CHAPTER 11
The legend of the Haunted Whare
A small shack near Tawhai Falls below the Chateau was reputedly haunted by the ghost of a woman searching for her lost lover. The whare burned down, twice. Rumours trickled through that a plaque or sign still existed on the overgrown site. Could I find it, and would the ghosts talk to me if I did?
There’s a spot towards the top of the Mangawhero Forest Walk, a loop at the bottom of the Ohakune Mountain Road, where the track emerges from the overhanging, clingy bush and breaks out into a short clearing. It’s grassy, with a strip for walkers that’s mown regularly by DOC. There’s thick growth on either side, and one side sports a rough trail I’ve never had the courage to follow. Whenever I walk through, this spot makes me shiver as I blink rapidly in the sudden sunlight after the dark of the forest, and I get an eerie sensation deep in my bones. I’ve wondered a lot about the ghosts and spirits that walk the slopes of the maunga, restlessly searching for something they will never find.
One day I walked the trail with a friend. As we emerged into the clearing, we both hurried through the grass strip.
‘I always get a really freaky feeling just in this bit here,’ he said. I gripped his arm, staring at him wide-eyed.
‘Are you even serious?’ I said. ‘I’m exactly the same. I get a sort of chill. It’s got a weird feeling for me, and not in a good way.’
‘I wonder if we could find out what happened here. I know there was a logging camp further up — maybe something really shady went on at this spot.’
The same thing happened again, unprompted and with another friend, except she insisted the spot had a positive feeling, not freaky or creepy at all, but very pure and spiritual.
‘This bit, I love it,’ she said. ‘It just feels really good to me.’
We walked from the little clearing up to cross the asphalt where the Mangawhero track loops across to the other side of the road, and she spoke again.
‘A friend of mine reckons she’s seen spirits on the road here. They’re ancient Māori warriors in full traditional dress, and as soon as you see them, they turn and look at you, then they disappear.’
Over on the Bruce Road, far away from the roaming spirits of the Mangawhero, there’s a little bump on the ground above the Tawhai Falls carpark. Tourists stop at the falls to see the 13-metre-high waterfall that plunges into a green pool surrounded by smooth rocks — an ancient lava flow — and wavering forest. In years past the bump was home to the Haunted Whare, a hut that only ever bore that name. Clad in corrugated iron, its sole window was the only eye for its troubled soul.
There’s a legend about the Haunted Whare’s ghostly status. A young woman fell in love with a man from a poorer background but her family disapproved. Forbidden to continue their relationship, the young couple ran away together and spent the night near Tawhai Falls. The next day the girl’s father and brother pursued them, killed the man and threw his body into the Whakapapanui Stream, then dragged the girl back home. She ran away and returned to the spot near the falls, where, overcome with grief, she cried out for her lover but only heard the river flowing. Desolate, she threw herself into the river and took her own life. It’s said that her unhappy ghost now roams the tussock-clad plains and the beech and toatoa forest around the Whakapapanui area, searching desperately for her lost lover.
~
In the late 1800s, sheep farms began to be established around the flatter lower slopes of what would become the national park. In 1880, shepherd Rawiri Ketu, who worked for the large local sheep run, built a slab hut on the hillock near Tawhai Falls, about a quarter of a mile from the stream. Unbothered by ghosts and the sweeping winds that buffeted the plains, 24-year-old shepherd Wi Takerei, of the Ngāti Waewae iwi of Lake Rotoaira, later took up residence in the whare. It was lonely and remote, but the runholders routinely sent out food supplies to Wi Takerei and the other shepherds by packhorse.
In 1927, historian James Cowan recounted the story of the Haunted Whare:
It was a solitary life for Wi Takerei, in that lone hut in the wilds, the dark wizardly-looking forest on the south, the rumbling volcano smoking its volcanic pipe above him.
Most Maoris avoided that part of the volcanic country. To their minds it was an abode of spirits and mysterious wild people of the bush. There were patu- paiarehe there, an uncouth unfriendly tribe of fairy beings, whose legendary chief was a dread, being named Te Ririo. There were spirit voices in the gales and in the creaking of the ancient trees in the bush — voices of ‘atua’ and ‘kehua’. Wi Takerei exhibited more than ordinary courage, unusual indifference to the affrighting sounds of the wilderness, when he agreed to live there without any human companionship.
