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Back in 1961 a young couple with little money had no chance of raising a loan from conventional trading banks to buy an existing house, but if you owned a section you were able to borrow a limited sum of money at reasonable rates from the State Advances Corporation in order to build one. During May and June 1961 Ken and I spent almost every Sunday looking at sections advertised in Saturday night's Evening Post. Price rather than location was our main concern, and I recall we used public transport to visit Wainuiomata, Ngaio, Highbury, Kingston, Breaker Bay, Melrose and Houghton Bay. We had little luck, until eventually a friend who was renting a house from the Public Trust suggested we look at their notice board where several sections were advertised for sale, including 36 Freeling Street, Island Bay. We visited the section, instantly fell in love with the view, ignored the difficult access, the hillsides covered with gorse and the openness to winds from both north and south, and bought the section for £625.
Arrow pointing to location of 36 Freeling St
It was almost two years before we were able to move into our new home, and meantime we discovered we had purchased a piece of Island Bay legend. We built on a shelf where an earlier house had stood, and initially our only concern was that we were able to use part of the former driveway and the old sewer pipes down into Freeling Street, thus saving a considerable sum of money. But as we met long-term residents of Island Bay we heard lots of stories about the old ‘Ghost House’, and although we cannot guarantee their total accuracy here are some we can remember.
The original house was built by Charles Freeling Reeves, an architect who owned around 15 acres of hillside, including all Freeling Street; hence the street being named after himself instead of a river as many other Island Bay streets were. Around 1912 he had a shelf excavated on the hillside above Derwent and Ribble Streets, where he built a large house he had designed himself. He was said to have been somewhat eccentric and also well-off; he owned a car when few could afford them and drove it up a virtual goat-track to the house. He initially built the house for his consumptive daughter to give her the benefit of the sea air; after she died he left New Zealand and died in South Africa in the 1930s. The house was rented but became dilapidated, and was finally left to become derelict. It was ransacked by locals for its beautiful timber, plumbing and fittings, and was finally burnt down on Guy Fawkes night in 1943 when small boys roasted potatoes on the floorboards.
We can get some idea of the interest taken in the house from the work of two local writers. In The Godwits Fly by Robin Hyde the main character Eliza is warned by a friend against climbing the hills behind the Home of Compassion because ‘A man hanged himself up there...Over in the Happy Valley. On a tree. And there's a haunted house; look, you can just see it. One day a boy was going past its windows and he saw a terrible face looking out.’
As Robin Hyde left Berhampore in 1919 aged 13, it would seem that there were two different horror stories circulating some time before then. By the 1930s the two stories are linked. Brian Sutton-Smith in Smitty does a Bunk writes the dialogue of two boys planning to stay out all night;
‘...we could go up to the haunted house. It'd be OK there even if it did rain.’
‘Eh? Cut it out. Not me. They reckon the spook of that German spy who hung himself there in the war still hangs around at night time.’
‘But you've been there in the daytime.’
‘Yeah, but that's different.’
I call the stories of 36 Freeling St the stuff of legend rather than history because they are obviously based on fact but have been much embroidered. And I must confess that, after living on the site for almost 50 years, we were in our early years seriously disturbed by gorse fires and storms, but never by a ghost.
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