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Kinder House and Ewelme Cottage are two historic and reputedly haunted houses on Ayr Street, in the suburb of Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand. Because of the claimed hauntings, the two historic homes were visited by a team of paranormal investigators in 2005 and featured on Ghost Hunt, a New Zealand television show.
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Kinder House
Location: 36.861982°S 174.782409°E / -36.861982; 174.782409
Kinder House, sometimes known as "The Headmaster's House" was built in 1857, commissioned by Bishop G. A. Selwyn and designed by Frederick Thatcher, architect of many Anglican buildings in Auckland. The house is a Gothic-style, double-storey mansion built of grey volcanic stone quarried from nearby Mount Eden.
The house was the residence of London-born John Kinder, a former teacher, painter, photographer and reverend of the local Church of England Grammar School. He occupied the house with his wife and the six children of his brother Henry Kinder, who was murdered by John's sister-in-law and her lover. The house was opened to the public as a gallery in 1982. The house is also used for wedding receptions and other functions.
It is claimed that the house is haunted by the apparition of a man. In 2012, leading landscape photographers from New Zealand and internationally exhibited New Zealand landscape photography at a special Kinder House-based exhibition organized by the Contemporary Photography Foundation, during the Auckland Festival of Photography. Photographers involved winners of the Landscape Photographer of the year for both Australia and New Zealand.
Ewelme Cottage
Location: 36.862825°S 174.783653°E / -36.862825; 174.783653
Ewelme Cottage was built in 1863 and 1864 for Church of England clergyman, Reverend Vicesimus Lush and family. The cottage was continuously occupied by the Lush family until 1968. Since 1969, it has been preserved as a house museum by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust as the Lush family had left it, with about two thousand books, hundreds of pages of sheet music, original artworks and a vast array of everyday objects from their time period. In an article published in the New Zealand Herald in 2011, Ewelme Cottage was suggested as possibly the most important of the Auckland's Historic Places Trust properties, despite being the smallest.
The drawing room, veranda and garden of Ewelme Cottage were used in the production of the 1993 Oscar-winning film The Piano. It is claimed to be regularly haunted by several ghosts, all of which are spirits of women and children. The house is reputedly haunted in particular by a young girl who has reportedly appeared by an oak tree in Ewelme's garden. A local clairvoyant once claimed that this ghost may be the spirit of a young female who was mentally insane. According to a curator of the historic home, sightings of ghosts at Ewelme Cottage date back to 1945.