatmen, who would have been well aware of the tree’s significance in marking a tapu place. So did a sonic boom, or the seiche that followed it, dislodge the burial canoe from its resting place and send it into the lake? Could a rippling seiche wave have sent it from under the tree and out along the lake?
The problem with this version is that the burial canoe could not have carried on far without an additional series of seiche waves moving it in the same direction – and no seiche waves are mentioned by Louise Sise, who emphasises the still clarity of the lake waters. Additionally, there is no written record of the burial canoe having been a war canoe or of any of its occupants being fixed in a standing position. And there would, of course, have been no “flashing paddles” or signs of its occupants propelling it, especially for two miles.
In an appendix to his outstanding book Tarawera: The Volcanic Eruption of 10 June 1886, Professor Ron Keam raises an intrigu- ing possibility. He believes that the Arawa inhabitants of another very small village, Tokiniho, further up the western side of the lake, may have heard the sonic boom that arose from the small eruption, 9km away, that apparently gave rise to the seiche on May 31. He suggests they may have interpreted it as a signalling explosion (a technique sometimes used by Māori) and believed it to have been sent by coastal Māori who had come down from the Bay of Plenty to the Te Tapahoro arm at the extreme eastern end of the lake, possibly to tell them about an important death.
He suggests some of the Tokiniho residents rushed down to the shore and set off in their own canoes, probably decorating them with greenery because news of a death was expected. They may have rowed in two canoes side by side and, determined on their important errand, not acknowledged the calling from the whaleboats because it was an unwanted distraction.
When they reached their destination, finding no signalling party waiting for them, they probably returned to their village and went about their business, as the tourists went about theirs in a distant location. No one from the two villages met up in the next 10 days, and as the people of Tokiniho were all killed in the subsequent eruption, the truth was never learnt.
If, however, there were two canoes, it seems unlikely that the Sises saw two canoes, particularly for the time and distance they recorded. Further, the tourists noted that the other canoe stopped when the whaleboat rowers stopped and started when they started. And none of the occupants of the whaleboats mentioned hearing a sonic boom, although Sophia did state that an eerie wailing noise accompanied the rushing in and out of the seiche waters.
A PUT-UP JOB
George Sise believed that the canoe was a “got-up arrangement” or “a put-up job” on the part of the tohunga, who, he says, was painfully aware that it was about time he did something for a living and needed some unusual accessories to produce anything like a satisfactory effect upon his people. Louise Sise agreed that the tohunga may have been making a memorable display as a portent.
The tohunga of Te Wairoa, Tuhoto, has been variously estimated to have been between 80 and 104 years of age at the time. Referring to some earlier feats by Tuhoto, Lieutenant Colonel Walter Gudgeon, writing in 1907 in an essay on tohunga in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, referred to Tuhoto as a “practical magician”. Was he using a little shock and awe to reinforce his cursing? If so, how might he have brought a war canoe to the lake without being detected?
War canoes – which at their biggest could be 30m long and weigh as much as three tonnes – were often built in several sections for easier portage. On arrival at their destination, the sections would be lashed together via pre-drilled holes, the holes then filled either with wooden pegs, which would swell when wet, or caulked with tree gum. A war canoe could have been portaged in sections through the bush to the lake, but it would have required a large workforce.
Alternatively, the tohunga’s collaborators could have converted and decorated an existing large fishing canoe to resemble a war canoe, by the addition of a carved tauihu/ prow and taurapa/sternpost. Photographic evidence exists of fishing canoes elsewhere in New Zealand having been convincingly converted to war canoes by such a measure.
But a third option is that hinted at by a display at today’s Te Wairoa, the Buried Village, of the prow section of a war canoe found near the village in 1927. The original sign, which accompanied its display until recent years, read: “Built by the Northern
So did a sonic boom, or the seiche that followed it, dislodge the burial canoe from its resting place and send it into the lake?
