I’m so sorry I didn’t write this earlier, I just didn’t know how to.
By pretending it never happened I could also pretend it wasn’t real.
With the act of writing this down I have to acknowledge what happened – and that all of the events did actually happen.
God I’m sorry. I’m so sorry to their families for lying to them. I’m sorry we went out to that godforsaken place and fucked with things that we shouldn’t have.
But most of all, I’m sorry to all of you.
We didn’t know.
It was just supposed to be some friends, exploring together – we had no idea that anything like that existed in this world.
I’m so sorry.
I wouldn’t exactly have called us ‘urban explorers’.
We liked old places and old buildings, but we didn’t put our stuff up on the internet or take many pictures. It started with poking through the old abandoned hospital near Christchurch, because we’d heard rumours it was heavily haunted.
The place was eerie, yes, but we didn’t find any real ghosts – just the ones our imaginations conjured up in the night.
From there it just sort of became a thing that we did together, myself, Jennifer and Rachel – trying to freak out ourselves and each other by climbing through the ruins of abandoned places, seeking that thrill of preternatural fear from the imagined threat of the supernatural.
We explored around Christchurch and down past Oamaru and across to the West Coast.
It was in the northern regions of the West Coast that we began to discover the abandoned mining towns of the late 1800s.
There wasn’t much left standing in those places.
The pioneers and miners built mostly out of wood – something that New Zealand was rich with back then – so not much of the old towns remained. The odd stone chimney stood out here and there, amongst tall grasses and mine shafts. You could find bits of rust-welded machinery scattered near the mines; orange-brown husks of wheels and gears, all corroded into lumps of nearly unrecognisable metal. In some places, like what remained of Macetown, stone huts still stood mostly intact, empty and silent – a testament to the crumbling, exhausted mines that had once made these places humming hives of industrial activity.
We should have realised that places like these should be left alone; just left to rot and fall into the gaping holes in the earth, or to slowly be pulled down by the patient roots of mountain Tōtara and Kawaka.
God, we were idiots.
The stone abbey was nearly twenty kilometres out from Denniston, a rare find on our random exploration excursions. It wasn’t marked on any maps, and there didn’t appear to have ever been any settlement nearby; it just stood, gaping and ruined, like a great stone skeleton fusted with brown mosses and lichens.
Broken arches gaped at us, but one curious feature remained whole – a tall stone tower, the tower that Rach had spotted through her binoculars the previous day as we walked through the hills.
Even more curiously, the tower had been bricked shut.
The doorway at ground level was blocked with blackened bricks, and the lancet windows higher up had also been bricked over – a long, long time ago, judging by the amount of weathering on the stone.
We camped there that night, in the ruins of the old abbey, our tents supported by the walls of ancient stone.
“We should see if we can get into the tower,” Jenny had suggested. I remember each syllable that she spoke, the deep-south lilt of her voice and the rolling burr when she spoke the letter ‘r’.
