The Madeira Hotel – Akaroa

One of the many historic buildings that caught my eye in Akaroa is a pub called the Madeira.
In 1858, Antonio Rodrigues, a settler who arrived in Akaroa, built a commercial building at 50 Rue Lavaud. In the early 1860s, he went into business with his wife, running a butchery and bakery. Rodrigues, originally from the Portuguese island of Madeira, later converted the building into the Madeira Hotel in 1871, naming it after his birthplace.
In 1905, Antonio passed away, and his son-in-law, Martin Daly, took over the hotel.
I travelled to Akaroa in April 2021, stayed for a few days, and heard a few tales from a few people that I encountered on my trip: a local dairy owner, a woman in a craft shop, an old guy at a service station, and a man who I sat with eating fish and chips down by the port.
He told me about the time he saw two “transparent men” in workers’ overalls down at the port docks. They were standing at the end of a pier.
Just standing there, supposedly just smoking cigarettes and talking. The man remembered thinking they “didn’t look right”. They looked old-fashioned in the way they dressed. One had a cheese cutter hat. The man was standing at the start of the pier walkway, and the two men stood right at the opposite end.
He turned away to look at something and then looked back. In the few seconds the man had taken his eyes off the men, they had disappeared and were no longer there. They hadn’t passed by him as it was only a two-meter walkway, and he would’ve seen them pass behind him. Beyond them was the water, so they could go in only one direction.
This happened in the 1970s and has stayed with the man since.
I recently received this story from a woman named Jo, who worked in the Madeira restaurant in 1995.
“An older lady was the chef; she told us the resident ghost would sometimes go home with her and hide her glass of beer. We laughed it off, and she told a friend and me that “you will find out for yourselves”.
There were times I would walk into the bathroom, and the blow dryer would go off, but I just thought it was a fault. One particular night, my husband and friends went to the pub. I had a strange feeling things weren’t going to be good. As I stood against the wall waiting for the band to start up, I started feeling someone poking me in the back.
Knowing it was impossible, I ignored it. Then my hair got blown from behind and hit my face. Nobody was there.
The feeling that something was wrong got stronger, and my friend and I left my husband and the others behind. That night things turned to shit with my husband and me, and the kids went and stayed with Anna, who worked with me. We were sharing a pouch of tobacco, and she went to roll a cigarette, and they weren’t between us on the couch.
We stood up and searched, nothing. Ten minutes later, they turned up. Back on the couch between us”.