By August 1882 the area was hit with heavy snowfall and severe storms, and Wi Takerei had not been seen for many weeks. The station manager, R. B. Maunsell, became concerned, and when the weather abated, he visited the whare with another man, Wi Poinga. They found Wi Takerei dead, lying face-down on the floor, clad in only his shirt, with his blanket on a stool next to him. One of his eyes was missing.
There were no visible marks of violence, and it was concluded that he had probably died of heart disease. The missing eye, however, remained a spooky mystery, and many thought the ghost had something to do with his death. Wi Takerei’s iwi came out from Rotoaira, Ōtukou and Papakai, burned the whare and all its contents to the ground, and took his body away for burial. The cause of death was assumed but never confirmed, and it was said that the ghost, the ‘kehua’, had plucked out Wi Takerei’s eye.
Cowan later wrote: ‘The lonely desolate spot on which the whare stood had been regarded by the Maoris as haunted by the ghost of a young woman who had come to a violent end near there, and now the people were disposed to believe that the kehua or ghost had had something to do with the young shepherd’s death. Mohoao, or wild men of the woods, too, were believed to haunt the place.’ (Mohoao are similar to patupaiarehe, but they are wild and angry, sometimes violent, and dangerous to humans.)
Runholders the Grace brothers rebuilt the hut a little further to the east, close to the bush and accessible to traffic going by on the dirt road. Built of corrugated iron, its simple room had a big fireplace that took up one end of the structure. Although John Grace slept in the new whare often in the 1880s without seeing any ghostly apparitions, its reputation for being haunted spread quickly.
In 1883, a surveyor named Springhall was living in the new hut while working nearby. One night during a fierce snowstorm, Springhall, his wife and another woman were playing cards inside to pass the time. As the wind howled through the trees outside and snow assaulted the corrugated-iron walls, the fireplace struggled to mitigate the chill. Then one of the women screamed. She had seen a ghost at the window, a young Māori woman with her hair in two long plaits that fell down her back and an expression of deep grief on her face. As the dogs outside barked and whined, both women fainted. Springhall bravely went outside and searched around widely but found nothing and nobody — not even any footprints in the fresh snow.
Springhall returned to the whare, where the women were recovering from their fainting attacks. He shut the door securely, hung a thick shawl over the window to prevent any further frightening appearances, and they lit candles to dispel the shadows. The women described the apparition as ‘urukehu’, referring to fair-haired, fair-skinned Māori people, who sometimes had a ruddy or golden tinge to their hair. Urukehu are believed to be the offspring of patupaiarehe, supernatural beings who live in the mist and avoid sunlight. Woe betide the human being who invades the territory of the patupaiarehe, the deep forests and foreboding mountains. The party in the whare recognised the woman as the spirit of the girl looking for her lost lover.
After this episode the hut stood deserted for a spell, but travellers who camped there reported seeing the same face at the window — a grief-stricken young woman with two long plaits.
From 1885 Roderick Gray took up residence in the Haunted Whare while working as a shepherd. He was wholly unbothered by the ghost, to the point of interacting with her regularly. Regarded as a recluse and an ‘uncommon character’, Gray was known for his conceptualisation of mountains as sacred. In his 1890 book Tongariro: The sacred mountain of the Maori, he wrote: ‘I need scarcely say that often a great awe comes over me whilst living here alone, and in the neighbourhood of sudden and violent death . . . always having the mountains in my gaze, any chance occurring is quickly noticed. I have learned to regard them as friends, as they have sheltered me for a length of time.’
Gray had seen his share of international adventure, having spent time in India with the British Army, but he’d been forced to resign his commission because of sunstroke. He then moved to New Zealand for health reasons, and perhaps was drawn to Ruapehu not just for the cold climate but also for the spiritual atmosphere. Cowan described Gray as an educated man, who would spend much of his free time reading the classics beside the fire, listening to the hail on the roof and the gale outside: ‘The lonely life suited his studious, contemplative temperament.’