Maori for the invasion of the Lakes District, it was paddled down to the Bay of Plenty and dragged over Hongi’s Track. In 1823, after the invasion, the canoe was used on Lake Tarawera for conveying tourists to the Pink and White Terraces. This canoe, still in a good state of preservation, was unearthed below Te Wairoa Falls in 1927.”
If the sign was accurate, there was indeed a war canoe in the vicinity (perhaps, as George Sise suggested, hidden up a creek designated tapu), and one of Hongi Hika’s, no less. It would have been feasible to smuggle in through the nearby bush the characteristic carved prow and sternpost and enough tree gum, lashings, decorative feathers and white-tipped paddles to restore the appearance of the war canoe to a sufficiently dazzling state, particularly if seen from a distance.
Was this the tohunga’s cunning plan: the sudden appearance of a majestic war canoe, with all the elements of its secret and sacred point of origin on the lake, the timing of its appearance for maximum impact and its silent crew, cleverly devised as a wonderful piece of professional stagecraft? Has part of the “phantom canoe” been hiding in plain sight at Te Wairoa since 1927?
Perhaps. But in what secret place was the canoe kept before its sudden appearance, and where did it go to afterwards? Even if a plan to disguise an existing canoe had succeeded, a number of “warriors” would have had to be smuggled in as well. That’s a big and risky secret to keep in a small village.
NO SATISFACTION
Applying Occam’s razor, the theory requiring the fewest assumptions is that offered by Mr and Mrs Sise: that the mystery canoe was a calculated display intended as a fear-inducing portent, supplied by a craft that was either adapted from an existing canoe or secretly brought in, and crewed by coconspirators of the tohunga.
Yet none of the theories is entirely satisfactory. The topography of both lakes, Tarawera and especially Rotomahana, was drastically altered by the volcanic eruption; we have difficulties even envisaging the landscape seen by those on the lakes on May 31, 1886. Any secrets the lake shore or bed concealed are probably buried metres deep in volcanic silt and ash.
Humans love to weave stories around significant events. The tale of the unidentified canoe was taken up by newspapers nationwide after the eruption and grew a little larger with each telling. Just weeks after the event, Alfred Burton of photographers Burton Bros had faked a photograph of the Phantom Canoe for inclusion in their travelling limelight lectures. They played it for laughs, which was somewhat callous, considering the recent loss of life and livelihood among Tarawera locals, but within a couple of years, artists had taken up the theme and were recreating the mystery canoe in oils, exaggerating and twisting details for a more Gothic effect.
They depicted the event as having taken place close to the shore, with the canoes almost within touching distance, or even set it by moonlight and mist and lightning bolts for added spookiness. The real-life clear morning reported by the eyewitnesses was jettisoned in favour of mist and eerie lighting, and the unexpected but normal conveyance that the onlookers on the day believed they had seen was transformed by art into a skeletal white ghost ship with tattered remnants of sails and a spectral crew brandishing weapons.
By the end of her life, after hundreds of oral retellings and at least five written versions, Guide Sophia’s version also had extra embellishments added. And so a myth was born, eagerly taken up by later writers and ornamented even further.
Perhaps a young country with few ghost stories simply felt the need to create its own, and the opportunity presented by an apparition that both Māori and Pakeha could agree on having seen was too good to miss. It added to the national sense of special identity, and to an extent it even allowed some to draw a moral around the profound trauma and grief that the eruption had caused. Perhaps the story served an emotional need; maybe it still does.
A correspondent to the New Zealand Herald in 1933 discussed recent alarming heavings and receding of the waters of Lake Taupo. “It is as well perhaps that explanation should falter, because when all the mystery of natural phenomena has been cleared up, much of their atmosphere, their charm and their awesomeness disappears too.”
It is seldom wise, as they say of royalty, to let too much daylight in upon the myth. The Phantom Canoe is our awesome story. The legend lives on.
Was it a wonderful piece of professional stagecraft? Has part of the “phantom canoe” been hiding in plain sight at Te Wairoa since 1927?