EERIE LAND OF MYSTERY.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 2376, 7 January 1922, Page 1

EERIE LAND OF MYSTERY.

GRIM WEST AFRICAN TALES. GHOSTS AND NATIVE MAGIC. Mr Alan Lethbridge, in his book, “West Africa the Elusive,” gives a clear and interesting account of our West Coast Colonies as they arc to-day, of their “heat and horror,” of their immense wealth, and of their strange medical problems. Wounds in the white man will not heal there, and no white child may be born. Nor has the secret of tropical fever yet been mastered, though Sierra Leone is no longer “the white man’s grave.” Tie has some grim stories to tell —one, which is new, of the haunted castle at Elmina, where no one sleeps without a qualm. It appears that a party of three men and one woman were playing bridge very keenly in the tropical night: “Of .a sudden the lady put her hand to her eyes as though dazzled. Asked if anything wore the matter, she denied anything wrong, and continued playing. Then again she clapped her hands to her eyes, gave an exclamation, and fainted dead away.” What she had seen she could not or would not say, but the tradition is that a headless woman walks the castle.

Nor does Mr Lethbridge reject the power of native magic. He vouches for one strange story; that at a point in the Niger delta in a hut near a store were a number of native workers, under medical supervision. Their headman said it was “no good place.” One morning a Kroo boy was reported dead; a postmortem revealed no apparent cause of death. Next morning two men had departed this life, and again post-mortems revealed nothing. On the third morning four men were dead, and there was something like a panic.

All the men were at once removed and a fresh batch brought up to be placed in “the same sinister house.” Thev too, died in the same mysterious way, and it was decided to burn down the hut. Then something fell to the ground and was seized by (lie he&dman, who rushed up to the doctor shouting, “Here be plenty bad thing, sail! Fit to kill all men. sail!” He held at arm’s length two human linger bones which had been tied together with a bit <Jf native twine in the shape of a rough cross. When this ju-ju was disposed of the deaths ceased. The Niger delta is not a place for lonely white men to take walks in the gloaming; an instance is mentioned of one “youngster” who did so, and two days later his mutilated corpse was found waterlogged in the sinister mangrove swamp. Nor is it a place to be buried in; we are told that in digging graves the water is reached, and the mourners have to stand upon the coffin to hold it down.