Despite his reputation as a recluse, Gray sometimes visited the other shepherds in their camps and told them of his eerie experiences in the wilderness. He once saw a wild woman near the hut, he told them, but she ran into the bush and disappeared, despite his extensive searching. Then a mysterious ‘Mohoao’ woman began to visit him. She would come inside the hut, sit by the fire and chat with him. Once, as he went to cross the swollen Whakapapanui Stream near the hut, the woman appeared and warned him not to. He would drown if he did, she said. He ignored her and continued, and she warned him again, then disappeared. Gray looked at the water roaring down the stream and decided to obey the supernatural warning. He returned to the Haunted Whare, and later considered that she had likely saved his life.5
The Haunted Whare eventually became an icon of Tongariro National Park. ‘The lonely whare peers out at you with its one window as you approach,’ Cowan wrote in 1927. The whare’s nine-pane window can be seen in the 1925 photo, but in later years it disappeared. ‘Sometimes alpine sports campers still use it, though it is nearly half a century old. But they go in parties; no one is anxious to spend a night alone in the Haunted Whare.’6
The ghostly happenings tailed off, and Cowan theorised that as the park had become an attractive playground for tourists, large parties of trampers and skiers had driven away the ‘last-lingering spirits of the Whakapapanui’. When the Chateau was built in the 1920s the hut, which was right on the road, became a popular stop on the way. Visitors would leave their signatures on every surface available. In 1936, a party reported visiting the hut at midnight but the only ‘ghost’ they found was a persistent rat under the floor — and later, the ‘ghost’ (presumably of a digestive variety) of the cheese, sardines and crackers the party had eaten under its haunted roof.
Around the same time, a couple of teenage boys from Taumarunui stayed in the whare in the hopes of a supernatural adventure. The rest of their party sensibly stayed at the Chateau. They conducted an inspection of all corners of the hut, finding nothing more than a few spiders. Then they heard a rumbling noise that ceased abruptly, trees scraping and footsteps outside. The rumble was ‘decidedly queer’, wrote Jack Tunnicliffe, the 17-year-old ringleader, and the footsteps gave him a prickly feeling running up and down his spine. He became terrified.
Then they heard a voice: ‘All right in there, you chaps? Perhaps you’d better come up to the Chateau after all. We’ll be able to get an earlier start in the morning if you do.’
It was the leader of their party come to fetch them. The boys hastily agreed. The original legend of the whare’s hauntings persisted in lore, even if the ghost seemed to be gone. ‘Nevertheless,’ Cowan wrote, ‘you will be told that if you care to spend a night alone in the whare, you may be rewarded — if you care for that kind of reward — with the midnight vision of a mournful woman’s face at the window, the wan bush girl seeking her lost lover.’
In 1938, the whare came close to being razed by fire. Careless trampers had been starting fires that had destroyed much of the flora in various areas around the national park, and in mid-August that year, a fire caught on in the vicinity of the Haunted Whare. The weather had been dry for a while and the vegetation and trees around the area were completely destroyed. Park warden John Cullen (who, you will remember from the Hauhungatahi expedition, was personally responsible for the heather portion of the flora) reported:
I am of the opinion the fire was caused by someone in a passing car throwing out the end of a cigar still alight. The winter sports were on at the Chateau at that time, which was the cause of a continuous stream of cars passing to and fro to the Chateau. Luckily, the wind was from the north-east at the time; had it been from southerly or westerly direction the fire would have crossed the road and burned all the area up to the Haunted Whare.
As warden, Cullen looked after the whare and ensured its pecked-out eye was repaired, fixing the broken window and doing maintenance on the roof with the reluctant blessing and funding of the Park Board. Its location on the road made it subject to much vandalism, as road-accessible huts still are today. Unthinkably, in 1936 its six bunks had been pulled out and used as firewood by one group of car campers who wanted to boil the billy.
Then, in 1943, the Haunted Whare once more burned to the ground. In March the following year, the acting secretary of the Park Board sent a memo to ‘the Medical Superintendent, care of the Temporary Mental Hospital, Chateau Tongariro’, demand- ing answers: ‘I understand that the building at the Park, known as the Haunted Whare, has been destroyed by fire, and I should be glad if you would kindly arrange for police enquiries to be instituted with a view to determining the cause of the outbreak.’
