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Haunted places · Haunted castles

Larnach Castle, Dunedin

When
since 1871 date from records made at the time
Where
Larnach Castle, Otago Peninsula, Dunedin, New Zealand
Verdict
Legend

New Zealand's only castle is famous for the ghosts of the Larnach family – though, as its guides point out, no member of the family died within its walls.

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-45.86°, 170.63° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

William Larnach, a Dunedin banker and politician, began building a residence on the Otago Peninsula in 1871 for his wife Eliza and their six children; some two hundred labourers worked on it. Eliza died suddenly in 1880, aged 38, in a rented house in town while her husband was in Melbourne. Larnach married twice more. After the Colonial Bank failed in 1895, and amid mounting financial and family troubles, he took his own life in Parliament Buildings in Wellington on 12 October 1898. The castle soon gathered legends: Eliza, his beloved daughter Kate or William himself were said to walk its rooms, a bloodstain was supposed to mark a marble bath, and in 1994, during the premiere of a play about the Larnachs in the ballroom, a ferocious gale swept across the peninsula. After the family left, the building served as an overflow for Seacliff Lunatic Asylum, a hospital for shell-shocked soldiers and a nuns' retreat. Two staff members said a small boy took their hands in the garden, told them ‘I've got to go in now’ and vanished.

Witnesses

Castle staff and the guide David Mills; visitors; the audience at the 1994 premiere.

Explanations and hypotheses

The guide David Mills sets most of the stories straight: no member of the Larnach family died in the castle, the marble bath has no blood or rust stains, and the ‘mysterious’ music in the music room is easily explained by a player left on after a dinner. The only accounts he finds worth noting – of the boy in the garden – may belong to the later period, when the castle was used as a hospital. The storm at the 1994 premiere is a coincidence that was added to the legend.

Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.

Sources

  1. Larnach Castle – Early History
  2. AA Directions – Jo Percival, Larnach Castle: clearing the ghost stories (2024)
  3. Te Ara – Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Larnach, William James Mudie

More: Wikipedia (en)