Hokitika

After our splendid glacier walk we drive north, determined not to spend another night in the touristy town at Franz Josef.

Quick stop at the Callery Gorge.

I found us a campsite with character (and good reviews), the Seaview Campsite.  Until the 1990s it was called the Seaview Lunatic Asylum.

That evening we took a night walk to the glowworm dell.  Wish we could have captured the moment, there were thousands of glowworms on all the earthen walls!  Really a magical moment.

From a sign at the local cemetery: "Amongst the many hopefuls who came to the West Coast during the gold rushes where those who were already suffering from mental health problems.  The difficult living conditions, the disappointments, uncertainty of making a living and some very dubious alcoholic beverages caused others to develop mental health problems once they were here.

"When the first hospital was built on the south side of Hokatika River in 1866 it included a small ward able to house five to seven 'lunatics'.  This proved woefully small with up to thirteen patients being crammed in while as many as seventeen other suffers were held in the local jail."

Long story short, they eventually built this large mental hospital compound, which was much better equipped at serving the patients.  Eventually policies changed and a mental health ward was built at Greymouth hospital, and in the 1990s they closed this place down.  We stayed in the part that used to be the substance abuse wing.

Just a short walk from the campsite is the Hokatika Cemetery, where many of the patients were buried, some in unmarked graves.  We know this because when we were here we spoke with a woman who was looking for her grandmother's grave.  Her grandmother had been a patient at the asylum and had been buried in a numbered, unmarked grave.  Sadly, we were unable to find the number; a road now runs suspiciously close to where some of the numbers are missing.

Stanley Graham and three of his seven victims (his full story in my next post) are also buried here.  We searched for at least an hour and couldn't find his grave, either.