Spook Exploded

Tongan Grave Mystery Explained

By F. T. Goedicke

THERE is an article in the December issue of the .New Digest, entitled “Cemetery Spook.” You may be interested in the explanation.

During my 60 years residence in Tonga I witnessed this phenomenon on several occasions. The first time was in 1885, at Haapai, in Tonga. I was returning home one moonlit night and, as I was passing a native cemetery, I saw a bright, white object, generally shapeless, apparently floating above a grave.

I should have been scared, but I was not. I had just spent two years among very primative savages of New Britain, and I had seen some terrible tortures inflicted by those cannibals. I had seen a European woman, tied up pig-fashion, rescued by her brother-in-law, Mr. R.

Parkinson, when she was about to be carried off into the bush, to be killed and eaten. So my nerves were in good order.

Twelve years later, when I was in Nukualofa, I was returning home from Kaopanga village one night when I met the Chief Medical Officer, Dr. McLennan, carrying a bundle of dry coconut leaves.

To my query of what was afoot he said “ Come along with me—l am going to send the devil to hell.”

He said that a “devil” had just been sighted over a grave in a nearby cemetery, and he wanted to show the people what the thing really was. He went into the cemetery, approached a grave over which the white thing floated, lit his coconut leaves, and threw them at the grave.

There was a sharp “Pop,” and a flare, and the white thing disappeared.

The doctor then explained that when the natives buried a corpse they filled the grave with white sea-sand. When decomposition began, under certain cir cumstances a gas formed, and this escaped through the sand and could be seen above the grave as a kind of vapour. It hap nened only occasionally, under certain conditions, and the gas usually was inflammable.