Thread: Bad feeling

Right, gather round and I'll tell you a long winded story, take from it what you will...

When I was a young fella I grew up on a large sheep and beef station south of port Waikato that had a heap of significant sites important to Maori.
There's are several Pā sites on the place and plenty of old kumara pits and other evidence of pre European Maori settlement.
Us kids used to get together with other kids on the farm and roam about getting into mischief and exploring the beach, the bush etc.
One day while clambering about on some limestone cliffs we came across a rock burial and kids being kids we took the skull and took it home with us. Dad ended up finding it and he was bloody ropeable and bundled us in the car and made us go and tell the Kaumātua at the local Marae about what we had done. They took the skull back and at that point I think we kind of thought that was the end of it.
Fast forward a year or two and I was one of those kids that developed really bad night terrors, one night I remember dreaming that an alien came and took me from my room and took me to this small stand of native bush that was up the road from my house, the alien then produced some kind of small trinket and pushed this trinket into the earth, I'm not sure what the significance of this part of the dream was about but remember being paralysed with fear the entire time but unable to leave or run away. I awoke from this dream screaming and crying, but here is the strange thing... I was outside the house, at 3am in the morning outside the house screaming and crying and super confused about being outside. Eventually the outside light turned on and my mum came outside just as bewildered as I was as to what I was doing, why I was out there, and why I was screaming and inconsolable about what I perceived to have just happened to me. This is an actual fact that mum will remind me about every now and then "that time when you were outside screaming and crying at 3 in the morning"
I actually had to go to "kiddy counselling" for a while as especially after that experience my terror at going to sleep at night was a major problem, I remember one of the tools they gave me to cope was a burning jar, so if I was really bad then I'd let mum or dad know, they'd get me out of bed and I'd draw a picture of what I was afraid of and then we would out the picture in a big glass jar and mum or dad would throw a match in there and it helped me somewhat relax a bit.
Eventually I grew out of it and the days turned into years and one summer evening when we lived in North Canterbury I was driving along the road to check some cows we had grazing at another property and I saw this old Maori boy leaning on a fence post on the side of the gravel road I was driving down and he seemed to be sipping from a jug of beer! I stopped to ask him if he was ok or needed a lift somewhere and he told me he was all good and we got to chatting a bit, I couldn't help prodding him about his jug of beer, to which he laughed "oh no, it's actually cold tea! back in the day when we were logging the native in the Waikato we all drank cold tea from a jug to help us keep cool"
This got me talking about the place I grew up and all the fun we had as kids exploring the native bush and the historic Maori sites etc. We ended up having a good chat for half an hour or so and I needed to carry on, he assured me he didn't need a ride and for some reason I didn't think that was strange, considering he was an older chap in the middle of nowhere, sipping a jug of cold tea!
As I bid him farewell he uttered a word in Maori and I didn't quite catch it, I asked him to repeat it and he said it again and I asked him what it meant, he just said I should look it up one day since all us young fullas are good with computers and what not.
I actually forgot all about it and then one day was reading something on the net about the Uruweras when I skimmed across the word "Patupaiarehe"... Wait... Something triggered my memory.. that's what that old fella with the jug of tea said that time!
I banged it into Google and started reading about Patupaiarehe, guardian spirits that live in the forest and mostly only move about in the mist or the darkness. I couldn't help but think about the place we grew up and began remembering times and things etc from when we were kids and as the memory of that time I found myself outside in the middle of the night ran through my mind a huge chill ran down my spine, was very strange indeed and I couldn't stop thinking about it for days. I told this story on a Facebook page and a woman contacted me and put me in touch with a Kaumātua who she said may be able to help you understand some more of everything so I gave her a call and spoke to her for a bit.
She told me that when I was a kid "something" tried to teach me something that was related to the time we had taken the bones from the rock burial but I was to naive and stricken by fear and misunderstanding to get the whole picture. She said it's taken 20 odd years but you have now learned that your deeds don't go without being noticed or without repercussion.
I'm not really one to read a lot into stuff like this normally but kind of strange thinking about all the "coincidences" that had to line up for me to draw a conclusion (that I'm still not sure about..!) Especially that old fella with the jug of tea, I don't know why I didn't think that was more weird at the time than I do now thinking back about it. Maybe I really am a slow learner...