#story: this took place about 2001 at Te Papa the museum in wellington. It has a Maori archive room were they keep all the Maori artefacts that arent being displayed in the public part of the museum. this is a high tech room where the temperature and humidity is kept at a constant to protect the artefacts the lighting is also high tech for the same reason. anyway when I was working in that room on the first day before we went in I told my Maori mate that I bet there are ghosts in there and he said bullshit this would be one of the most blessed place in nz. while working in there I saw shadows of people out of the corner of my eye darting in and out of the storage racks so I said to my work mate I thought you said that there is no ghosts in here and he just looked at me and went white as one [ first time Ive seen a Maori go white] and just went very quite. found out latter after I got sent to another job he refused to go back in there. there are 2 old Maori ladies [caretakers] that take care of the room and sit in it all day and we were chatting to them and one asked my Maori mate where are you from and he told her and then she asked the Samoan security guard [when you work in te papa you have to have a security guard with you at all times so you dont touch anything] where he was from but just ignored me. I thought perhaps she didnt ask me because I look pakeha although i am kai tahu-waitaha and proud of it so I interrupted and before I could say were im from she said I know you are from gisborne [there Is know way she could have known this]. anyway I kept getting drawn to these three big Maori carvings that were hung up on a large steel mesh frame and one day the caretaker lady came over to me and told me these carvings are alive, I didnt say anything but was puzzled by what she meant by that. a few days went by and I kept on forgetting to ask this lady what she meant by the carvings being alive when again I ended up steering at these 3 big carvings and the lady called over my work mate and the security guard and started talking about them . she said that when these carvings were being carved the carvers would tell the carvings what they were meant to do with each stroke of their chisels and that with that they were given their own life force then she looked me strait in the eye and said thats why I told you they are alive. right after this she asked my workmate and the security guard to help her lift something in the back room and left me all alone with these carvings for what seemed like ages [totally against the rules as I did not have a guard with me]. when they came back the lady started to talk about the carvings again and she told us that they were made to protect the bones of the dead which were put in their pukus and that they came from the side of a lake near rotorua. she also told us that when trying to shift these carvings the boat sunk that was trying to get them across the lake, the train derailed trying to get them to wellington then the truck got flat tyres trying to do the same. eventually they got them to the old museum in wellington and that night the museum burnt down and the only reason these carvings were saved is that a taxi driver was driving past saw the fire and was only able to rescue the three carvings. straight after she told us this the lights went out and it was pitch black as it is a sealed room [as I said earlier the lighting is high tech and dose not just turn of by itself] she managed to get the lights back on revealing a very white Maori and Samoan but it didnt bother me. I asked her if anything else spiritual had happened in the room and she said it happens often then told us about when they brought an artefact in from the chatham islands and that all hell broke lose in the room. they brought in various priests to try to calm things down to no avail. after a couple of weeks of havoc they got some one in who could speak in the chatem island dialect to explain to the artefact what was happening and things calmed down after that. it turns out the chatham islanders were enemies of the mainlanders and they had put the artefact in with its enemies and it wasnt too happy about it. a couple of years ago I was in the rotorua museum and I felt a tap on my shoulder so I turned around and there was no one there then I saw these three carvings on display, they have just about made it home. these are them as displayed in rotorua museum.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 09:06:52 +0000
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