The Ghost of a young prostitute
Locals know that Room 1 of the old Vulcan Hotel, in the tiny village (permanent population in single figures) of St Bathans, New Zealand, is haunted. It’s generally thought to be the ghost of a young prostitute, murdered during the gold mining days of the 1880s. My family aren’t ‘true’ locals (third generation), but I grew up in the other end of the valley from the famous hotel, just half an hour away. I can’t remember when I first became aware of that haunting, but my understanding had long been that guests in that room would sometimes feel someone sit on the bed beside them.
Over the years, St Bathans became very familiar to me — Blue Lake, a literal stone’s throw from the hotel, is host to one of the most diverse plant fossil assemblages on the planet. The lake is a man-made hole, sluiced through sand, gravel and mud, in the nineteenth century hunt for gold. The layers of mud, useless to the miners, are full of plant fossils — pure gold for my research. The hotel was a very convenient place to pop into for a coffee, or a beer, after (or even during) a hot day’s field work. Or for a dinner before camping out under the trees somewhere. But apart from one night in the room converted to a dorm (Room three, I think), I’d never had the chance to spend a night in Room 1 .
Driving to St Bathans
One day I flew into Christchurch from Australia. I gave the hotel a ring and asked if there was a room for the night. This wasn’t a problem and they asked if I wanted a feed as well. I told them I wasn’t sure when I would get in (it’s a good five hour drive), I had a lot to do along the way, and it might be late. This was also not a problem – there would be a meal when I got there. I picked up a hire car and set off from Christchurch, looking at a few fossil sites in Canterbury, then eventually headed over the Danseys Pass.
That’s a narrow road that you can’t hurry on. It winds through low mountains, with lots of blind corners and loose gravel. There isn’t much traffic, but going too fast, that one other vehicle on the road is likely to be the one you collide with. Failing that, there’s the ‘single vehicle accident’ scenario, where you manage to slide off the edge of the road. But having safely negotiated the Pass, I got down to the flat back roads, on the other side, then hammered the hire car to 140 kmph on the straights. I pulled in to St Bathans village around 9.30 pm.
It was summer and still perfectly light, and I pulled up beside a pretty laid-back scene. The publicans, husband and wife, were sitting on the chairs outside the pub along with two guests. I parked the car and joined them. They produced my meal and we all shot the breeze for a while, until eventually the guests headed to bed. The husband then went to bed and it was just me and his wife chatting. The next day I wanted to hunt for fossils, so arranged an early breakfast, at 07;00. Eventually she got up to go and told me to find myself a room when I was ready “Any room except the Number One, or the Number Two — it’s got the guests”. My ears pricked up. “The Number One?” I said. “Oh, I guess you may as well spread yourself out”, she said “Take the Number one if you want”.
The room had a small double-bed against the far wall, and a bed-side table with an alarm clock on the near side of it. There was a window out on to the deserted street. I went to bed, and (unusually for me) fell asleep quickly.
I encounter said ghost
In the dead of the night I was woken by being slammed twice into the mattress. There was no fear — just immediate exhilaration. All I could think was: “Wow — that was the ghost!”.
I looked at the clock — it was 06: 20, and I could hear music coming down the corridor from the vicinity of the kitchen. Good, I thought, that’s the sound of my breakfast being made. I lay in bed going over and over the ‘experience’ and thinking “ Wow! Wow! Wow! That was the ghost! I’ve experienced the ghost!”.
But then …. I realized — “I’m lying on my left hand side. If I had just looked at the clock, I would have had to have been lying on my right hand side — and I know I haven’t moved at all”.
And then I opened my eyes. It was pitch black. It was so dark I couldn’t have seen the clock anyway. And there was no music. It was dead quiet. I got up, turned the light on, and checked the time. It was just after three.
Confused, I turned the light back off and went back to bed. I didn’t sleep for ages, then did, then woke up about thirty minutes after I said I wanted breakfast. I rushed to the shower then into the dining room. The publican wasn’t too happy of course. As I tucked into breakfast, I tried to redeem myself: “That ghost”, I said –“people feel someone sit on the bed beside them, don’t they?” “Yes”, she said, “but some people get slammed in the mattress. But just last week we had a woman who was woken up by someone playing with all of her toes….”
Expectations
The best way I can try to describe what I felt was as if someone had lowered a huge electromagnet over the bed (yes, I’d have to have the opposite polarity, but work with me on this one) and then thrown the switch twice in quick succession. If there was a sound to it (and there wasn’t), it would have been a “WAAARP… WAAARP”. To be absolutely clear — it had a sort of ‘electronic’ nature, but there was no ‘shock’.
What I experienced deep in that night was far from my expectations. [Unfortunately] I wasn’t woken up by the spirit of some young woman, good-natured, despite being robbed of her life well over a century before. Rather, what it was, was entirely ‘inhuman’. Of course, it may be entirely unrelated to the ‘ghosts’ other people have experienced for decades, but this seems like too much of a coincidence. Whatever it was that I felt — I have never felt either before or since.
Whatever it is giving that Number 1 bedroom a strange reputation, I’m sure I’ve experienced it.
