Bumps in the night
Strange occurrences, unexplained movements and nonexistent visitors are some of the goings-on reported at a Waimate lodge in recent months. Pictured is sceptic Gaye Jackson, but even she cannot explain some of the accounts.
Strange goings-on at a Waimate lodge are yet to convince the owners and staff that ghosts actually exist.
Among the unexplained events at the Queen’s Lodge was a girl in a red dress seen by a guest playing along an upstairs hallway late one night in 2019 yet no children were staying at the time.
Also reported are strange shadows on the security camera periodically, while a milk bottle lid once twisted back and forth without any human intervention.
The Artefacts cafe, bar, restaurant, conference space and accommodation is housed in a two-storey building that used to be a cottage hospital and doctor’s residence in the early 1900s, and more recently the Criterion Hotel.
Shayne and Nicky Glenjarman bought the complex in February 2019 and have since heard many folklore tales of ghostly appearances but say they had not encountered anything.
They also found a lot of selenite around the place, a crystal used supposedly for protection against evil spirits.
‘‘I haven’t seen anything and I walk in the dark all the time,’’ Shayne said.
He said nights were very quiet and the only things he had come across in the roof or under the floor was a 25 cent piece and an old tin of tobacco.
‘‘All the stories told are disjointed . . . It’s local folklore everyone has a story,’’ he said.
At the end of 2019 a couple of ‘‘ghostbusters’’ turned up unannounced and proceeded to try and exorcise the premises, Shayne said.
He said the man had a pipe like a didgeridoo and the woman held a bowl of water and started crying.
Strangely the screen of the security camera went green and it had never done that before, barista and sceptic Gaye Jackson said.
Though Shayne blames pressure causing the milk bottle lid to rotate, Jackson said that occurrence really ‘‘freaked out’’ the previous barista who witnessed it in October or November last year.
‘‘The top was spinning back and forth.’’
She had found one of the bedrooms in the accommodation wing ‘‘deathly cold’’ though none of the other bedrooms felt that way on the same side of the house.
Jackson also heard of a couple of overnight guests that were woken in the middle of the night when the window blind in their bedroom flew half way up the window and items in the kitchen went missing regularly.
‘‘Things we use every day like the can opener. We didn’t find it for weeks then it suddenly appeared in the drawer. It’s weird.’’
She said if a can opener was thrown out by mistake it would not reappear in the drawer where it was usually positioned. Though Jackson said she could not explain such phenomena, she did not believe in ghosts.
‘‘I’m always sceptic until I see something for myself.’’