Monthly Archive

I’ve been reading a whole bunch of creepy stories on a certain website recently, and they reminded me of something that happened to a colleague of mine while we were on a business trip nearly ten years ago. It’s fairly mild as ghost stories go, but this is a true story, and not an urban legend (I was there - so you won’t find it on Snopes.com. ). I thought I’d share it with you for your entertainment.

In 1998, I flew with some colleagues to a Microsoft TechEd conference being held at the Auckland Sheraton hotel. After the day’s activity and following late night “networking” we each went to our separate rooms, slightly inebriated but otherwise no worse for wear.
The hotel rooms were the type that always lock when the doors close, each having one of those electronic key cards for access. Our rooms were one or two floors above ground level.

My own night passed without incident.

The next morning, we all met up for breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. But one colleague looked a bit bemused and more than a little freaked out. I asked him what the matter was.
“I went to bed last night with the bedside lamp on,” he said, “and forgot to turn it off. But when I woke up this morning, I found that the bulb had been unscrewed and was lying on the bedside table next to the lamp…”
(Remember, we each had our own rooms, the doors were all locked, and there was no other external access. I also asked if he was the type to sleep-walk, and he said he wasn’t.)

Being a supportive chap, I then reminded him that there was an old cemetery almost directly across the road from the Sheraton, and that perhaps some neighbourly ghost had decided to help the hotel save power (if you click on the thumbnail picture above, you can see a Google Earth snapshot of the hotel with nearby cemetery). My colleague wasn’t too enthused with that idea. But then again, maybe he had simply rubbed the lamp before going to bed unawares - arousing a djinn in its modern containment vessel. It was a high-tech conference, after all.

A recent rise in violence by groups of youths across the country appears now to be infecting the school system. According to a recent article in the Dominion Post, a pack mentality has developed within a group of 13 year old Hutt Valley High School students calling themselves the ‘Killer Coconut Krew’; a group which has reportedly terrorised a number of students, by ripping off their pants and violating them with “a variety of objects” including cellphones, a pair of scissors and a shoe (link). This appears to be part of a growing trend among young, predominantly Polynesian males apparently enamoured with US gang culture, roving around urban areas randomly attacking people without provocation. I have had my own experience of this.

What initially piqued my interest in the Hutt Valley High case however was the apparent blasé attitude by the school’s management, in particular that of its acting principal, Steve Chapman. When faced with the most serious case so far (involving sexual violation with an object on December 10), he had failed to contact police after three days, electing only to ’stand down’ six boys. Chapman’s justification for this bafflingly light response was a lack of evidence for the more serious allegations. Later in the Post article however, board of trustees chair Susan Pilbrow claims the allegations to be “minor” in nature. So which is it, I wonder? The allegations were found to be minor, or lacking in evidence?

This attitude of denial is completely at odds with a school system that has shown itself time and time again to be completely intolerant of any misdemeanors that are sexual in nature. One would normally expect that any such cases, minor or otherwise, to be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. We have cause to be interested why this has not happened in this particular example. With a growing trend of random youth gang violence in the wider community, we might also expect that if a school had opportunity to nip in the bud a similar phenomenon on their own patch, they would. I will be extremely interested in further developments in this case, and others like it.