William Rigney and Somebody's Darling - Grave Story 121

When William Rigney found a lone unmarked grave in the small settlement of Horseshoe Bend in Otago he had a sudden feeling that he would end up just the same - in a lonely grave with no headstone.
So he did something about it. He put up a wooden headstone that read Somebody’s Darling Lies Buried Here.
Not a lot is confirmed about Rigney. He is believed to have been born in Loughrea, Galway, Ireland in about 1833.
He may have attended a theological college - which would not have been unusual - but after supposedly being expelled, instead ended up emigrating to Australia before coming to New Zealand.
He was at Gabriels Gully by 1861. The gully was where the first gold rush started.
It was then William learned of the ‘lonely grave’ and decided to do something.
He and another man, John Ord, built a fence around it and William got a board of black pine, shaped it like a headstone and carved the words into it. Later they appear to have been burnt in.
By 1902 the board was badly decayed and the nearby community raised funds for a proper headstone of marble with the same words on it.
When asked about it, William said “I have always felt a special interest in that grave, as I have a foreboding that in the end my lot will be the same – viz., a lonely grave on a bleak hillside.”
As it happened when William died in 1912, he had expressed an interest in being buried by the grave that had affected him so much.
So on his death, aged about 79, on June 5, 1912, he was. His headstone erroneously reads: “Here lies the man who buried Somebody’s Darling.”
Despite local legends that Rigney himself had found the body, that has proved to be untrue.
So who was Somebody's Darling? No one knows for sure, but a body was found on a beach in the Clyde River in February 1865 and believed to be that of Charles Alms (or maybe Elms) a butcher from the Nevis Valley who drowned in the river in January while herding cattle.
An inquest at the time the body was found attributed the body as one Charles Alms.
Now the area is called the Lonely Graves Historic Reserve and is considered a symbol for all those who died lonely deaths and are buried in long forgotten graves.
Both Rigney and Somebody’s Darling are buried in what is known as the Horseshoe Bend cemetery six miles from Millers Flat.
Oddly, in 2000 the original wooden headboard of Somebody’s Darling went missing from the grave and was eventually found outside a Wellington police station. It was returned to Horseshoe Bend.