The cause of the fire isn’t on record in the newspapers of the day, or in any Park Board archives. I followed the thread of the Haunted Whare from Archives New Zealand to the Department of Conservation and the Alexander Turnbull Library and found no police reports on its destruction — accidental, ghostly or otherwise — aside from the above brief mention. Then I stumbled across the answer in a journal article. At the time, the Chateau was being used as a mental-health facility after Porirua Hospital had been damaged in an earthquake; 300 patients and staff were being housed just up the road from the Haunted Whare. A nurse who was stationed at the Chateau was witness to the hut’s negligent burning. ‘We were all young and sprightly creatures and we didn’t ever see any men,’ she said. ‘One time a crowd of air force fellows came from Waiouru and we had a party at the Haunted Whare about a mile down the road from the Chateau. It was just an old tin shed really and we lit a fire and sat around. Afterwards the fire wasn’t put out properly and the whare got burnt. Nobody knew until the truck went down to National Park the next morning and there was what the driver called “this charred bloody ruin”. All the members of the National Park Board came and interviewed us and I’ve never been so terrified. There is a little plaque there now which says it was burnt down in 1943 but you’d have thought it was Cleopatra’s Needle or some such, the fuss there was.’
Local historian Karen Williams wrote a summary of the Haunted Whare’s story in a Project Tongariro journal in 2000, and said that there was now nothing left to see: ‘And so ends this story of the Haunted Whare. Today there is no sign of the plaque nor of any remains of the old building which was once located about 400 metres to the southwest of the Tawhai Falls carpark on the road to Whakapapa Village.’
I made a mental note: there was nothing left to indicate that the Haunted Whare had ever existed. Still, I’d hunt for it anyway.
~
I put my research shoes on and began pounding the pavements of Wellington, going from department to department to trawl through archival material in the hope of finding concrete clues to its location. At Archives New Zealand I found several maps on which the Haunted Whare was clearly marked on the road leading up to Whakapapa.
It always seemed to be just adjacent to the road, a little square snuggling up to a line, always shown between the road and the waterline of the Whakapapanui. It did occur to me, though, that the road could have changed over the years; it was, after all, just a dirt road for horse and cart initially. Once it was properly tarsealed it could have been rerouted for any number of reasons.
I found mentions of the first whare being ‘about 400 metres to the south-west of the present Tawhai Falls carpark’ and the current one being ‘about 100 metres above the existing carpark’. One document said a suspension bridge across the Whakapapanui existed just below the Haunted Whare and Tawhai Falls was about fifty metres down from the bridge. A Tongariro National Park ranger’s report placed it ‘on the Bruce Road, two miles from the Chateau and close to the Tawhai Falls’, noting that it was of great historic value:
It is surprising the number of visitors to the Park who are very disappointed to find that this interesting little hut has gone. Many people were so interested in this hut, that they pay a visit to the old site. The interests and ghosts of this hut are still very much alive among the present day visitors and many people would be very pleased to see this building reconstructed.
When construction of the Chateau Tongariro was being planned in the 1920s, there had been some debate by the Park Board and even at parliamentary level over the proposed site. At Archives New Zealand I found old maps showing four proposed sites, one of which was directly opposite the Haunted Whare, on the other side of the Bruce Road. Helpfully, it included details for the proposed site: it was at an altitude of 3220 feet (981 metres), 2.25 miles (3.6 kilometres) to the Whakapapa huts and 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometres) from the junction with SH47. I considered it a wise decision to build the Chateau in its present location at Whakapapa Village, as the Haunted Whare site was fairly underwhelming by comparison.
I also found some letters from the Park Board penned in a state of irritation to the Prison Department, which had apparently installed a stable near the Haunted Whare in the 1930s. ‘It has been stated that the smell from the stable yard makes the Haunted Whare itself unsuitable to occupy for camping purposes,’ one complained. And another: ‘Many who would otherwise have been keen to utilise the Haunted Whare, are now repelled by the proximity and stench of the stableyard.’
At the DOC archives I came across an old booklet about walks in Tongariro National Park, which had consistent directions for finding the site: ‘Look carefully for the sign marking the spot because it has been overgrown by the beech forest,’ the author advised. ‘It is a difficult site to get to as there is no track, but as most people are fascinated by the supernatural I can imagine most readers trekking through the scrub and mountain beech to get to the marker-sign.’
