Just think of the steak
I love ghost story threads.
An itch ... is ... a desire to scratch
Yes... Once in the bush, alone... 40 years ago and recall it like yesterday. Wharfedale track Canterbury... hair standing up back of neck, it was a warm sunny day but I got all cold and shivery while at a good pace. About half way from road end to what is now called the Wharfedale hut... put the wind right up me.
It went all still and quiet, any breeze dropped right off...
I had been through there many times and went through again several times in later years, never sensed it again
I used to get dark thoughts and feelings everytime we stalked past this lone old dead Scots pine on Mar Lodge estate in the Scottish highlands...turned out it had been used to hang folk back in the day.....heard lots of stories about the island on lake Taupo too....
There is this low laying, bowl shaped area with plenty of pigs in it and only nikau palms growing here. All around is thick bush and it drops down about 15m. Every time I enter, the gps freaks out and I find it incredible hard to find my way out again even though it's not that big at all. Strange place that is...
Only the Bush Gremlins, they sneak up behind you and blow on the back of your neck when you're heading back to camp alone in the dark.
They become invisable if you spin around to look at them.
No harm in the hills lol.. weird events? oh yeah.
I had a couple during several years of so called shootin for a crust type of work. Something I will never ever forget. Scary enough for sure,stunned ? most definitely. And for obvious reasons I most certainly wont be spouting about what on here.But I will say this...there are things out there that are truly beyond belief,things that can leave you totally speechless. I spent a full week at the hut after the first event and didn't leave it.
Years ago in the Whirinaki up past the Rogers hut beautiful sunny day. Working through some bush it sort of got darker and darker even though I could see the sun above the trees. Got a really spooky feeling just couldn't shake it. Stalked out of the area and felt better. Years later I was reading one of Barry Crumps books as it was written about that area. He described the same feeling it wa san area called Maungataniwha "Mountain of the black water goblin". I pulled out my topo and it was the same area I got that put the shits up me. Yeah there's strange stuff out there.
Had a weird one in the back yard checking on the chooks late at night. As I walked through the cutout in the hedge it felt like there was a fan heater blasting down on me. Breath that big breathing down on me I just kept going in the back door. No go look that's for sure.
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...
Flappy Disc Customs Bespoke Hunting Rifles
Visiting the battlefield at Culloden some years ago I was suddenly overcome and felt terrible, feeling like I had been hit in the stomach with a sledge hammer. A staff member came over and asked if I had ancestors who fought here which I confirmed was correct. He said he has seen it often in descendants who visit. I came right after a few minutes and continued my visit in a fairly somber mood. I had never experienced it before or since.
Sorry, misread your post. I've posted about this before. It was a tricky situation, river bed right on the border of private land and DOC land. Pretty sure the animal was feral, but not 100%. Managed to scare it away, but had a round chambered and would have shot it in self-defence if needed.
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