An incident during one of our 2014 investigation sessions still has me scratching my head …….
Massey Homestead, Mangere East, was for some years the home of William Ferguson Massey, who was Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1912 until he died in 1925.
It is thought that William Massey still resides within the walls and makes himself known to staff and people visiting, from time to time. The activity reports are rare, but there have been claims of moving shadows, items moving around the rooms and voices through the years. The team has so far chalked up five research visits to Massey Homestead, with interesting activities ranging from intriguing interactions with various trigger objects to odd shadow figures and sounds of movement and footsteps heard overhead.
During the night, I went outside to take photos of the building’s front. The lights were on in the home.
As I got into position, I saw a shadowy figure, who I thought was just one of the ladies on the team standing at a top-floor, left-hand window. I couldn’t see any features, just a dark person’s form looking out the window.
I didn’t want them in my shot, so I waited until they moved from the window. The ‘person’ then moved out of sight, and the lights turned off immediately as this happened. I wanted the front window lights on for my shot, so I quickly leapt a few meters closer to the house and yelled up to whoever had left the room to please turn the lights back on in that room. This was about 4 seconds after the lights went off. No one answered me. I yelled out again. Still no answer.
After about a minute, one of the team members who had heard me yelling out came to see what I wanted. She claimed it wasn’t her who had been in that room at the time and that she was with the others in the team, downstairs, in a whole different part of the building at the time. No one was upstairs.
I am now kicking myself for not taking any photos whilst the shadow person was standing there!
I only have the after-photo I took about 4 seconds after the ‘person’ left the window. Just before the light in that room went out.
We did manage to recreate a pretty accurate representation of the person in the window for reference.
Recreation photo by Matthew Tyler.