The National Library staff dug out an article for me from 1983, which noted that the Haunted Whare was on a small knoll to the left-hand side of the road. But the writer of this piece, too, claimed there was nothing left. ‘In recent years a notice board stood on the knoll stating that this was the site of the Haunted Whare. When I visited the Chateau a few months ago the notice board had disappeared and the knoll stood alone with its trees and shrubs and not even a single plank of the building to bear testimony to anything that man had constructed, haunted or otherwise.’
I concluded that I knew what I was looking for: a site where there was nothing left to indicate that anything had ever been there, next to the Bruce Road, just above the Tawhai Falls carpark. It sounded silly, and I procrastinated about even bothering to go there. Then one day I was up on Ruapehu with Harry Keys, who reckoned there was an old sign at the spot — or if there wasn’t, he could at least find the site. He suggested we hunt around in the bush on the way back.
We parked on the road just above the Tawhai Falls carpark. ‘There used to be an old road marker here, which was how you’d find the spot, but it’s gone,’ Harry said. ‘It’s not far into the bush though, so we can just push in and have a look. It’s round about here anyway.’
We found a tiny entranceway in the forest and slipped in.
‘How about you go up that way in a straight line and I’ll go down this way, and we’ll yell if we find anything,’ Harry said.
Neither of us had gone far when Harry almost tripped over some number-eight wire on the ground. ‘Can’t be far away.’
I brushed some spiderwebs off my face and kept tracking upwards, staying parallel to the road and crashing through tree branches. Then Harry yelled. ‘Found it!’
‘Woohoo!’ I yelled back. ‘Well done!’
A few seconds later I was at the site. There was an old sign indicating the spot. It stood in a small clearing, tiny but distinctive, and as per the intel I had garnered, it was exactly on the 980-metre contour line. The sign featured a small sketch of the hut, and the text was still very easily readable:
HAUNTED WHARE
About 1881 a shepherds’ hut was built on this site.
This hut replaced the first hut built in the Park in 1880 which was deliberately destroyed by fire after the finding of a dead Maori inside. HUT BECAME KNOWN AS THE HAUNTED WHARE AND WAS FINALLY DESTROYED IN 1943.
I peered around the clearing. Apart from the sign, there really wasn’t anything to indicate anything had ever stood here. It was hidden from the road, just, not far into the bush, and flat enough to make an excellent camping spot. I decided I’d come back and camp out, and see if the ghost of the Haunted Whare would come and visit me. After all, she wouldn’t have had any overnight company since 1943, and she’d probably been through a lonely patch.
I mentioned this idea to a few friends to see if anyone wanted to join me, and predictably everybody thought I was nuts. Reactions ranged from ‘No fucking way!’ to ‘Why would you even want to do that?’ to ‘What is actually wrong with you?’ I knew from past experience that when everybody thinks you’re mad, either you’ve hit on an excellent idea or you should be sure to take a personal locator beacon and extra snacks. It was only by the road, though, so no need for the PLB, but I would pack some treats. It’s only polite, if you’re entering ghostly territory, to take some sort of offering as an intruder.
~
I went back a few weeks later, wanting to complete my overnight camping mission before winter hit. For once, I didn’t leave my intentions with anyone, partly because it was right by the road, and partly because I knew my loved ones would think that the cheese had finally, thoroughly, slipped off the cracker.
I parked by the Tawhai Falls carpark around 5.30 p.m., leaving enough time to set up my camp before dark but not so much time that I’d get bored before bedtime if the lady ghost didn’t show. I took a bivvy bag rather than a tent — figuring it would be swifter to pack up if the going got too ghostly — but stashed a fly in the car just in case of rain. The skies cleared as night fell, revealing stars when I ducked back to the car after forgetting something, and the air suddenly got cold and crisp. I inflated my mattress and stuffed it into the bivvy bag with my thick winter sleeping bag on top, and a proper pillow, plus a thick book from the Ohakune Library rather than my lightweight Kindle. This was luxury!
The clearing was plentiful with bush litter, so I pushed the leaves away from a little spot before lighting my cooker for dinner. No dehy cardboard meals here — I’d brought leftovers of a dahl meal I’d made the night before, and a supermarket naan bread, which I managed to sort-of toast over the cooker’s flame.
