The ghost girl

For nearly 150 years a ghost girl has been reported near the Lyttelton Cemetery. She seems lost and vanishes when approached.
Whether that is true or not, it fits with the horrible murder of Isabella Thompson whose body was found on Oxford Terrace very close to the cemetery.
Eleven-year-old Isabella had been in a good mood, she was heading to buy tickets to a school picnic when her father last saw her.
John Blair Thompson had given her a few coins to buy the tickets and she had skipped out of his view about 4.45pm on January 9, 1875.
Not long after a drover noticed a piece of white fabric near a hedge but thought he saw a drunk sleeping it off. He told a couple of friends, Thomas and Richard Rouse who went to have a look.
Instead they found Isabella’s body under a gorse bush. Her throat had been cut. Her underwear had been removed. She had been on her way home - the tickets were found not far from her body.
Police came and the hunt began - it was just after 6pm.
Initially the suspect was Alfred Osborne - recently released from prison and essentially homeless. But it was soon discounted as sightings came in of a man in grey stumbling down Oxford Terrace about 5.30pm and then seen on a train heading to Christchurch with blood on his hands.
It did not take long for police to track down John Robinson Mercer who was working as a cook on the ship Cleopatra.
When asked about his bloody clothes he claimed he fell down. Police found bloodstained trousers and a jacket.
At his trial in Christchurch a shipmate of Mercer recounted him saying he wanted a girl and that he would cut her throat.
He also had marks all over him like he had been in gorse.
It took the jury all of 12 minutes to find him guilty.
There was some suggestion that when he had been in Buller a short while before he had been implicated in an indecency against a girl there.
He was returned to Lyttelton and on May 8, 1875 he was hanged at Lyttelton Gaol.
Isabella is buried in Lyttelton Cemetery - not far from where her body was found.
Photo by Julian Magata.​