hand

Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira
Reference: The severed hand, or, the Howard mystery: with portraits of Mr and Mrs Howard, the Messrs. Godfrey and the mysterious hand. Christchurch: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1886

There are all sorts of fascinating Christchurch stories to be found on our website. This one has a definite touch of Christchurch Gothic. The Howard Mystery, or The Severed Hand, features on our page about Taylor’s Mistake:

On 16 December 1885, at Taylor’s Mistake, a bay already clouded in mystery and maritime drama, a hand was found by two men fishing off the rocks. Identified by a ring still on it, the hand was claimed by a Mrs Sarah Howard as being that of her husband. Mr Arthur Howard’s clothing had been found on Sumner beach on 11 October the same year. Mr Howard, who was a mechanic had life insurance to the value of ₤2,400 – a considerable amount of money for this time. The sum Mrs Howard stood to gain from her husband’s demise, as well as several other aspects of the case, raised police suspicions. This led to the two fishermen and Mrs Howard being arrested for conspiracy to defraud an insurance company. Mr Howard was later tracked down in Petone, at a YMCA picnic (both hands intact) and was arrested. The hand was later identified as that of a woman but despite the exhumation of several graves in an attempt to discover the hand’s owner, to this day the identity of the woman is not known.