The mystery of the Brooklyn Dodger: a ghost, or perhaps just a boy. (more…)
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They were a menace, said the landlady. They were cracking the pavements and tangling the powerlines. The trees at Ohiro Lodge had to go. So on March 23, 1963, Joyce and Robert Beatty of 145 Ohiro Road, Brooklyn, Wellington, had the old macrocarpas at the front of their guest house cut down, leaving tall and quite tragic-looking stumps.
The neighbourhood was unimpressed. Telling the story on the Radio New Zealand show Spectrum 10 years later, Joyce recalled a barrage of visits and phone calls accusing them of doing a terrible thing—not only aesthetically, but spiritually. They had failed to honour the tree spirits. They had violated an urupā, a burial ground. There would be consequences.
Around 9.30pm on March 24, stones and pennies began pelting the house from the front, shattering windows in a bombardment that went on for hours.
A dark, tree-lined public road lay in that direction, as did the fresh macrocarpa stumps. The Beattys and their 15 male lodgers angrily went in search of the vandal but couldn’t find anyone. The police were called. By the following day, the weird happenings were public knowledge.
That night, 100 local people gathered outside the lodge, along with 10 police and a smattering of journalists, to see if it happened again. It did. More stones, more pennies, and a few larger bits of rock were launched at the house, a few hitting windows and parked cars. A journalist nicknamed the culprit the Brooklyn Dodger, cheekily comparing them to a New York baseball pitcher.
“Several people have telephoned or written to the newspapers with possible explanations,” reported the Canterbury Press. “One woman suggested the stoning was the work of a poltergeist (a noisy, mischievous spirit taken to upsetting furniture and breaking articles in a home). Others have telephoned with the poltergeist theory and another caller, obviously Irish, suggested leprechauns.”
On the third night, 200 people were standing in the road, some throwing coins at the house as they waited for the Dodger. Robert told a journalist that somebody had fired a rifle at him, that a threatening phone call had been received, that the Army should be called in.
On the fourth night, 800 people were watching despite misty weather; the hail of stones and coins began at 11pm. Gabriel David, a journalist with the Evening Post, later told Spectrum he spotted a boy up a tree with a catapult that night, and handed him over. That detail didn’t make it into print—newspapers stated only that the police had a lead. Nobody was charged. But the Brooklyn Dodger never made another appearance.
According to Joyce, however, the haunting actually ended with an exorcism. In her telling, a mysterious Māori woman from Gisborne rid the lodge of spirits with holy water, a slice of bread and a potato. The exorcist, Joyce says, gave no name, accepted no payment, and didn’t explain who sent her. Joyce implies that the woman was briefly possessed while praying in the yard. The woman’s parting advice? Trim those tree stumps properly. (You can hear the story in Joyce’s own words by searching for ‘Who Threw That Stone’ on www.ngataonga.org.nz.)
Like this supernatural coda, the identity of the Brooklyn Dodger has never been confirmed. So if a certain erstwhile youth is reading this, and wants to finally admit that he is the poltergeist, please get in touch with New Zealand Geographic: email is fine; no need to rattle the roof.
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