Ghosts, skeletons and cobwebs took over the Parliamentary Library on Thursday night to celebrate the debaucherous MPs, fires and feral animals that haunt parliament’s history.
It’s not uncommon to hear the opposition describe parliament as a place of violence. In a literal way, they’re right – this building has seen its fair share of deaths, earthly horrors and debaucherous behaviour since parliament began sitting in Wellington in 1862. And that’s not even counting all the atrocious and racist colonial shit led by governments of yore.
In the spirit of the spooky season, the public and The Spinoff were allowed a peek behind the veil with parliament’s spooky tour, a more haunted version of the typical daily tour through the buildings. Held twice a year, the tour shows off parliament’s spookier offerings: a bunch of staffers-turned-ghosts retelling the haunted history of the halls of power, with some thrills in between.
With the help of a timid and bloodied tour guide, our 20-something-strong group (some in costumes ranging from the cast of Scooby-Doo, minus Scooby, to Paddington Bear and his marmalade) is led up to parliament’s galleria. This is where you can find the most haunted area of the building: the library, which also happens to be where most of the Act Party offices are – coincidence? Perhaps.
Waiting for us inside the library, with a ouija board and upturned glass laid out in front of her, is our first ghost of the evening. Her grey face and tattered dress draws gasps from the crowd, and four brave souls join her table to make contact with the afterlife. “What do you want us to know?” asks one. The ghost lets her glass glide across her board, and after a few seconds she replies: “Death.”
We shuffle out of the library, past a bust of Robert Muldoon (scary man!) and the window where Barry Soper and Heather du Plessis-Allan took their wedding photo (that wasn’t one of the spooky facts included on the tour, but it should’ve been). In front of the grand staircase, our tour guide flees with fright when the second ghost of the tour descends in a white Victorian-era gown, with blood dripping from her eyes.
She tells us the library we’re standing in today is the end result of multiple fires, and a shipwreck. Originally based in Auckland, parliament had its first sitting in Wellington in 1862, which is when the 750 volumes held by the General Assembly Library (as it was known to the ghosts of the 1800s) were shipped south via the White Swan. The boat was wrecked off the Wairarapa coast, and while there were no casualties, the volumes of legal documents were lost to the sea.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing for the library from there, either. The old wooden building saw multiple fires until the premier, Richard Seddon (aka the big statue dude on the parliament lawns), opened a fireproof brick library building in 1899. Nearly a decade later, in 1907, a large fire gutted the parliament buildings, leaving only the gothic-style library. There were plans to extend the library in the rebuilding, but the cost blowout was too terrifying to see it to fruition.
More nightmares of the natural world came in 1968, when the library’s skylights were savaged by a storm, the same one that sank the Wahine ferry, killing 53 people. The librarians climbed the roof in their underwear, trying to cover the holes while a chain of workers delivered the books to safety. Then in 1992, three fires ripped through the parliament buildings while they were undergoing refurbishment. In October that year, a fire broke out in the library area, damaging the staircase and roof. In a twist of good fortune, some of the original stained glass was saved due to having already been removed during the refurbishment.
Our ghost glides through the doorway behind the staircase, into parliament’s archive, where we meet another – unlike the more subtle ghouls around the building, this one sends our group into terrors by screaming at random intervals. Anyway, she’s here to warn us of the story of former minister William Larnach – yes, as in the Dunedin castle guy – who died inside parliament in 1898. Some security guards have tales of lights flickering in the night and locked doors flying open, clearly the work of the phantom Larnach.
Supposedly, Larnach’s son was shacking up with his step mother, which sent the Wellington rumour mill into overdrive. Add in Larnach’s mounting financial ruin, and the pressure was all too much. Larnach was found dead in select committee room J – which no longer exists – with a revolver in his hand. His skull was stolen from his Dunedin grave in the 1970s by a university student, who liked to show off the bullet-holed head at flat parties – he was later tried in the Dunedin Magistrates Court for improperly interfering with human remains.
In addition to deaths and disasters, there was a healthy amount of debauchery in parliament. Christchurch MP Edward Wakefield (not the New Zealand Company one, but his nephew), was a famous drunkard who helped overthrow the government of 1872 with his alcoholism. Wakefield’s vote would have been the deciding one in ending the premiership of William Fox, so Fox’s supporters kept him locked in a room to keep him sober, which would supposedly keep him in support of the government.
But when the opposition caught wind of Wakefield’s lock-up, they concocted a plan of their own. Some opposition MPs climbed to parliament’s roof, and lowered bottles of whisky down a chimney into a fireplace by pieces of string, for Wakefield to drink himself silly. When he was let out of the room, he ended up voting against those who locked him in there. It’s a good thing modern parliaments have cleaned up their act when it comes to alcohol, our tour ghost quips.
Filled with this knowledge, we head into the archives, where decades of old editions of the NZ Herald, The Post and its predecessors and other papers are kept. Our screaming ghost reappears to give one of the punters a bloody good fright, and tell us of the olden days when cats ruled the debating chamber to keep the rats away. That started the great flea infestation of 1977, after a bunch of feral cats took over the basement.
And as it turns out, Larnach wasn’t the only poor soul to cark it in parliament: back when the press gallery had messengers, Walter Bruce died in a basement bathroom after having a heart attack. One reporter of times gone by was said to have had a spooky encounter with Bruce’s spirit, but this reporter cannot confirm any sightings of his ghostly form haunting the press gallery today.
While our ghost regales these tales, in the background, the furniture glides across the room and sounds of creaking around the aisles of newspapers send shivers down spines. Turn back while leaving the darkened archival room, and there’s another ghost in red Victorian garb, slowly making her way forward every time you cast your eyes back at her.
The experience is as campy and educational as it is scary. The cheap thrills of cobwebs, skeletons, screams in the distance and ghosts positioned in bathrooms, on top of staircases and in the darkness is enough to justify the exclusion of anyone under 12 on this tour. But the most terrifying thing of all? The knowledge that at one point we lost hundreds of books in the ocean, and that our MPs have always been a little bit too naughty to be in power.
This reporter managed to leave unscathed and largely unspooked. But after the tour, leaving parliament through the dimly lit halls of the press gallery, I couldn’t help but turn around and look back. I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t not bringing any of the ghosts or bad juju with me.
