Napier Prison

Napier Prison opened on Hukarere (Bluff Hill) in June 1862, built for fourteen prisoners, and stayed open for 131 years until the last 56 inmates left for Mangaroa in December 1993. Four men were hanged inside its walls and three of them were Māori: Kereopa Te Rau in 1872, Haira Te Piri and Makoare Wata in 1889. The fourth, Rowland Herbert Edwards, still lies in the yard under a stone cut with his initials and the date. Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki was held here in 1866 before being deported without trial to the Chatham Islands, and in 2014 the Crown posthumously pardoned Kereopa Te Rau. Since 2002 the site has been leased and run by Marion and Toro Waaka, who offer visitors a choice between a historical audio tour and a ghost audio tour. The ghost tour is the newer arrival: the operator's own website carried no paranormal content at all until 2008. Heritage New Zealand's detailed listing report for the prison mentions no hauntings whatsoever.

The hill came before the gaol, and it was not empty ground. Hukarere — the bluff that settlers renamed Bluff Hill — is part of Mataruahou, and the Heritage New Zealand assessment of the site records that it was "a landmark that was used by tohunga for astronomical purposes" to time customary activities. Tūhinapō, which the same record calls "the most sacred spot in the district", stood on this ground, and ritual offerings were made here. In 1851 the land passed to the Crown in the Ahuriri Block purchase and was set aside as gaol reserve and slaughterhouse reserve. Sacred site, land purchase, gaol: that sequence is the history of Napier Prison in miniature, and it is why the place is still spoken of as tapu. In 1861 the Hawke's Bay Provincial Government, formed three years earlier, voted 800 pounds for a new gaol to replace a lock-up that no longer served a growing town. The building opened in June 1862, designed to hold fourteen prisoners plus staff, and in the same year was formally declared a place of execution. It stayed open for 131 years and held men, women and children. It also held the mentally ill, and the reason is recorded plainly. Housing prisoners alongside asylum patients was described at the time as an "abomination", so in 1869 a "West Wing" was opened as a public asylum under the Lunatics Act 1868, with fenced yards separating female prisoners, female patients and male patients. A purpose-built asylum went up at the northern end of the reserve and opened in 1875; it closed on 1 August 1886, when the authorities decided its "existence could no longer be tolerated". Heritage New Zealand notes that almost nothing survives of New Zealand's earliest asylums, which makes the 1869 wing one of only two provincial-government asylums still standing. The prison's Māori history is not a footnote to its history; it is most of it. Between March and June 1866 the gaol held Hauhau prisoners, among them Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, who made several unsuccessful requests to be tried and was instead deported without trial to Rēkohu/Wharekauri, the Chatham Islands, on 5 June — the deportation that would eventually produce his escape, his war, and the Ringatū faith. Four men were hanged inside the walls, and three of them were Māori. Kereopa Te Rau, of Ngāti Rangiwewehi and one of the original followers of the Pai Mārire prophet Te Ua Haumēne, was tried at Napier in December 1871 for the killing of the missionary Carl Völkner at Ōpōtiki and hanged on 5 January 1872, the first execution at the gaol. His body was removed by Tareha and buried elsewhere. In 2014, 142 years later, the Crown pardoned him posthumously as part of the Treaty of Waitangi settlement with Ngāti Rangiwewehi: the state that hanged him formally accepted he had not committed the murder. Rowland Herbert Edwards was hanged at eight in the morning on 15 July 1884 for the murder of his wife and children. He is still in the yard, under a small stone cut with the initials and the date — "R.H.E. July 15 1884" — and he is the only one of the four with a marker. Haira Te Piri, aged 28, was hanged on 13 May 1889 for the murder of the storekeeper Frank Pook, his wife Jane and their baby Bertie at Mataahu on the East Coast. Before he died he asked to say goodbye to the other Māori prisoners, and they filed into his cell one by one. Makoare Wata, convicted of murder and arson, farewelled three of his children at six in the morning on 28 September 1889 and was hanged at eight. Both were buried in the gaol grounds. Two of the executed men lie in unmarked graves on the site, and their descendants regard those graves as particularly sacred. The walls that make the prison photogenic were cut by the men inside it. Prisoners on hard labour quarried and dressed the sandstone from a quarry directly across Coote Road, and the boundary and retaining walls went up in stages from the 1890s into the early 1900s; the arch over the entrance carries the date 1906. The quarry itself did not stay a quarry. In 1973 Napier City Council began converting it into the Centennial Gardens, a waterfall and hanging-garden complex opened on 16 October 1974 — so the pleasant public garden at the foot of the hill is the hole the prisoners dug. The place aged badly. By 1909 Napier Prison was being described as the worst prison in New Zealand and there were calls to close it; instead, in 1919 its status was reduced to a police gaol holding mostly short-stay prisoners. The 3 February 1931 Hawke's Bay earthquake left deep fissures in the yards and sank foundations, and the corridors have undulated ever since. Repairs cost 170 pounds. New buildings were added through the 1950s and 1960s, women were held until 1974, and overcrowding was chronic. The government announced a replacement at Mangaroa in 1983; it opened in 1989 and Napier ran on for four more years as a remand facility. In December 1993 the last 56 inmates and 19 staff were transferred out and the gate was locked. In 2002 Marion and Toro Waaka leased the site from the Crown and opened it as a backpackers hostel and tour operation. The backpackers closed in 2009; the tours did not. In 2021, after an application by Marion Waaka, the whole complex was entered on the New Zealand Heritage List as a Category 1 historic place. The prison that hanged three Māori men and jailed Te Kooti has been in the care of a Māori family for more than twenty years.

Napier Prison is open and easy to visit, and no ghost tour is required to get in. The site is at 55 Coote Road, Bluff Hill, Napier, reached by a steep driveway off Coote Road, a few minutes' walk uphill from the city centre and Marine Parade. The operator lists opening hours of 9am to 5pm, "winter and summer", seven days a week. The self-guided audio tour needs no booking: you turn up, pay at the door and let yourself in. Prices published by the operator are NZ$30 per adult, NZ$15 per child aged 12 and under, NZ$80 for a family pass covering two adults and two children, and NZ$90 for two adults and three children. At the desk you choose which audio track you want — the historical tour or the ghost tour — and the route takes you through the cells, past solitary confinement and into the hanging yard. Audio has been offered in multiple languages, and the operator has advertised a te reo Māori version, which is unusual for a New Zealand attraction of this kind. Escape rooms run as a separate, bookable product, and the prison also hosts seasonal events; phone 06 835 9933 for same-day escape-room bookings. Two practical warnings. First, this is an old, unmodernised prison on a hillside: floors slope where the 1931 earthquake dropped them, surfaces are hard and uneven, and the route is not a level museum circuit. A 2024 notice on the operator's website advised that the area along the retaining wall was closed off pending repair, so check the current state before travelling if that matters to you. Second, and more important than any of the above: people are buried here. Rowland Herbert Edwards lies under a marked stone in the yard, and at least two men executed in 1889 lie in unmarked graves whose location their descendants regard as sacred. Heritage New Zealand records the whole hill as a site imbued with tapu, both for the executions and for Tūhinapō, the sacred place that stood here before the gaol. Treat it as a burial ground, because it is one. At the foot of the hill, the Centennial Gardens on Coote Road are free, open and worth ten minutes. They occupy the quarry where the prisoners cut the stone for the walls above, and where the men caught in the 1931 landslip were dug out.