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HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS

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HALLOWEEN HAUNTS: UNDERWORLD CONNECTIONS

By Lee Murray

 

Another spooky season is upon us and, once again, I’m scratching my head, trying to come up with something to contribute to our HWA Halloween Haunts blog. Because, as I’ve said many times before, Halloween isn’t really a thing down here in Aotearoa New Zealand. There are lots of reasons: the mostly secular nature of the nation, the bouncy southern hemisphere spring-lamb timing, and the fact that uncanny supernatural things are a part of our everyday, so perhaps we don’t see the need for a unique celebration of the macabre. Very few of our stores stock Halloween merchandise and we’re not big candy eaters when compared to other countries, either. I’ve been looking back at the blogs I’ve submitted in previous years: a conversation with my Path of Ra co-author Dan Rabarts about why Halloween isn’t really a thing here, another conversation with Dan about why Halloween isn’t a thing here, a meta-article comprising comments from my Kiwi horror colleagues about why Halloween isn’t really a thing down here… Well, you get the idea. But while I’ve been wracking my brains, struggling to come up with something that might fly as a Halloween blog, New Zealand’s Bird of the Year / Te Manu Rongonui o te Tau competition has been in full swing, popping up all over our social media, on the local news, and generating somewhat heated discussions in my extended-family group chat.

Organised by the New Zealand Forest and Bird group, the competition has been running since 2005 and is intended to raise awareness of our native wildlife, their habitats, and the threats they face, given that many of our unique local species are in danger of becoming extinct. Every year, images of around seventy birds (and sometimes a couple of other endangered species, like bats) compete for the honour of becoming the year’s most celebrated bird. Unlike Halloween, birds are our thing, so it’s an annual epic showdown, with people lobbying for their favourites, and even engaging in some outright cheating in order to launch their preferred species into the limelight.

“One thing they don’t tell you is that New Zealanders absolutely love talking about their birds,” comedian Rebecca Shaw is cited as saying in the UK’s Guardian (16 May 2023). “Every time I’ve been at a gathering of three or more people, they have started talking about the birds at some point.”

In 2023, the rest of the world got in on the furore with the pūteketeke (Australasian crested grebe) taking the coveted winning spot after US talk show host John Oliver prompted a campaign on its behalf, taking out billboard ads in New Zealand, the U.S., India, Japan and others and attracting an incredible 290,374 votes.

By now, the convenor of this blog will be tapping his foot with impatience, wondering what possible connection a few native New Zealand birds could have to Halloween, that eerie time of the year when the ghosts of the departed souls linger close to the veil. For that, I’ll ask you to check out the winners from previous years and in particular Bird of the Year for 2006.

The lucky 2006 winner is the pīwakawaka, or fantail, a tiny tan bird about the size of a sparrow, with spectacular tail feathers shaped like a fan and a vibrant cheeky personality. They’re common in our backyards here, and any time you’re out walking in a park or along a bush trail you’re likely to be followed by a fantail or two, looking to make a meal of the insects kicked up as you pass.

https://pixabay.com/photos/bird-fantail-ornithology-species-8352180/

 

For Māori, these little birds have a far deeper significance as they serve as a conduit to the spirit realm and, legend has it, are responsible for the presence of death in the world. A heavy burden indeed. As the story goes, the trickster Māui is persuaded by his father—Whiro-te-tipua, the god of darkness and evil—into believing that mankind could become immortal if he were to pass through the womb of Hine-nui-te-pō, the Great Woman of the Night or the goddess of death. Maui tries to enter the goddess’s sleeping body intending to devour her from the inside and emerge through her mouth but, warned by the cries of the pīwakawaka, Hine-nui-te-pō wakes and kills the demigod, crushing him between her thighs.

My flash fiction story, “Goddess”, which appears in Discontinue if Death Ensues edited by Carol Gyzander and Anna Taborska (October 2024, Flame Tree Press, UK) is a modern retelling of that myth.  Here is a tiny excerpt:

The room zinged with menace, and the air turned cold. It was as if Whiro, the lord of darkness himself, had entered the room, snaking his evil tentacles through the slats in the air conditioning. The moon shuddered. I held my breath.

In that moment, Māui changed before me, his thick man-neck contorting into bulbous, brutal forms, which shifted, shrivelled, shrank. He dropped to his hands and knees, his skin darkening, and his spine extended at his tailbone.

He became a lizard, cloaked in reptilian red. Well, he would choose to take the form of a curséd harbinger of ill luck, wouldn’t he? When the ugly son of Punga had shrunken to the size of a football, he turned his yellow eyes on Hine. His tongue darted in and out, and he scuttled towards the couch. I panicked, trembling behind the credenza like a coward, as Māui climbed the couch, latching on to the fabric with his curved lizard claws.

What was he doing? But I knew. I knew. He wanted to take her power from her. To claim her body and a place in the NightRealm sanctum.

In truth, this particular tale is the second act in an ongoing saga between Māui and the fantail. In a previous encounter, the pīwakawaka is said to have refused to tell Māui where his ancestor, the fire goddess Mahuika, had hidden the source of fire. To force the pīwakawaka to reveal the goddess’s secret, Māui squeezed the bird so hard that its eyes nearly popped out and its tail projected, leaving it so badly injured that henceforth it could only fly erratically, flit-hopping from branch to branch. Little wonder then that the bird would try to foil the demigod’s subsequent evil plans.

Many of the other contestants on New Zealand’s Bird of the Year also have ties to the supernatural. For example, the legendary explorer and chieftain, Ngātoroirangi, a priest of the Te Arawa tribe, had two pet tīeke (saddlebacks)—black birds with a singe of brown around the middle—which were renowned for their supernatural powers and wisdom. By interpreting their cries and their flight behaviour, Māori sailors and fishermen could predict changes in the weather. In fact, the birds’ cries are still considered an omen of an approaching storm.

In another example, the ruru, or morepork owl, with its haunting mournful cry, is believed to be a harbinger of death. Ascended from the underworld, if the bird lingers near, or even enters, a house, it is powerful portent of impending death in the family. Although, sighting a ruru isn’t always bad news; sometimes, the guardian ancestral spirit (kaitiaki) of a family or tribe becomes embodied in the form of an owl woman or Hine-ruru, who serves to warn against ill luck.

So, for Halloween, while we may not get hordes of trick or treaters roaming our neighbourhoods, Kiwis will definitely be watching to see which of these supernatural harbingers might win our prestigious Bird of the Year competition. Given the season, I wonder if those same soulful spirit birds might be watching us back from the trees.

Lee Murray is a writer, editor, poet, and screenwriter from Aotearoa New Zealand, a Shirley Jackson Award and five-time Bram Stoker Award® winner. A USA Today bestselling author with more than forty titles to her credit, she holds a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in Fiction and is an Honorary Literary Fellow of the New Zealand Society of Authors. Her latest work, NZSA Cuba Press Prize-winner Fox Spirit on a Distant Cloud, was released in 2024 from The Cuba Press. Read more at leemurray.info

 

Embedded Links:

https://horror.org/halloween-haunts-a-kiwi-kaleidoscope-by-lee-murray-and-friends/

https://horror.org/halloween-haunted-places-of-new-zealand-by-dan-rabarts-lee-murray/

https://horror.org/underworld-gothic-dan-rabarts-lee-murray/

https://www.birdoftheyear.org.nz/past-champions/

https://www.flametreepublishing.com/discontinue-if-death-ensues-isbn-9781804179376.html

 

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