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The Maori Race

Ghosts

Ghosts.

As to ghosts proper as distinguished from evil spirits there were several varieties. There was the taepo (“Night Visitor”), which seems to have been any kind of supernatural being that made its presence known by mysterious tappings or rustlings on the thatch of the house at night. There was the second-sight ghost, generally the double of yourself, when you were “fey” and the sight of which portended death. A young Maori chief of unusual intelligence (Te Pou Tawera) related to me the following episode. “When I was a child my mother went out about noon to get water from the river. She crossed a fence, page 425 and when descending to the stream noticed a female sitting on the opposite bank, looking at the water. When my mother reached the edge of the stream the figure slowly raised itself to a standing position and looked across. My mother then saw that the other was also herself. She came back to us moaning and crying. She died a few weeks afterwards.”

The true ghost was the kehua. It was generally seen as one passed along a path at night or in the dusk. It would be found lying across the path, like a corpse. If you stepped over it, it would kill you. If you tried to avoid stepping over it by turning down a bye-path you would again find it lying in your track. Then you must go back. Probably it may have been the spirit of a friend or relative giving you a warning not to proceed in a certain direction, or to desist from the purpose then in your mind. If you were “fey” you would see the double of yourself lying in the path, and you would surely die within a short time. If the spirit of an absent friend presented itself indistinctly and with face averted that person was still alive, but was threatened with death; if the form and face were clearly seen the spirit had left the body. In one recorded instance a ghost appeared at night (but in the full light of a blazing fire) to a party of natives who were out hunting. Only two of the party, however, could see it. When they returned to their homes they found that the man whose spirit had appeared had died at the hour the ghost presented itself.

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The young Maori chief Te Pou Tawera, above mentioned (now, alas! himself in the World of Shadows) told me the following when speaking on this subject:—“I have seen but two ghosts. I never saw a kehua on the path. I was a boy at school, in Auckland, and one morning was asleep in bed when I found myself aroused by someone shaking me by the shoulder. I looked up and saw bending over me the well-known form of my uncle, whom I supposed to be at the Bay of Islands. I spoke to him, but the form became dim and vanished. The next mail brought me news of his death. Years passed away and I saw no ghost or spirit, not even when my father and mother died, and I was absent in each case. Then, one day I was sitting reading when a dark shadow fell across my book. I looked up and saw a man standing between me and the window; his back was turned to me. I saw from his figure that he was a Maori, and I called out to him, “O, friend!” He turned round and I saw my other uncle, Ihaka. The form faded away as the other had done. I had not expected to hear of my uncle's death, for I had seen him hale and strong a few days before. However, he had gone into the house of a missionary, and he (with several white people) was poisoned by eating tinned meat, the tin having been opened and the meat left in it all night. This is all I myself have seen of spirits.”

If one met a kehua (ghost) you had only to offer it some cooked food and it would instantly disappear, for ghosts, like all supernatural beings, disliked cooked food.