Mount Victoria Tunnel

If you've ever driven through the Mount Victoria Tunnel, you've probably honked your horn. Everyone does. It's a Wellington tradition so embedded that it has its own nickname — the Toot Tunnel. Kids demand it. Adults comply. The tunnel fills with a rolling cacophony of horns, forty-five thousand vehicles a day.

Most people think the tooting is just for fun, or that it's a superstition about holding your breath through the tunnel. The real story is darker.

The tunnel was built between nineteen twenty-nine and nineteen thirty-one — six hundred and twenty-three metres through the rock of Mount Victoria. During construction, a seventeen-year-old pregnant woman named Phyllis Avis Symons was murdered by George Errol Coats, a twenty-nine-year-old relief worker on the tunnel project. He buried her body in the tunnel excavation fill. Police had to dig through the construction material to recover her remains.

The tradition of tooting is widely believed to be a tribute to Phyllis — or, depending on who you ask, a way to ward off her ghost. The story featured in the TV show Wellington Paranormal, which tells you something about how deeply it sits in the city's consciousness.

The tunnel opened on the twelfth of October, nineteen thirty-one, after fifteen months of construction at a cost of a hundred and thirty-two thousand pounds. It's a perfectly ordinary-looking tunnel. Concrete walls, fluorescent lights, a steady stream of traffic. There's nothing to mark what happened here. No plaque, no memorial. Just the sound of forty-five thousand cars a day honking for a girl most of them have never heard of.