Among the ghosts of
Reporter Shane Cowlishaw and photographer Lawrence Smith were granted access inside Mt Eden prison and discovered a building steeped in history and legend.
IT is, cleaner Sahil Kumar says, a rather unsettling place to work. The rats don’t bother him, he’s seen plenty of those before. Nor, even, the dead pigeons, killed by the razor wire high above. It’s the ghosts. If you ask the people who continue to maintain ‘‘The Rock’’ since it was closed for good in 2011, Mt Eden Prison is haunted.
There’s the lone loudspeaker that continues to crackle and moan, despite the PA system being shut down five years ago.
An electrician was called in to investigate, and he cut all the wires leading to it. But it continues to crackle and moan.
That’s unsettling, but it’s a story about another contractor undertaking emergency repairs that Kumar is eager to tell.
The contractor, crouched down in a cell hard at work, swears a Maori inmate appeared behind him and yelled at him to ‘‘get the f... out’’ before walking away.
By the time the contractor scrambled up to respond, the inmate had disappeared.
The man sprinted out of the prison and refused to return.
Kumar says just the other day a colleague had to head in at night to check something.
‘‘I’ve never seen anyone so loaded down with torches, he was shining like a lighthouse.’’
It’s little wonder Mt Eden is the subject of urban legend.
Built more than 150 years ago, the imposing fortress was constructed in a style designed to instil fear into those sent there.
A panopticon prison with spokes radiating from a centre hub, it was the site of dozens of executions, including New Zealand’s last, in 1957.
Since The Rock’s doors were shuttered, it has remained empty, save for semi-regular maintenance and cleaning to keep it from falling completely apart.
Weeds rule the entranceway and shadows dominate inside.
Row upon row of spartan cells stand empty; cracked toilets and rusting bed frames are all that remain.
But unbeknown to most, Mt Eden features floor-to-ceiling murals painted by artistic inmates.
Giant sea creatures dominate the visitors’ room, including a pair of scantily-clad mermaids deemed too erotic by some staff.
In another area, a mother sporting a moko and carrying an infant on her back watches forlornly over an empty wing.
Outside, razor wire and water cannons continue to stand watch over graffiti-marked exercise yards where prisoners not only stretched their legs but often sorted out their differences.
Philip Lister, who has been with Corrections for 42 years, including a stint at Mt Eden, has become the department’s unofficial historian.
Guards stood watch above the prisoners outside, but the violence that broke out was often finished by the time staff arrived to intervene, he says.
Auckland’s Southern Motorway also snakes almost directly above the yards and contraband would be thrown from cars despite the mesh wire hanging overhead.
‘‘When they built the motorway we had a series of towers that had armed sentries with rifles. On one particular occasion I was standing there, I hadn’t been working here very long and that was usually where you got put, sentry duty, a car pulled up, said gidday to me and threw a tennis ball into the yard and I thought ‘do I shoot them or not’?
‘‘The chief officer when I reported said ‘certainly not, the things wouldn’t fire anyway’.’’
Mt Eden’s most notorious feature is the execution ground. Two sets of three holding cells face each other, the last stop for prisoners before the gallows erected against a stone wall outside.
Lister says that as the time of their death approached, prisoners were taken down to the holding cells and put on ‘‘death watch’’.
Prison staff would sit with them right up until their execution, trying to keep them calm with games of cards. gallows.’’
All 36 executions carried out at Mt Eden would have been traumatic for staff and often a stiff drink would be handed around by management.
‘‘It was a very, very nerveracking and horrible situation for all the prison officers.’’
The holding cells remain, but old gym equipment now stands where the gallows used to be.