New Zealand Ghosts & Other Haunts

Hi Asylum, found this on an unexplained.com board.
Thought you might be interested.

New Zealand Pterodactyls?

My first Mysterious New Zealand topic was about the story me and my cousin were told by a farmer in North Island. Facsinated by this story of reptillian bat-like monsters, I went digging for any other accounts of New Zealands mysterious "Pterodactyl". I have uncovered some new information of what is possibly the same creature, haunting the farmlands of North Island. Whilst I doubt their truthfulness, and do not really consider them to be anything more than local legend, I hope they intrigue you as much as they intrigued me.

The Bird that bit Catherine

One hot summer, Catherine, who was nine or ten at the time, was sitting on the fence of her family farm reading, when she became aware of a little creature sitting next to her. She turned around and saw that it was a green bird, no bigger than a sparrow, with a long tail and long pointed beak. After watching it for a while, she began to read again. When she turned away though, the 'bird' became quite upset and continously chirped until she turned back around. This became so annoying, that she waved her hand to shoo it away. Unpeturbed, the little animal just bit her finger, leaving little circular wounds where its fangs had peirced her. She screamed, and fell off the fence. It was then that the critter spread it's wings, which were leathery and had no feathers like the rest of its body, stood up and flew away. Realising what she had seen, Catherine ran to her father shouting "Daddy, daddy, I saw a dinosaur!"
Her father was sceptical, but her mother said that she too had seen the 'bird' once, perched in a tree. Catherine also claimed to see it on two occasions afterwards, both whilst flying and neither comparable to the time she was bitten by the prehistoric monster.

The Piglet and the Pterosaur

On a morning of 1981, Mr and Mrs.Jones (Pseudynom) became witness to a spectacle they would never forget. After being woken by strange sounds, the couple walked to the pig sty to find the cause for the commotion. They were shocked to see a rather large piglet head butting an animal they had never seen before, a bat-like creature with an impressive, long beak, covered in scales. Both were covered in blood, as was the frosty grass, and the piglet seemed to be losing the fight. The winged creature clawed at the piglets back from above and bit its face badly, resulting in the piglet dying. The flying animal swalloed a few chunks of the corpse's flesh, then flew off with the body in its jaws. It was never seen again.

A Hunter meets the Pterodactyl

One story features a hunter, sceptical of the monsters existence after being told a few locals of the stories, who decided to shoot one of these creature to see if they really existed. He returned with nothing but a fresh cut across the right side of his face, which was tended to immediatly. He attempted several other times to capture what he called "the pterodactyl that gave me this scar" but apparentally it evaded him every time for he never caught another glimpse of it.

'The Fisher'

I have obtained a story via EMail of a related cryptid, or possibly the same animal that a Miss S encountered once in an unspecified North Island location 'near Rotorua'.
Whilst bathing in a 'small, beautiful clear lake' on a boiling summer morning, S noticed that about every 15 minutes, a relatively large green bird would swoop down, skimming the water with its beak and catching a fish. She nicknamed it 'The Fisher' and always saw it when in the lake or on its shores, sometimes her friends would also see it. Once the creature was so close in front of her face that she saw it's head very clearly and described it as 'saurian in nature, with large staring eyes and a sharp beak full of little teeth'. It had no feathers or fur, and was covered in smooth scales. It had a long tail, consistent with other accounts of similar critters, and on one occasion, after gliding in front of the sun, the wings became momentarily transparent.
The last time she saw one was before she moved to her current home in South Island, she had noticed them a lot less, due to the lake becoming smaller, and a nearby fern-filled area growing larger. She believes the Pterosaurs moved into the ferny area after the lake started getting smaller, as it offered more food and space to hunt. She assumed that fish was not first choice on their menu, having seen a group of ten feasting on a dead mouse.
Prehaps the Fisher and the Pterodactyl are one and the same?


As I said in my first thread on the subject, I remain sceptical about this creatures existence without any evidence but stories. How has a Pterosaur, a relic from the dinosaur age, survived hidden for this long? Then again, New Zealand is the country that hid the Takahe for 50 years, the Chatham Island Taiko for 111 years, the Storm Petrel for 150 and the enormous Longhorn Beetle for almost 300. When one is tramping through the vast New Zealand countryside, a Pterodactyl would not seem out of place, and one can't help but imagine prehistoric monsters thriving undiscovered in the wilds...

Nice find GG. I hadnt heard Pterosaur stories out of NZ before, although it doesnt seem that they are the size of other great birds of saurian nature stories.

I do know that the NZ eagle, or Haasts Eagle was the biggest carrion bird in the world ever, although now extinct - so when it comes to bird species nothing is really impossible in NZ ecosystems.