The Brooklyn Dodger: the stone-throwing at Ohiro Lodge, Wellington

Ohiro Lodge stood at 145 Ohiro Road, on Brooklyn Hill in Wellington. It was a guest house, bought in 1958 by Joyce and Bob Beatty, who shared it with 15 lodgers. Old macrocarpa trees grew on the property, and Mrs Beatty wanted them gone because they were "getting in the way." On Saturday 23 March 1963, the trees came down. Tall stumps were left behind.

The next night, about 9:30 pm, stones and pennies began pelting the house from the front, egg-sized stones thrown from the road above. They hit hard enough to shatter windows. The bombardment went on until 5 am. By then 12 windows were broken and the woodwork was damaged. The Beattys and their lodgers searched the grounds but never saw anyone throwing.

Only the objects, out of the dark. On the second night more of them struck the windows and the cars parked outside, and the Evening Post described the boarders as "nervous wrecks." Decades later, a man who said his father was a policeman on the case wrote: "It wasn't single shots but a constant stream of objects including pennys and haypennies." He also recalled "a large rock that a boy couldn't possibly lift landing on one of the police cars."

About 100 locals and journalists gathered on the second night. By the fourth, about 800 people had turned out to watch. Evening Post reporter Gabriel David gave the unseen thrower a name. The Brooklyn Dodger, after a New York baseball pitcher.

Police searched the area on several nights, with 10 to 12 officers, and set up radar to track the stones. While the radar was in place, the throwing stopped. Once it was removed, it started again. The theories multiplied: a poltergeist, angered tree spirits, a tapu, an urupā. One caller, "obviously Irish," suggested leprechauns. A Māori woman, reportedly sent from Gisborne, blessed each room with bread and potato and prayed with Mrs Beatty.

On the fourth night, the hail of stones and coins began at 11pm, in misty weather. Then Gabriel David, by his own account, saw a young person up a tree with a catapult. He alerted police. Officers brought the boy down and Chief Inspector Norman Rutherford spoke to him. The bombardment stopped that day.

David's sighting never made it into print. The newspapers said only that police had a lead. Nobody was charged.

In 1973 Lindsay Perigo revisited the case for the RNZ programme Spectrum, in an episode called "Who threw that stone?" Retired journalist Pat Lawlor argued it was a genuine poltergeist, not a person. Mrs Beatty, by then widowed, later said the household had failed to honour the tree spirits and had violated an urupā.

Others looked for people. Claire McEwan, who later lived in a flat on the site, suspected university students. In 2016 James Gilberd of the NZ Strange Occurrences Society called the boy with the catapult "a probable natural explanation." Yet the policeman's son says his father "still can't explain what he witnessed."

Ohiro Lodge was demolished about three years later. The disturbances reportedly resumed as it came down, and labourers heard strange sounds from the half-wrecked building before a block of flats went up in 1967. The Independent on Sunday later listed the "mystery of the Brooklyn stone-slinger" among the weirdest events of the 20th century. Police in a similar case at Thornton Road, Birmingham, suspected a home-made catapult. The identity of the Brooklyn Dodger has never been confirmed.