Night fell as I ate, and the ghost did not arrive to join me. I cleaned up, sorted gear and got into my bivvy bag, regretting not bringing the tent as my head torch attracted swarms of bugs. No matter; I read by the red-light setting.
Still the ghost did not arrive. Tired, I did a final bush wee, executed a set of 20 jumping jacks to get the blood flowing around my body and help me keep warm once I got into my sleeping bag, then decided I needed a properly final, final, just-in-case bush wee, got into bed and switched off my head torch.
I held my breath and listened for the sound of the ghost approaching.
Eventually I drifted off, thoughts swirling of Sir James Gunson having a party with James Cowan and committing arson by dousing the Haunted Whare in petrol and striking a single match while helicoptering their guns around. Why were there no metal remnants at the site, given the whare was made largely from corrugated iron? My tired brain had no answer.
In utter darkness something prompted me awake. Finally! It was the ghost. She had come to talk to me, in the same way she used to sit by the fire in the Haunted Whare and converse with Roderick Gray. (Did he claim this in earnest, I wondered, or was he regularly partaking of the local electric puha?) Or perhaps — excitingly — it was the ghost of Roderick Gray himself, and we’d be able to talk about our favourite books!
I heard footsteps. Light steps, crushing leaves. I held my breath, listening, hearing my blood pounding in my head. A twig cracked. I fumbled for my head torch and switched it on. This couldn’t be real! This couldn’t really be the ghost of the troubled lady! If she spoke to me, I’d strike literary gold — it was on record that the ghost of the Haunted Whare hadn’t talked to anyone since the 1920s!
As the red glow of my head torch lit up the clearing, I saw the ‘ghost’: a fat, bumbling kiwi, bless his little brown feathers and pointless wings. He looked pleased to see me, if rather surprised, and dipped his head in a sort of greeting.
‘Awww, hello little muffin,’ I said, then felt silly. I was on a ghost-hunting mission, in the middle of the night, camped out and talking to a bird in the bush. He poked at something with his long beak, then wandered off, his big bum pushing through small branches, making cracking sounds as he went.
It took me a while to go back to sleep after that, particularly as the chill of the night had set in and my nose felt frosty. But somehow I drifted off again, and woke up in the daylight to find a spider had been hard at work the night before and had spun a web between my cooker and the pot.
~
Had the Chateau been built at the Haunted Whare site as it was once proposed, it might have been a doubly ghostly structure, for the Chateau has a ghost, too, known as Charlie. Tales of his spirited exploits began to surface after the Second World War. Generally he hangs out in room 305, and he somehow changes the temperature in the room, so the middle always stays freezing cold and refuses to warm up. Charlie hates the little stool being pushed in under the dressing table, and staff always have to put it back, because he persists in pulling it out. Guests have reported that the kettle boils of its own accord in the middle of the night, and they hear excessive noise, of people in the room above dragging furniture around and jumping up and down on the floor . . . even if the room upstairs has been unoccupied.
One staff member reported: ‘I took a school group to the room and the door was open just a little bit, which is really an impossibility without someone holding it open as all our doors are fire doors and close automatically. After a minute or two, the children were about to enter the room when the door suddenly opened itself very wide and then slammed in front of them.’
In the large, opulent lounge downstairs there’s a window known as the ‘Ngāuruhoe window’ because it looks out to that volcano. Staff cleaning it in the early morning sometimes see the reflection of a man coming down the stairs, but when they turn around to ask if they can help him, they find there’s nobody there.
Maybe I also needed to camp out at the Chateau in case Charlie was around. It had recently shut its doors, supposedly for good, so it was likely nobody would be around to stop me. I couldn’t camp out inside, of course — at least not without risking significant police intervention — but I could camp out on the lawn outside the Ngāuruhoe window. I tucked the idea away for later.
Meanwhile, I turned my attention to breakfast. It was daylight, and although the clearing had been imbued with a ‘Blair Witch’ sort of atmosphere the night before, the stark sunlight filtering through the trees dispelled any notions of ghosts while I brewed my coffee. Other stories were calling for my attention; I would give up on Ruapehu’s ghosts, for now.
